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Originally Posted by Beedok
What does rowhousing add other than significant fewer people compared with towers? More Nimbys maybe? Condo and apartment towers can easily be pushed into having ground level retail, something rowhousing can't really match.
As for moving forward without decimating the past, you can chose to move your downtown somewhere else and preserve the old one (as Vancouver, Ottawa, and Montreal have all done to varying degrees), or move the buildings out of the downtown. London only has a few scattered remnants of the Roman wall around the city out of what was originally a whole community. Eventually a growing city will tear down basically anything but the most important landmarks. It's just what happens. Cities are organic growing and changing things and all parts are impermanent. Preservation of large chunks of a city over long periods is pretty universally a sign of stagnation and decay in a city (like Rome, which fell from a million people to ~30 000 around the time of the Black Death, it didn't recover again until the 1800s).
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Variety of ownership and styles is always good. You don't need towers or high density developments to have vibrant commercial areas within walking distance of those rowhouses either. It would be downright awful if the massive downtown area as defined by the city of Toronto was just condo and apartment towers.