Urban vs Suburban - 2 styles enter, one style leaves! - Page 41

suburbia · #**801** Posted **Oct 11, 2014, 9:50 PM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by speedog

I'm not sure if I agree because I can look north of me into Thorncliffe, Huntington Hills and even Beddington and find very generous sized lots and some of those communities were still being built out in the late 70's and maybe even 80's and all of them are still relatively low in density.

I don't believe those places were designed in the 80's. 70's yes, but irrespective, my point is still valid. Generally speaking, 60's and 70's inner city is way less dense than current developments, or anything designed certainly by 1990 and on.

Quote:

Originally Posted by speedog

Maybe the definition is more around the average commute time or distance to the core - difficult to peg down.

I've heard 'some' use this, but I've highlighted that most people in the city don't work in the inner city, so if urban living is 'better' and someone lives in a pseudo-dense area close to where they work, should they get penalized by claims of it being non-urban? The meaning of urban has been too often distorted, and then house of cards arguments created based on this. Urban actually means in the city. Cities are urban by definition:
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/urban

So my discussion in the prior post of what Americans call suburban is quite valid. There was an American research paper posted on the forum some time ago that showed how suburban living was more expensive than urban, when accounting for cost of housing as well as commuting. When I investigated in detail, their suburban was 2 hours of commuting one way out from places of work. In fact, the range 0-5km from centre was extremely expensive, and then the band 5-20km out was cheapest, and then increased costs after that. So while the fellow who posted used it to explain how inner city was cheaper than what forumers here call suburban, the reality was revealed with a more thoughtful read of the report. What was claimed suburban by us, was actually urban by the report writers. Seems we have many spin doctors on the forum when it comes to using such studies.

Anyway, thanks for the thoughtful discussion. Personally, I wish I had a 60' lot, but alas, I'm an environmentalist

fusili · #**802** Posted **Oct 11, 2014, 11:31 PM**

"Suburb" and "city" are fairly nebulous terms, and shift based on the particular context. However, in Calgary, for most planning policy purposes, we effectively have 4 areas: Centre City, Inner City, Established Communities and

Centre City: What most think of as our downtown and Beltline. Includes communities of Downtown, Beltline, East Village, Chinatown, Eau Claire and Downtown West End

Inner City: Best way to describe it is any pre-war gridded street suburb. Once the street pattern changes from grid, to what planners would call a "neighbourhood unit" pattern, you move into Established Communities. Altadore, Forest Lawn, Bowness, Tuxedo, Killarney etc included here.

Established Communities: Your 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s burbs essentially. Neighbourhood unit road patterns at first, then strait up spaghetti roads in the 90s.

Developing Communities- Mostly those communities that are still undergoing build-out, but not all.

speedog · #**803** Posted **Oct 11, 2014, 11:48 PM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by fusili

"Suburb" and "city" are fairly nebulous terms, and shift based on the particular context. However, in Calgary, for most planning policy purposes, we effectively have 4 areas: Centre City, Inner City, Established Communities and

Centre City: What most think of as our downtown and Beltline. Includes communities of Downtown, Beltline, East Village, Chinatown, Eau Claire and Downtown West End

Inner City: Best way to describe it is any pre-war gridded street suburb. Once the street pattern changes from grid, to what planners would call a "neighbourhood unit" pattern, you move into Established Communities. Altadore, Forest Lawn, Bowness, Tuxedo, Killarney etc included here.

Established Communities: Your 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s burbs essentially. Neighbourhood unit road patterns at first, then strait up spaghetti roads in the 90s.

Developing Communities- Mostly those communities that are still undergoing build-out, but not all.

So the curvilinear style communities such as Highwood, Highland Park, Cambrian Heights, Rosemont and such - all built post-war fit sort of between Inner City and Established.

speedog · #**804** Posted **Oct 11, 2014, 11:51 PM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by suburbia

...

Anyway, thanks for the thoughtful discussion. Personally, I wish I had a 60' lot, but alas, I'm an environmentalist

Why is it that an environmentalist can't have a large yard and grow their own food on it? Does having a large yard make one less of an environmentalist even though they may utilize the space in an environmentally friendly way compared to many that may have significantly smaller or no yards?

Spring2008 · #**805** Posted **Oct 12, 2014, 4:28 AM**

The ring outside of the inner city will see redevelopment as the housing stock continues to age and demand pressures push redevelopment further out. Already starting to happen in certain areas.

suburbia · #**806** Posted **Oct 13, 2014, 12:43 AM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by speedog

Why is it that an environmentalist can't have a large yard and grow their own food on it? Does having a large yard make one less of an environmentalist even though they may utilize the space in an environmentally friendly way compared to many that may have significantly smaller or no yards?

Because the concept of the city is expensive, and extreme low density use of limited land therein is in appropriate use. It would be better to use non-urban lands in this manner. Plus, 95%+ of people in 60 foot lots do not actually grow their own vegetables. It is just something brought up in anonymity.

suburbia · #**807** Posted **Oct 13, 2014, 12:45 AM**

I noticed the downtown is virtual shut down ... again. I've advocated previously, and do so again, for multiple dense commercial / residential zones more distributed throughout the city, as inherently, over identification in one area only is risky.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_point_of_failure

youngregina · #**808** Posted **Oct 13, 2014, 1:47 AM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by suburbia

I noticed the downtown is virtual shut down ... again. I've advocated previously, and do so again, for multiple dense commercial / residential zones more distributed throughout the city, as inherently, over identification in one area only is risky.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_point_of_failure

Ugh, downtown wasn't virtually shut down. 90% of it was still up and running and by no means is having a commercial core a single point of failure. During the floods for example most of these companies have back-up operations anyways, including the ability to have employees efficiently work from home when necessary. Having the offices in close proximity to each-other offers a greater communications and technical assistance advantage that wouldn't be as efficient with multiple commercial nodes. IT workers for example need to be in close proximity to a number of their clients to work well and without too much delay. This is a far greater trade-off than the odd economic disadvantage of a power failure, flood, etc.

lineman · #**809** Posted **Oct 13, 2014, 6:40 PM**

Infrastructure loss can happen anywhere. Whether a business affected downtown or in seton, it doesn't matter. It's still affected.

There's a reason the CBD is so dense. Businesses want to be there. If they were okay with multiple nodes, places like interplex would have been built out as originally envisioned years ago.

speedog · #**810** Posted **Oct 13, 2014, 7:53 PM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by suburbia

Because the concept of the city is expensive, and extreme low density use of limited land therein is in appropriate use. It would be better to use non-urban lands in this manner. Plus, 95%+ of people in 60 foot lots do not actually grow their own vegetables. It is just something brought up in anonymity.

One drawback of my 60x110 lot that became evident today - the amount of autumn clean-up although it's still a very good trade-off. Something to note, we had another 1100 square foot bungalow sell about 8 lots north of us on a 60x110 R2 lot - was afraid it would be bulldozed but to my surprise, the new owners have moved in and are renovating. 1100 square feet 3 bedrooms up, 1 bathroom up, 60's vintage inside and no garage for $540,000 - 4.9km from downtown.

Ramsayfarian · #**811** Posted **Oct 13, 2014, 10:42 PM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by youngregina

During the floods for example most of these companies have back-up operations anyways, including the ability to have employees efficiently work from home when necessary.

During the flood a lot of companies learned that backups are easy, it's restoring data and seamless failovers that are hard.

suburbia · #**812** Posted **Oct 14, 2014, 2:27 AM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ramsayfarian

During the flood a lot of companies learned that backups are easy, it's restoring data and seamless failovers that are hard.

What happened with Shaw's fire? Oh yeah, they expedited backing up to the NE and canceled their new office tower.

VIce · #**813** Posted **Oct 14, 2014, 4:04 AM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by suburbia

What happened with Shaw's fire? Oh yeah, they expedited backing up to the NE and canceled their new office tower.

You say that like they chose one as an alternative to the other.

suburbia · #**814** Posted **Oct 14, 2014, 2:25 PM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by VIce

You say that like they chose one as an alternative to the other.

I didn't mean to imply that. Clearly they wanted to move from a more consolidated single downtown location that warranted a new tower, to a multi-site de-risked model.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgar...gary-1.1360561

Ramsayfarian · #**815** Posted **Oct 14, 2014, 3:42 PM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by suburbia

What happened with Shaw's fire? Oh yeah, they expedited backing up to the NE and canceled their new office tower.

AFAIK their data centre in the NE is not open yet and IIRC they announced the their new office tower after the fire. Shaw's failover wasn't the smoothest, but they weren't the ones with a multi day outage.

It was IBM who dropped the ball and impacted several government agencies as their DRP was to fly tapes to Ontario and restore the data there.

lineman · #**816** Posted **Oct 14, 2014, 5:11 PM**

Clearly Shaw backed out of 3EC because of non-confidence in the developer. A quick search will tell anyone that.

Not sure how a data centre fire prompts a decentralization of corporate offices. Why would an EVP of Finance need to be downtown and the EVP of Marketing need to be in the NE? That makes zero sense. Quit making shit up.