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Originally Posted by Keith P.
So what you are saying is that it is arbitrary?
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No, it's values-based. Cities are super complex reflections of human culture. Sure, there are many quantitative aspects to these exercises. Things like looking at demand forecasts compared to potential supply (which was done as part of Centre Plan), servicing capacity, and considering what types of floor plates and such are most financially-efficient (though it's worth noting that this changes as technology changes).
But all of that is eclipsed by the context of "what is the kind of city you want to live in? What are your values?" It's messy. And it's often contradictory ("I want a city that's affordable. Oh, but don't build anything new."). Humans are messy.
There's too much push to bring "science" to city building*. There's very little that's scientific about it. But we live in a society where you "can't possibly be right unless you have the peer-reviewed studies to back it up" (never mind that there's no universal "right"). All that results in is an industry of trying to create a science that can't possibly exist. Listen to the New Urbanist people and they'll tell you they've created the science of building the perfect town. No, they've created a framework for building one very specific type of town. Or worse, it results in metrics (and engineers
) driving your city design - building for the cheapest sewer or the fastest roads rather than for places people want to live.
Even the "rationale" examples provided in the UDI's Keesmaat peer review of Centre Plan are value-based:
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In Toronto, this materializes in a midrise typology between 6 – 11 stories, and the appropriate height is determined by the width of the right-of-way of the street. Others like Hamilton, use alignment with natural features (the Niagara Escarpment). For Hamilton, this has resulted in the adoption of a new policy framework wherein on tall building sites, all buildings are capped at 30 stories. Some cities, such as Paris, use historical context as the basis for their height rationale.
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There's nothing scientifically "good" or "bad" about aligning heights with the Niagara Escarpment or historical context - those are value decisions about how those communities want to relate to their surroundings.
*As an aside, I'm currently watching the Vietnam War documentary series on Netflix, and one of the things that really stands out to me was the push to "science" that war. They collected endless amounts of data and ran it through computers and generated... what? There is no science of war. And the push to force "science" on it just resulted in reams of pointless data and bad decisions made based on that data (garbage in, garbage out as the programmers like to say).