First time back in Regina in a year, had a look at the Vic Av re-do. Finished product looks pretty good from my
last visit when it was still a work in progress. Didn’t get a chance to walk around, but the curb bulb outs and tidy medians do make it more attractive and seems to be more pedestrian friendly.
Same critique as last time: painting the traffic light poles black make it more polished and “urban”. But hanging so long over the road they still make the street seem wider and speedway like. Verticals on the side closer to eye level, or shorter overhangs - like Regina’s older traffic lights, with a vertical in the median and a shorter overhang from the sidewalk - would still be just as visible but less intrusive.
Also had a chance to visit one of the suburbs that came up since I had moved away. What's Greens on Gardiner now was just the open field over the grey fence when I grew up in Woodland Grove; now it looks pretty close to complete. Not much improvement over past car-centric designs in terms of creating a traditional mixed use main street anywhere - the commercial area with the Save-on-foods is essentially big-box like.
But it seems to have a better mix of housing options than the late-‘90s/early-2000s suburbs, with detached, semi-detached, duplexes, four-plexes and apartments throughout the neighbourhood. They're mainly segregated from one another, rather than integrated into a coherent streetscape, but at least there's some mixing of options overall.
There are also plenty of traditional homes, with porches on the front
and garages all in the back
It makes for a nice streetscape - at least if you’re only looking at one side of the street. It’s a weird jumble - instead of integrating them amongst each other, or matching forms on facing sides of the street, they use the streets as the dividing line between building types. So you have front doors and porches on one side, and blank garages and driveways on the other
I can see how that might look ok on a planning map (just zone by block), but it would have made for better streetscapes to mix them all up, or match both sides of the street.
That said, no matter how things are laid out, there are always outliers - I’d heard about
this landmark on Green Brook Rd, had to lay eyes on it for myself!
You can’t see it here, but the gem is on the side facing the path to the park - on the tiles, a skyline à la early-2000s City of Regina logo! Unconventional appearance aside, the dome probably makes for a really cool skylight, and the tile is probably very easy to keep clean in all weather.
Prev
CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, they are all owned by giant corporations, whether its directly via shares or indirectly via paid advertising, and they benefit from wealth inequality while pushing cultural politics that seek to divide us further. Come on man, you can do better.
Linear Mode
