Ugly Canada 2 (Only architecture, planning and design faux pas)

[Harrison]

Originally Posted by 905er

Have you seen K/W lately?...

This looks more like it belongs in Novosibirsk, Russia.

I have and he's not off-base if he's referring to the Northdale or King Street N. part of Waterloo. Just look at this:

[kwoldtimer]

Yes, I was thinking that I could see that building in the Waterloo student ghetto. In Kitchener, not so much, although there are a couple of eyebrow-raisers that have been proposed.

[rousseau]

Nowhere in K-W is good-looking or charming, but parts of the hi-rise student ghetto around the universities are ugly in the zany way of rapacious capitalism that actually kinda works due to all the street-level retail.



https://www.google.ca/maps/@43.47503...7i16384!8i8192

[Proof Sheet]

Originally Posted by rousseau

Nowhere in K-W is good-looking or charming, but parts of the hi-rise student ghetto around the universities are ugly in the zany way of rapacious capitalism that actually kinda works due to all the street-level retail.



https://www.google.ca/maps/@43.47503...7i16384!8i8192

Wow..I was at Waterloo in the 80's and have been back every few years since and now our son is there at U of W and the place is unrecognizable. Our sons perspective on the area is so different to mine. The REV/V2 residence looks identical to when I was there.

Albert, Lester, Sunview all have had massive changes over the years. Are there any owner occupied properties left on those streets ?

[megadude]

Can someone explain why KW doesn't have charming neighbourhoods? There's gotta be something, no?

DT Guelph ain't too shabby. Galt in Cambridge is great. So how did this come to be for KW?

[kwoldtimer]

Originally Posted by megadude

Can someone explain why KW doesn't have charming neighbourhoods? There's gotta be something, no?

DT Guelph ain't too shabby. Galt in Cambridge is great. So how did this come to be for KW?

It has some nice old residential neighbourhoods, but these were small, blue collar towns until after WWII. They also had minimal government presence and relatively little “old money”. A lot of what might have been preserved was lost with growth in the decades following the war. With the exception of Kitchener’s Belmont Village, the cities still have nothing outside the two cores that resembles the complete neighbourhoods that one finds in larger cities.

[rousseau]

Originally Posted by kwoldtimer

It has some nice old residential neighbourhoods, but these were small, blue collar towns until after WWII. They also had minimal government presence and relatively little “old money”. A lot of what might have been preserved was lost with growth in the decades following the war. With the exception of Kitchener’s Belmont Village, the cities still have nothing outside the two cores that resembles the complete neighbourhoods that one finds in larger cities.

When you think about it, it's actually quite amazing that a place the size of Kitchener-Waterloo doesn't have any smaller commercial sections outside of downtown. Belmont Village barely qualifies, and that's the closest it gets.

https://www.google.ca/maps/@43.45448...7i16384!8i8192

When you look at Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge as a whole you've only got five pre-automobile business areas for 600,000 people: Waterloo, Kitchener, Preston, Hespeler and Galt. Compare that to similarly-sized Hamilton, which has, well...<goes to Google Maps>...fourteen or more distinct neighbourhood-anchoring business districts, and that doesn't include King, Main and Barton Streets with their linear stretches of mostly unbroken commercial frontage reaching upwards of 7 km in length each, which, if broken up into neighbourhood-sized sections would add some fifteen or more commercial sections to the tally.

So yeah, K-W was not all that big prewar. The dour, utilitarian German population of Berlin was clearly not that fussed about creating grand urban vistas and gracious neighbourhoods. The closest you get to any semblance of southern Ontario charm is Ahrens St. and environs.

https://www.google.ca/maps/@43.45511...7i16384!8i8192

And Allen St. in Waterloo is sort of alright.

https://www.google.ca/maps/@43.46195...7i16384!8i8192

K-W's preferred housing stock for the wealthy is in newer (i.e. not Victorian) areas like along Union Blvd.

https://www.google.ca/maps/@43.45416...7i16384!8i8192

[davee930]

delete

[ssiguy]

Kitchener has always been Canada biggest "drive-thru" city. No one goes to Kitchener unless absolutely necessary. Kitchener is the place you have to go thru on your way to Toronto in the East or Stratford and London in the West.

Parts of the original towns of Cambridge {Galt, Hespler, and Preston} are quite quaint and Waterloo is OK and has the universities and Kitchener seem to be little more than the space between them.

It's not a bad or ugly city but just completely non-descript and bland.

[megadude]

I'm ashamed to say I've never actually been to downtow K or W. I've partied with Laurier people a couple of times near campus and I've driven through the outskirts but given that I like exploring, it really is bad that I haven't been. Not like there's enough there to warrant a visit, but it's an hour away and I've driven to obscure towns on a whim that are two hours away. That's when I rented a car a few times with Enterprise's weekend rate for $32 and started checking out towns I've never been to. Cross several of them off the list each day I did it.

I will always remember happening upon New Hamburg and being surprised by some of the architecture. I only stopped by to see the Nith River as I'm an angler.

And of course, I've been to St. Jacob's market. And then made my way to St. Mary's and Stratford afterwards. I've never been compelled to go deep into KW.

[vid]

Originally Posted by urbandreamer

I posted this photo I took a few months ago in the Canada P&C section:

What even is proportions???

[Architype]

Originally Posted by vid

What even is proportions???

"a part, share, or number considered in comparative relation to a whole."
But first there must be a whole.

That could be much worse, and will probably look better when it is finished, it employs the modern aesthetic of brick & stone something or other.
Those materials should not let anyone down, but in the wrong hands.

[rousseau]

Originally Posted by ssiguy

Kitchener has always been Canada biggest "drive-thru" city. No one goes to Kitchener unless absolutely necessary. Kitchener is the place you have to go thru on your way to Toronto in the East or Stratford and London in the West.

Parts of the original towns of Cambridge {Galt, Hespler, and Preston} are quite quaint and Waterloo is OK and has the universities and Kitchener seem to be little more than the space between them.

It's not a bad or ugly city but just completely non-descript and bland.

i disagree. K-W is the big city destination for a wide swath of the rural area to the north and west of it. You can see on the map that lots of roads lead to K-W without having to zig-zag. Though it turns into a toss-up between London and K-W the closer you get to the Lake Huron shoreline.

I would argue that London feels more non-descript and bland than K-W, though of course no vacation consortium is going to start flying multiple charters a day to either of them. But where London has some genuinely nice residential streets and a downtown with real character and some lovely Victorian shopfronts (like here), Kitchener is mostly an eyesore.

You can take a tour of King Street starting here. Work your way up to Waterloo if you have the stomach for it. There are a few nice buildings, and a couple stretches are lined with condos that look interesting with the LRT running through, but most of it is ugly.

Having said that, Waterloo has an internationally renowned university and a proportionally outsized tech ecosystem. And a crazy student rental scene as mentioned previously, where buildings like this get built with commercial businesses on the ground floor. It also has the biggest Oktoberfest outside of Germany. I wouldn't call it non-descript, exactly, and certainly not in comparison with London, which really is devoid of easily definable character.

[ssiguy]

London, like Hamilton and Windsor, is a real city with real urbanity. It is chocked full of beautiful old homes on tree lined streets with gorgeous parks. It has a downtown and when you are there you know it unlike Kitchener.

You even said it yourself when talking about a world renowned university and tech ecosystem............Waterloo aka NOT Kitchener. Again, Kitchener is the place you drive thru but not the destination. A similar scenario plays out in Niagara. St.Catharines is the biggest city but people don't go to St.Cath but rather drive thru it on their way to NF, NOTL, or the US. The key difference is that St.Catharines is actually quite a pretty and picturesque little city quite unlike Kitchener.

It's not that Kitchener has a bad reputation but rather more the fact that it doesn't have one at all. For cities, like people, there is only one thing worse than being talked about and that's NOT being talked about.

[O-tacular]

Sounds like Red Deer would be Alberta’s Kitchener. A city you drive through on your way to Calgary, Edmonton or Sylvan Lake. It’s the halfway point where you gas up and stop to go to the bathroom. I only visited the city itself beyond gasoline alley on the QE2 when work required it in recent years. So far as I can tell there is no historical core to the city. The highlight of the tour my local co-worker gave me was a stop at the Hell’s Angels clubhouse at the northern edge of town and him pointing out a treed area that used to have a homeless camp.

[MolsonExport]

Red Deer struck me as a scuzzy stroadsville the last time I drove through it. Nothing worthy of making a stop.

[O-tacular]

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

Red Deer struck me as a scuzzy stroadsville the last time I drove through it. Nothing worthy of making a stop.

Yes indeed. Gaetz Ave is the main stroad that runs the length of the city. Imagine if Calgary’s main feature was Macleod Trail. The natural areas surrounding Red Deer are nice but the city is bland and depressing.

On a semi related note: looking at that original shot of student res buildings from KW I can’t believe the lack of city planning. Not a single tree or anything beyond a dinky sidewalk with overhead power lines. It looks like these enormously ugly res buildings were just plopped down on semi rural roads.

[advance62]

Originally Posted by ssiguy

London, like Hamilton and Windsor, is a real city with real urbanity. It is chocked full of beautiful old homes on tree lined streets with gorgeous parks. It has a downtown and when you are there you know it unlike Kitchener.

You even said it yourself when talking about a world renowned university and tech ecosystem............Waterloo aka NOT Kitchener. Again, Kitchener is the place you drive thru but not the destination. A similar scenario plays out in Niagara. St.Catharines is the biggest city but people don't go to St.Cath but rather drive thru it on their way to NF, NOTL, or the US. The key difference is that St.Catharines is actually quite a pretty and picturesque little city quite unlike Kitchener.

It's not that Kitchener has a bad reputation but rather more the fact that it doesn't have one at all. For cities, like people, there is only one thing worse than being talked about and that's NOT being talked about.

More of the technology companies are in Kitchener, not Waterloo including Google's Canadian engineering HQ which is currently expanding:


It might not be the prettiest place in the world but the current building boom and developments in the pipeline are totally changing the face of Kitchener and to a lesser extent, Waterloo. The population is also expanding quite quickly as people flee Toronto and the GTA which is hurting the local housing market but that's a separate, ugly conversation.

[ssiguy]

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

Red Deer struck me as a scuzzy stroadsville the last time I drove through it. Nothing worthy of making a stop.

Red Deer is a dump. The ONLY thing it has going for it is that it's easy to get to somewhere else ie Cal/Edm or Sylvan Lake. The city itself has nothing to offer and the downtown is ugly and dead.

Lethbridge on the other hand is actually quite a nice and vibrant little city greatly helped by the university. Medicine Hat is also very nice but quiet as it has become a bit of a seniors haven due to it's very dry and sunny climate.

[Xelebes]

Red Deer is a working class city. I have a lot of family from that area and most are either involved in nursing, trades or industrial supply.