Quote:
Originally Posted by WhipperSnapper
An urbanist isn't an enthusiast. It's one that takes planning principles into account. Those two proposals wedged on the Yonge Street frontage of that block is the worst form of residential development imaginable and not because it's not LMAO human scaled. This isn't even the nuances of established planning principles. This is the basic stuff. Represents overdevelopment of the sites affecting the quality of life of the inhabitants. Cafe Urbanite shutting down all those years ago was the worst thing for our community.
Than you go on about appreciating skyscraper housing even if you don't like it and follow that up by saying Toronto shouldn't have these single family homes so near the core because you don't like them. This is the historical nature of Toronto built form and identity. Paris built 66 foot multi-family over single family in its core. It still faced the same crisis of not enough housing/office being representative in those 66 foot buildings for the expanding modern metropolis. It chose not to block bust. Same for London.
And, yeah, selective intensification of these dastardly neighbourhoods with wide sweeping upzoning is a delusion. Homes will be assembled over the next decade or two and sold of to large scale developers because that is where the money is. Owners will be given a lease option or homes will be boarded up or rented out in an as is state in the interim
Skyscrapers earned their prowess through commercial usage. You're reliant on powered building systems to function. You can tell people to work from home if there is some sort of mechanical system failure at the office. You're stuck if it happens to your home.
The global economy is reliant on sales. Existing customers aren't enough despite everything now being designed to be trashed in ten years or less. It takes new customer acquisition. That's the fear behind stagnating or shrinking global populations. There wouldn't be enough buyers of tvs, refridgerators and, in Canada's case, homes. Kids growing up in one bedroom apartments in Toronto's entertainment district can't go outside and play tag. They won't see the stars or starlink satelites. They will see pale yellow skies more often than blue. People are social animals. There's a lot of middle ground between a hundred acre farm and the Entertainment District to socialize.
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I think the bolded parts are the core of the misunderstanding. The first one, about taking planning principles into account. That's exactly what I do, and I can tell you as an actual planning major that planning principles do not just consider the housing tastes of the inhabitant. They balance that along with a variety of other things including (in no particular order):
- the environment (preservation of habitat, air emissions, paved surfaces, etc.)
- the cost of infrastructure
- public health & safety (exercise, road safety, addressing pollution / crime, etc.)
- resilience to change (climate, demographic, economic),
- the cost an quantity of housing
- politics and social dynamics (injustice, fairness, segregation etc.)
- the economics of the developer
- aesthetic beauty (of architecture and cityscape)
- transportation (the ability to get around)
We know that we need to aim for a balance between all of these sometimes competing priorities and that it sometimes
requires compromises in one or all of these areas. If I were to just look at one or two aspects such as housing tastes or aesthetic beauty then the result would be far different.
And that gets to the second bolded part.
I don't oppose restricting parts of metro areas to fully detached houses because of my personal feelings toward them. It's because they do a poor job at balancing these varying priorities. They do a good job at providing a desirable experience for some inhabitants (not everyone likes and wants that but many do). But it does poorly in balancing that with pretty much all the other things other than perhaps aesthetic beauty where detached houses vary greatly. Those priorities do ultimately come down to providing a positive experience for people, but just not as directly. A lot of it is longer term such as the future health of the environment that we all live in and the future cost to provide services and maintain infrastructure. None of these issues pertain to personal taste. It's like the difference with food when balancing flavour, cost, nutrition, food safety, and environmental impact. If you only care about one thing such as flavour, you'll neglect other equally important aspects.
The other thing is that in the planning field we try to avoid making absolute, universal statements about human nature and wants. There's a difference between physical issues like the effect of air pollution compared to psychological matters like the scale of architecture. We know there are prevailing trends, but there are always exceptions and people who want things that are different from the norm. So saying "X is good for people and Y isn't, so we'll only plan in manner X" takes away people's freedom to be individuals. Some people do enjoy density at a much greater level than typically ideal. Those people may enjoy a 55 Yonge situation. Just like others would consider a fully detached home in say, Wychwood, a nightmare with the houses too close together and being so close to city energy. For them, a small town or rural area would be ideal. Small towns and rural areas are available for the second person, and dense developments are available for the first.
And there's also just that life is messy. In the same way that someone might take on a job they don't like or work themselves longer and harder than they know is good for them because they really need the money, people will take on less than ideal housing because it's a means to an end. Some decide that not having the extra money would be worse for them than working a bad job or hectic schedule, and others decide that living in a particular type of housing is better than say, living further from work or family, being in a nabe they don't like, paying more money, or not having to wait much longer for a unit. I think that applies to a lot of people who may not even live in the city dealing with traffic and higher prices if it wasn't for their career or social connections etc. And a planner's role is not to take away such options but to give as many options as possible while balancing all the different priorities and realizing that perfection in one area can be the enemy of the big picture good.
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