O2 is leading a large interdisciplinary team of urban designers, engineers, district energy experts, planners, and landscape architects in the creation of a revitalization master plan for the largest remaining Fraser Riverfront development site in the Lower Mainland. Impacted by several major infrastructure challenges, including highways, railways, flooding, and servicing infrastructure constraints, the Mission Waterfront has become known over the years as a site where development plans and visions are continuously prepared but little action ever takes hold.

Despite these challenges, O2 has developed an approach to the revitalization master plan that focuses on leveraging the site’s greatest strengths, including its West Coast Express station, opportunities for further developing employment lands, and unparalleled opportunity to develop an iconic, natural riverfront.

Recognizing the transformative potential of transit-oriented development around the existing West Coast Express station, O2 has taken a creative approach that is sensitive to the existing employment lands in the area, ensuring future residential growth does not compromise the City’s existing employment tax base, but instead provides complementary and ancillary benefits to the existing community of businesses. Importantly, the plan will also unlock substantial new employment lands as well, generating a balanced spread of residential and employment around the station, supporting bi-directional commuting patterns.

O2 has also integrated its internationally-recognized ecological programming and landscape architecture into the Mission Waterfront, seizing on the site’s uniqueness as one of the only “green shore” urban sites in the entire Lower Mainland. Finding opportunities to elevate the stature of the waterfront’s pristine natural environment and increasing public access to the river will create an urban-river interface that is unique throughout British Columbia.

Elements of the plan are already being delivered, as filling on lands in the core area of the plan is currently taking place. Once completed, this area will be primed for large-scale development that kicks off the next 40 years of growth in Mission’s Waterfront.