Quote:
Originally Posted by mrnyc
the thing for me isn't great lakes or east coast or new england or northeast corridor.
those seem pretty clear.
its whuddaboud rochester, syracuse, toronto, hamilton, buffalo, erie? and cleveland and pittsburgh for that matter.
east coast makes no sense here.
just because of arbitrary state lines? no.
midwestern? more so, but no, not that either.
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Toronto and Hamilton are Ontarian, and don't fit into any American categories like "Midwest", let alone "Northeast".
I don't just mean that in the obvious sense that they're cities in the province of Ontario, but also how they're designed and their culture is very much that of Ontario, which is Canada's biggest province that is culturally cut off from the rest of the country to the east and west. To the east it's cut off from the rest of English-speaking Atlantic Canada by French-speaking Quebec. To the west, it's cut off from what we call "Western Canada" by a huge expanse of wilderness in northern Ontario. Canadian provinces are very centralized and have much more influence on how their cities plan and grow than American states. They've been active in this kind of top-down central planning more or less since the end of the Second World War. Ontario's population has quadrupled since then, so most of what you see on the ground is a product of the last 80 years of that kind of planning.
For example, the 1960s and 1970s commie block high-rises that Toronto is somewhat famous for are pretty ubiquitous in inner-suburban Ottawa, Hamilton, London, Kitchener-Waterloo, and even smaller cities like Kingston, Peterborough, Brantford, and Sudbury.
The worst neighbourhood of an Ontario city isn't a pre-war area that's half abandoned to urban prairie, but cheap, 1970s townhouse complexes in the inner suburbs that look more like what you'd find in shady parts of Houston, Texas, like Greenpoint.
Most subdivisions built after 1980 are much more dense and California-like than what you'd find in upstate New York, Ohio or Michigan.
If you're focused on the <20% of the built form that was built before 1940, even then I wouldn't say cities in Ontario have much in common with their American counterparts. American cities have better, more exuberant skyscrapers and historic commercial buildings. There was practically no influence from the City Beautiful movement, whereas this defines the Midwest. The street grid in an Ontario city is kind of basic and utilitarian, without the massive diagonal boulevards radiating out from downtown. In most cases, they weren't even planned centrally; Toronto built streets ward by ward and it was only during the automobile age of the 1920s that city planners connected them with doglegs and widened them to form arterials.
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