City planners would do well to heed advice of renowned architect
By Joanne Chianello, OTTAWA CITIZEN November 25, 2013
When Jack Diamond — officer of the Order of Canada, Royal Architectural Institute of Canada Gold Medal winner, all-around Canadian design icon — comes to town to discuss how we should build cities, the cognoscenti take note.
So it was no surprise to discover National Capital Commission executives, senior city planners, Mayor Jim Watson and a couple of councillors, developers, architecture professors and a smattering of media types piled into a Rideau Club dining room late last week to listen to the renowned architect.
The luncheon guests were hardly shocked by the Toronto-based Diamond’s main message that continuing to build low-density communities is simply not sustainable. Even in Ottawa, where we have more open space than almost any other large Canadian municipality, we’ve been embracing the concept of intensification as we come to grips with the fiscal and environmental costs of ever-expanding sprawl.
But Diamond did raise a few eyebrows when he suggested cities are going about intensification all wrong.
High-rises? “All too often a knee-jerk reaction.”
And he had few good things to say about a current plan to build 80-storey towers in downtown Toronto, arguing that there isn’t the infrastructure to support such a huge development, at least not right now.
To the hundreds of Ottawa residents who’ve come to this city’s planning committee to complain of out-of-scale rezonings, Diamond is surely a hero. While he’s not against tall buildings per se, Diamond posits that too often, condo towers are approved and built smack in the middle of low-rise neighbourhoods all in the name of intensification.
“You’ve got to calibrate it,” Diamond said in an interview after his speech. “You can’t confront 20 storeys with two.” He doesn’t offer a strict formula for how the building heights should be graded in a community, because “the important part is that the contrasts are not great.”
The award-winning architect of the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts is also a big believer that most cities can reach their intensification goals with a combination of residential infill — that’s duplexes, triplexes and even quarterplexes (no NIMBYism allowed!) — low-rise apartment buildings and, on main intersections, mid-rise buildings in the nine- or 10-storey range. And he’s including the suburbs in this vision.
“If you were to measure the under-utilized land within the city boundary, you’d be shocked by how much there is,” said Diamond.
But of all his bold ideas — from revamping the municipal tax system to protecting man-made space like sidewalks over green space (although he admitted later he was exaggerating slightly to be provocative) — Diamond’s most intriguing concept was that of shopping centre as town centre.
It makes perfect sense: zone malls as mixed-use centres, to include housing and offices. After all, retail centres are usually surrounded by acres of parking, which could go underground or in a parkade, turning over all that under-utilized space to building street-front shops — “The surest way to kill a street is to build blank walls along them,” said Diamond — and housing. Key to this plan is to locate shopping malls on major transit hubs.
It was a fascinating discussion, in large part because we don’t often talk out how to make the suburbs denser. The intensification conversation usually pits the rapidly changing urban core against the expanding outer communities. That’s got to stop if we have any chance of growing this city in a sustainable way.
In Ottawa, we’re only just getting around to that discussion. Indeed, some of these intensification concepts will be discussed this week as council votes on the official plan, the city’s blueprint for building in years to come.
Perhaps we can learn from our planning mistakes of the past — such as approving a 48-storey building in a neighbourhood of largely two-level homes, for example — and put in place rules “to increase the density of the suburbs without upsetting the scale,” as Diamond put it.
And that’s an outcome any neighbourhood in the city would welcome.
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