VANCOUVER, April 26, 2010 -- James Cheng,Canadian architect who distinguished himself in high-rise residential building projects in Vancouver following the city's hosting of the 1986 World Expo, said that Shanghai's hosting of the upcoming World Expo will be a golden opportunity for the Chinese city to increase its livability.

"Vancouver was very fortunate to have Expo'86 where a big junk of land become available for the development. So we could create a model city from scratch," said Cheng who has become well known for creating some of Canada's most prominent, and increasingly tallest, buildings over the past 30 years.

"I think Shanghai is now having the same opportunity with the Expo 2010," Cheng said in an exclusive interview with Xinhua, adding Shanghai will have a big junk of land on the both sides of Huangpu River to create a new form of city.

"I would assure Shanghai would even better than Vancouver, because Shanghai now has another many years to learn or to look at what we've found, and be able to do even better," he said.

Throughout the 1990s Cheng was particularly prominent in his hometown, helping to transform the look of Vancouver's False Creek following the city's hosting of the 1986 World Expo. Today, the former industrial site, just off the downtown core, is a centerpiece of the city, home to thousands living in its glass towers along the water's edge.

Last year saw the opening of the Hong Kong-born architect's Living Shangri-La, a 62-story hotel-apartment tower in downtown Vancouver, the city's tallest building, while in the country's biggest metropolis, work is currently underway on his 65-story Shangri-La Toronto project set to open in 2012.

It is a scenario Cheng would like to see repeated in Shanghai following its hosting of the expo, building communities that are environmentally, socially and economically sustainable, re- establishing the livability of the city, something he feels has been lost in recent years.

The expo site is massive and has been achieved by clearing out old industrial and housing on both sides of the Huangpu River, the main body of water running through Shanghai.

"They have to look at the expo land with that kind of perspective. It's not necessarily to make the most money, not necessarily (to be) the most green, but what's going to happen to the people. How are they going to build communities, how are they going re-establish the neighborhoods?" he asked.

As a frequent traveler to China where he designed Beijing Capital Land's mixed-use Interwest project in Haidian district, he has recently finished a master plan for Haikou where the Hainan capital will create a "new city" as part of the government's plan to further develop the southern island province.

Currently he is working with a Chinese developer to create an entire city block as part of Nanjing's plan to build the world's biggest train station.

Cheng points out the Chinese governments are now starting to realize the value in the old cities, the way people interact and how all the services are related. He said old Shanghai was a prime example of how you could live and work in the same area and avoid traffic jams and commuting.

"China is now very wise. I think the new generation of leaders recognizes the shortfalls of the previous generation. Now they are building subways, trains, they are not relying on airplanes or cars so much. So things are coming and they are beginning to look at the mixed-used mode of development concentrating along transit stations. I think China will be a world-class leader in urban design."

In recent years, Cheng's name has frequently been associated with "Vancouverism," a term referring to high density in the city' s downtown core, yet with amenities, street-life, parks, schools and urbanism all close to where you live and work. While it has also been called the "Asianization" of the city, home to more than 300,000 Chinese, Vancouver is a perennial among the various rankings listing the world's best cities to live.

Essentially Vancouverism preaches mixed-use development, preserving view corridors -- in this case, the ocean and the mountains, and public access to enjoy the waterfront.

Cheng see its more as an attitude about how locals want to live as a city and what's important to them. "Part of that is a pedestrian route. Right at the heart of Vancouverism is about people walking the streets and being able to be entertained, and have eye-contact with people living in the buildings, and so on. That was Shanghai in spades in the old days. They have lost that in the new city."

He expressed his admiration for Shanghai's preservation of the Bund, the French Concession and a whole raft of Shikumen (tenement- style brick housing from the early 1900s unique to the city), the "character of the city," for future generations to enjoy.

But he added that not every shikumen needs to be preserved, just enough to make the character stand out and then densify around them and use it as open space.

"What we have been trying to tell the city of Vancouver is the value of the historic structures, not just memory of past or cultural, but that they are the sunlight access. Because they are low scale it actually preserves certain segments of the city. If all of Shanghai is built up like Pudong there will be no air movement through the city. All the towers will jam everything up. By preserving certain districts you have hop-scotch green air pockets and then high-density pockets and so on.

"Those green pockets, just like we are telling city council here, the single-family neighborhoods, are our green lungs," he said.

Cheng suggested Shanghai planners rethink the streets; not all of them need to be grand boulevards or the same size, some should be narrow, intimate and with certain character, the kind of thing that made the city what it was. "They have to recapture some of that magic."

In addition, people shouldn't rely on government to create parks, but more so developers should include public spaces into their various projects to heighten livability.

Calling China a "passage that all developing countries will have to go through," Cheng added that the country no longer needed to build spectacular buildings such as Beijing's CCTV headquarters or the "Bird's Nest" Olympic Stadium as they had proved to the world that they could.

Instead, how buildings come to the ground and how the ground plane and the public realm are developed, that's going to be the key to the future of Shanghai.

"They now need to focus on actually building real cities for real people, not show-off pieces.

"They (Shanghai) have done a lot of things right. Look at the Bund. They are only beginning and they have only done the first row of refurbishing the old buildings. There is a whole pile of them. Those are the most sustainable buildings because they will last several hundred years and can sustain many, many social changes and cultural changes.

"The most important thing for Shanghai, and for all of China, is to build quality. In the past, they just built quantity, the latest glitz, the latest thing. But to me, for a city or country to mature is to go beyond that and starting to build an environment with integrity," he said.

He added that Shanghai has just the opportunity to do that with what can be created at the Expo site.