Quote:
Originally Posted by FrAnKs
There's one thing I know: Quebec city' skyline is hard to capture from one specific vantage point because of its topography. The St Roch part alone would be per example a good little skyline of a 150k to 250k metro area if taken alone, but it's at the foothill of the upper town and not always included in skyline shoots.
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Quebec City is interesting to me partly because it invalidates so much received wisdom around old bylaws, height limits, or just general naysaying and negativity that pops up when you follow Halifax politics and development.
If you were to plan out the main cluster like in Halifax you'd put the tall buildings on the lowest elevation land parcels and the shortest buildings on the highest elevation parcels and the whole thing would look like a flat blob.
And you'd consider the fact that you can see some highrises inside the citadel in Quebec City a huge problem when in fact people don't really notice and it doesn't matter. The received wisdom suggests that these 70's highrises have permanently destroyed Quebec City's tourism appeal when in fact they are fine and the stuff happening at street level matters more than height.
Another Halifax fallacy is that heritage buildings are expensive and the economy will tank if too many are kept around. Had Quebec City been run like Halifax, about half of its surviving heritage buildings would have been destroyed. In the 90's, some generic box stores would have been built with completely generic signage.
There's also a bunch of climate-related naysaying. You cannot have paving stones and nice street furniture if there is ever snow, people will not walk outside in sub-zero weather.
A lot of this is fading now but it's all incredibly parochial given that there's a city that offers some good counterexamples only a 10 hour drive away. Of course, these things mostly came from dull suburban councillors and Baby Boomer newspaper commentators circa 2007.
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