Great Canadian Suburban Skyline Thread!

[wg_flamip]

Toronto went through this weird period during the Metro era when elected officials from the suburban 416 and the old city were able to unite, for different purposes, around the suburban node idea. The conservative suburbs wanted to attract business and development away from the city (and Mel Lastman wanted his NYCC vanity projects), and the left-leaning city wanted to protect neighbourhoods from over-development. This lead to the suburban node model of city planning, which has been in many ways a failure.

The first big mistake, especially re: SCC, was where these nodes were planned out for. Instead of, say, at Kennedy/Eglinton, already served by GO and the subway, Scarborough planned its node around a mall and a highway served by the unreliable RT. Etobicoke's city centre, while arguably better served by transit, was planned near the messy Six Points interchange.

One of the biggest failures of the suburban nodes has been their inability to attract office development. Companies, it turns out, did want to locate out in the 'burbs - but in sprawling corporate campuses and business parks with plentiful parking, not in highrise clusters with all the problems of a downtown location (expensive parking, &c.) without the benefits (transit connections to the rest of the city/GTA, &c.).

We ended up wasted a whole lot of time and resources assuming these nodes would really take off. The Sheppard subway was built assuming NYCC and SCC would become huge employment hubs, while the planned DRL was abandoned. In the end, downtown took the lion's share of new development despite all this and we now have an overburdened infrastructure trying to cope.

That said, while the suburban nodes didn't live up to expectations, they're not to be completely written off. NYCC has been a success in other ways, namely in attracting a good deal of residential development. It's not impossible to live there without a car, but it's not really possible for most to walk to work either. I think Etobicoke's city centre will eventually take off too once Six Points is re-configured. The nearby Islington village has relatively good urban bones which can (and is) being built upon. I'm afraid SCC will suffer from some of that good ol' Scarborough stigma for a while yet though.

Personally, I'm watching to see what happens to the long-neglected former city of York as some of the new transit projects come on-line. There's a lot of potential out in Weston, for example, especially as creative types are priced out of the old city. Unfortunately, they tend to elect some of the worst politicians in the city and the legacy of being the poorest municipality in the province (IIRC) is proving difficult to shake. That said, if there's anywhere in Toronto where gentrification has the potential to cause serious American-style tensions, it's out in that little corner of the city.