Quote:
Originally Posted by Beedok
I suppose we're all impacted by where we grew up, because I was raised in that and it's probably my favourite urban form. There's greenery, history, height and density.
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We've had this discussion before. This:
https://www.google.ca/maps/@43.2519001,-...e4CPwC1wGcQwqAOdIoLzg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
is hideous. Look around. It makes you wince.
I'm not talking about the happy memories of your (and my) childhood, I'm talking about the utter structural failure of the urban form in much of Hamilton. The Durand neighbourhood shown in the photo and my Street View link might have been alright as a type of inner ring streetcar suburb, but it's too close to downtown, and it got flooded with commie blocks in the 1950s and 60s. It's
not dense at all: the streets and the residential form cater exclusively to the automobile, and the farcical lawns in front of the mansions and the apartment towers are little more than useless totems of suburban living.
Granted, nobody was eager to live a car-free lifestyle in the 1950s and 60s, so these commie blocks with their underground parking garages provided affordable rents to people in transition who needed their cars to get to the new jobs out in the suburbs before they themselves had the money to buy a house in the suburbs.
I know I'm railing against history here, fully aware that the history couldn't have gone any other way. Hamilton expanded in the late 19th century as a high-wage factory and steel mill town, and it's natural for most people to want to have as big a house as they can afford, so the notion that we could have had the urban typology of a Mile End or an Outremont is a complete non-starter. Hamilton was never going to be Brooklyn. Unfortunately, a lot of what the tumult of the 20th century wreaked on it isn't pretty.
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