🏙️ Vancouver tech needs industrial land
Plus, scaling up circular economy tech in the city, and 12 other stories.
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An underrated issue for the city’s tech sector is the lack of industrial land. While Vancouver is home to plenty of SaaS companies and Web3 startups that don’t need much space to operate, Vancouver’s tech isn’t only about building digital products, but physical ones, too. Failing to recognize this could jeopardize leadership and innovation in well-established sectors, such as biotech.
A poignant exploration of Metro Vancouver’s industrial land crisis was covered by local filmmaker Uytae Lee with the CBC (side note: for any other urban geography/planning enthusiasts, his YouTube channel, About Here, is probably one of my favourite ones to watch). There’s dwindling land available for manufacturing, film studios, and food processing, increasingly lost to development for housing. It’s resulted in nonsensical travel patterns of global goods that arrive at the Port of Vancouver, get trucked over to Calgary for processing, and transported back to Vancouver for sale.