Quote:
Originally Posted by TheRitsman
I will continue to argue that the city doesn't matter much from far away. If phone backgrounds matter that much to you guys, you can learn to draw.
There is a certain level of demand, and if we allowed 60 storey towers, there would be half the development which would mean less parking filled in, and many more people over a single point in the city. These towers and others do after job of getting density without completely blocking all light from the surface of the earth, and get more people downtown without overriding roads and transit more than they already will.
What we need is to fill in more of the city with a mix of this density and medium density, and to infill older neighbourhoods with middling density and gentle density such as duplexes and triplexes, with parking lot plazas having density to create a meeting place, the "third place".
I will pull better quality renders from the PDF presentation I receive from clerks tomorrow.
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Should city skyline be a big concern to the planning department? No, not really. However, is there not value in having a city skyline that has a variation of heights, has a high quality of architecture, and is generally aesthetically pleasing?
In my mind, it's no question at all - it holds a lot of value! Especially in a city with the topography of Hamilton, particularly with the escarpment being such an important place to look over the city. What does completely giving up on the skyline gain us, anyways?
I used to see development with a view similar to yours - a very rosy view just happy to see parking lots disappear, money get invested, and new supply being built. I simply can't view development the same way anymore. So many of the proposals we have seen in the downtown, while being numerous, and while representing major investments, are generally terrible architecture, terrible urban planning, and terrible city building.
Yet, so many of these above typified proposals comply with the City's policies, plans, and goals!
Frankly, I think there's enough demand to justify taller buildings and still fill in a good chunk of empty space. Before the DTSP, developers were proposing multiple towers above 30 storeys - the market demand
is there.
And honestly, there isn't truth in a simple correlation between height and shadow - the casting of shadows is affected by so, so many more intricacies than simple height, and with a little bit of thought in design, the shadow impact of one sixty storey building can end up being much less than the shadow impact of two thirty storey towers.
Truth be told, there are issues with redeveloping large sites in short periods of time. Design suffers, streetscape suffers, potential is wasted, etc. I am happy to see parking lots disappear, but I do not believe it is a wholly positive thing that we get rid of them as soon as possible. I especially believe this when the policies that are guiding the redevelopment of these parking lots are worsening the negative effects.
While we as a city cannot change the economic principles that invariably result in parking lots being redeveloped before other parcels, we have a duty to push for the best possible redevelopment schemes on these sites. As it is a lot more difficult to knock down a 30 storey tower than it is to rip up a parking lot, it's reasonable to expect the buildings built today will stand for another hundred years, and recognize that because of this we're only going to get one chance to build out these sites properly and that therefore we have to seize that opportunity now.
We are not doing that. The height limit is not doing that. Many plans and policies are not doing that. We are wasting the potential of these sites.