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Move the farm and turn that property into a park? Buy up the properties around it and develop them instead? Sounds feasible. While we're at it, how about we disassemble the parliament buildings too, then rebuild them stone by stone on the EB Eddy site so we can put condos on parliament hill instead?
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har har.
If you would kindly dispense with the sarcasm, you would see that we already have the Arboreteum and gardens in the area; all we need to do is expand on them.
Keep the buildings(since most of them are old and nice and shouldn't be destroyed), develop large portions of the farm fields, and let the rest be sold off to develop condos.
It's feasible, especially with the proposed transitway extension onto Baseline. At the north end of the park you'd have the 85 and the O-Train and at the south end you'd have a shiny new part of the transitway.
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What I guess you didn't read in my original post was the idea that if you build a really classy park it will spur development around it.
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Oh no, I read that just fine. But when you look at Ottawa, large, classy park in Suburbia doesn't really jump to mind...
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Both Hyde Park in London and Central Park in New York were surrounded by farmer's fields when they were planned, and the developers snatched up the opportunity to build around them.
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Yeah, and the same could happen if we try to convert the Agriculture Farm into a classy park. There are a tonne of "farmers fields" that could be bought up and spur development.
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And there's enough space in the thick of the greenbelt to build without casting shadows on the NIMBYS.
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Perhaps, but it would still be a pretty rough sell. Especially if council ever got hold of it. You also forget that NIMBY's will be there and complain, whether or not it affects them...
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And if you don't believe large-scale developments in the suburbs that shift the gravity of a city can be built in this country, check out this website: www.downtownmarkham.ca. Or for that matter, just check out Kanata.
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I never said it wasn't possible.
And I've been to Kanata many times. Three Claridge Condo Towers, a big-box shopping centre, Scotiabank Place, tonnes of golf courses, a Business Park and crescent after crescent of houses that look so delightfully similar. Oh, and let's not forget about the lovely transit connections out there.
While a massive park would be great, putting it out in the burbs to serve only a handful of people in communities that could walk to it seems to go against the mission to fight urban sprawl.
Shoddy transit connections to the park would also suck terribly.
And developing a new community full of condos/whatever in the burbs is still urban sprawl. Hopefully it could help make the burbs more self-sufficient and thus reduce auto emissions spent driving into town each day, but we'd need to see some proof of this.
I honestly believe that we should focus on trying to find development opportunities within the core, instead of looking to suburbia for the ansawers.