Quality of Canadian urbanism

[kool maudit]

I'll be blunt: I have never visited Edmonton, but photos and Street View have always made it appear the ugliest and most utilitarian of Canada's major cities. I have explored neighbourhoods like Oliver and downtown, and in terms of finding a good street, I have always come up empty-handed (I can sometimes find a good block).

That said, urbanism has a human element and the buildings are just the frame to scenes of human movement and dynamism. In this way, I bet there are a lot of places in Edmonton that would strike me, in person, as "this shouldn't work but it does". I have been to places in Miami, for instance, that are like this.

At the heart of urbanism is the phenomenon of placing sites of human activity in very close proximity, with the emergent property being the streetwall. You can get away with a lot of crude architecture if you just do this; if you go the opposite way, with beautiful buildings placed in isolation, like objets d'art, you get a kind of sculpture-garden type feeling that is very far from the feeling of the city. Zaha Hadid and architects like this are enormously guilty of this, as are many of China's new CBDs.

The correct, city-favouring worldview holds Le Corbusier as a minor 20th century villain (major in his field, but minor compared to the far more carnivorous types that so animated that terrible century). One day, his ideas will be as discredited and distasteful as eugenics or phrenology. B.F. Skinner, too, and Julian Huxley.

But these figures are at the foundational heart of our current order and the timeline implies that we go through... some shit before we return to right relation with towns and cities.