Quote:
Originally Posted by Centropolis
yeah, kind of. midwestern cities often have wide, big boned downtowns...often the cities feel like they were laid out for thousands, if not millions more people than are there...even chicago. broad expanses of big infrastructure, huge swaths of industrial or logistics, big guilded age projects like parks, blvds, endless blocks of middle class built homes in the city and suburbs. there is definitely a kind of pan-midwesternism, although regional differences between the lake, river, and prairie cities exist with regards to vernacular. it’s not a place where people complain about there “being too many damned people,” like you hear in say california or increasing the southeast. you can feel the contrast when you leave the midwest and are in a city like nashville, and somehow, suddenly, the city feels improbably cramped with cars and close-in suburbs. i’ve felt the same thing in austin.
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And that's where Toronto (and Hamilton and most of the rest of the Canadian side) really stands apart from the American side of the Great Lakes. For better or worse, it doesn't have any of that gilded age monumentalism. Things are haphazard, ramshackle, and tightly spaced, with, as you wonderfully put it earlier - a bunch of "spaceships" plopped down around town. Toronto was built for far
fewer people than actually live here now. The whole civic trajectory of the place has basically been an accident from the start.
I think just by virtue of the Great Lakes being a trans-national region from a time when each side of the border had more palpable economic, demographic, and cultural differences will kind of invalidate the whole premise that the Great Lakes region is the one with the most uniform appearance.
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