Quote:
Originally Posted by MonctonRad
And you also have a little spot of land you can call your own, and a place where you can plant a garden, and where your children can play in safety. The suburbs are not a den of iniquity!
Suburbs however should be thoughtfully planned, complete with a street grid (but respecting streams and other natural features), stressing bicycle trails, walking paths, and well placed playgrounds and parks. Suburbs should not be monolithic and should include neighbourhood retail clusters (corner stores, pharmacies, pubs, bookshops and services like hairdressers and doctor's offices - not never-ending strip malls on collector roads) as well as neighbourhood recreational facilities. A suburb should be preplanned with (future) transit in mind up to and including undeveloped corridors for BRT or commuter rail down the road. In the meantime, these corridors could be used for recreation (making it crystal clear to residents that this is only temporary).
My own neighbourhood in Moncton isn't perfect. It is too monolithic, and I have to drive everywhere to do any errands. The street grid is not perfect and bus routes are too circuitous. On the other hand, the schools are well placed in my neighbourhood, there is a new neighbourhood YMCA I can walk to, the potential of a new satellite municipal library next to the YMCA, and a network of walking and bicycling trails that are completely separate from the road network. The city has respected existing brooks and streams, and they remain in their virgin state. There is also an abundance of neighbourhood playgrounds. I would give the Kingswood/Evergreen area a score of "B-" in terms of neighbourhood planning.
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I think one of the reasons our suburbs were built to be monolithic (and therefore so crappy in terms of complete living environments) is American influence. American planners were long obsessed with the segregation of uses and functions, and the "residential only" aspect of suburban areas was a strong selling point in terms of keeping so-called undesirables out. That's probably why so many suburban residential areas in the US and Canada don't even have corner stores or even transit. Corner stores offer places for undesirables to loiter, and without transit undesirables (not assumed to have cars, I guess) can't easily get to your pastoral suburban street.
There are even lots of places where the "neighbourhood" elementary school isn't in the middle of the neighbourhood, but has been deliberately placed on a suburban arterial road on the outskirts of it.
Thankfully we've been getting away from this type of development, but the roots of it are quite evident all over the continent.
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