Quote:
Originally Posted by park123
You're right, Toronto is residentially more suburban off of the main corridors, and I kind of forgot about that. I guess I was thinking larger because there seem to be more lively and extensive pedestrian commercial streets than Chicago? And sorry I have bad taste and like Dundas Sqauare. So the downtown felt livelier to me. The thing with Chicago is that Michigan Avenue is absolutely world class, but you go over one street and it's parking podiums, not much retail, and no pedestrians. The Loop is architecturally stunning but it's also not especially activated in a retail or pedestrian sense.
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Based on a recent visit to Chicago, that was my impression as well. While more numerous, Chicago's neighbourhood commercial strips have a lot of gaps in the urban fabric and pedestrian vibrancy (the problem I think, being that there are just
too many for any to really develop a critical mass). Toronto's are more consistent, finer grained, and used more intensely.
Of course, Chicago's traditional pre-war built form is considerably more extensive than Toronto's and was built up more intensely; but has also suffered far more decline. As a result, when it comes to commonly used metrics of urbanity, Toronto now has higher density, higher transit usage, more high-rises, etc. What makes which city more urban? Matter of opinion I guess. Either way, if Canada were included in this, Toronto and Montreal would be safely in that same nebulous second tier, not really any obviously higher or lower than those five American cities.
But, not really relevant as this is one just one of many other USA-only threads!
