Was Don Mills the turning point in terms of suburbanization in Canada?

[Docere]

Of course suburbanization existed before Don Mills. But before that the suburbs really feel like the continuation of the interwar pattern of development. Don Mills was a "new town" type development, the streetcars never there, the first car-oriented area "built from scratch" so to speak. It set the pattern for what came later.

We often use "1945" as the cutoff but I wonder if ca. 1953 is really the first year of Canadian suburbia as we know it.

[urbandreamer]

North Vancouver's postwar bungalow hoods off Grand Boulevard predate Don Mills.

[Kilgore Trout]

Interesting question. It depends on the city. In many cases, suburban development was a natural extension of the existing urban form well into the 1950s and sometimes into the 1960s. It took awhile for Don Mills-style suburbia to catch on.

For example, Killarney, Vancouver was developed in the late 1950s, and it maintains the same kind of street grid and density as other, older areas:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/TztXab33JQxExEUS9

In Calgary, Rosscarrock was not developed until the late 1950s and it maintains a street grid with back alleys:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/LLQzkwAbihZqXDP37

Next door is Westgate, which developed just a few years later, but you can already start to see more Don Mills-style features in the planning:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/KmmduP7K3FqVX6Qk6

Montreal is an interesting case because you have examples of both Don Mills-style development and more urban typologies being built at exactly the same time.

Lakeside Heights, Pointe Claire, developed in the 1960s:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/pDvFh7VkyxHZtrbv7

Montreal North, also developed on greenfield land in the 1960s:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/FZAtYFtKo5uiL2y89

And then you have a very distinctive 1960s typology, which is triplexes developed on a car-oriented suburban street pattern. This is common in areas with strong Italian influence like St-Léonard, Anjou and LaSalle:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/aJTDPRPQEh9WTaZW8

[Docere]

Originally Posted by Kilgore Trout

For example, Killarney, Vancouver was developed in the late 1950s, and it maintains the same kind of street grid and density as other, older areas:

In the case of Van, the city limits in 1929 are still in place. But south of 41st wasn't fully built out until around 1960 or so I guess.

[Docere]

Originally Posted by urbandreamer

North Vancouver's postwar bungalow hoods off Grand Boulevard predate Don Mills.

And isn't Park Royal the oldest shopping mall in Canada?

[Docere]

Toronto's Lawrence Manor area is a good example of immediate postwar area that sort of represents a transition or the last extension urban form . Softee captured it well:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRkzlejQhKc

[niwell]

There are tons of gridded areas in Toronto that were built up after 1945 and while kinda ugly, retain the narrow lot presence of pre-war development. They have been referred to as “unplanned suburbs” in literature and generally represent areas that were platted out by a developer as early as the 1920s well outside the city and had individual houses developed independently. Often these areas lacked a lot of basic services at the time (sewers, municipal water treatment, etc).

Also have “wartime” housing clusters developed in the late 40s on more suburban street patterns with very small houses and big lots. This never really fulfilled the demand of the housing crisis at the time.

I see Don Mills as a very Toronto/Ontarian response to the massive demand for housing in a more egalitarian way than was occurring with contemporary developments in the US. Yeah there are a lot of SFHs but also clusters of apartments and a retail / institutional core with provisions for public transit. It was really cutting edge for the time, and even though we may cringe at the land usage / street layout now probably represents a better ideal for building real communities. In a lot of the ways it’s a far cry from new suburbs that may better fit an urban design pattern but are very car dependent and segregated by income and land usage.

[Coldrsx]

Westmount mall (1955) in Edmonton is a surprisingly good candidate.


https://twitter.com/LouisPereira_/st...74076708241409

[WhipperSnapper]

AFAIK, Don Millls is the first master planned community in Toronto which was inspired by the success of smaller suburban subdivisions distinguished by modest bungalows from the post war catalog of house designs on the fringes of prewar Toronto.

I would call Don Mills the product from the early success of suburbanization spearheaded by the government through CMHC. The difference between pre and early post war are wider lots to allow each home a driveway

[Proof Sheet]

Originally Posted by Kilgore Trout

And then you have a very distinctive 1960s typology, which is triplexes developed on a car-oriented suburban street pattern. This is common in areas with strong Italian influence like St-Léonard, Anjou and LaSalle:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/aJTDPRPQEh9WTaZW8

Behold the 'Tempo'.

[SignalHillHiker]

Ours was Churchill Park, though we weren't part of Canada at the time.



"Distance from the city" is hilarious by modern standards. It's literally connected to our first suburb, Georgestown, which is indistinguishable from and attached to the oldest residential neighbourhoods in the city. I could walk to Churchill Park in less than 10 minutes.

[Docere]

Interesting piece on Don Mills (I don't know if it's paywalled):

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/real...rticle1004819/

An influence on Don Mills was not so much Levittown but the Eichler developments in California.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Eichler

* Levittown was very blue collar, while Don Mills was more marketed to the professional/young executive set.

[ssiguy]

Don Mills may have been the first truly master planned suburban development but you had to start somewhere. It was just a reflection of changing times that was effecting every advanced economy especially in NA/Aus. The only reason it didn't kills our downtowns unlike in Canada/Aus is that we didn't have the added impetus of fleeing the downtowns by white flight and taking their taxes and political influence with them.

[Gresto]

I thought it was common knowledge that Don Mills was the first suburb in Canada, if not North America.

[Docere]

Unlike Toronto, where the city proper (at the time) was fully built out by 1930, Montreal which had a bigger land area still had some unbuilt areas at the end of WWII. Cote-des-Nieges and Snowdon weren't built up until the 1940s and 1950s. I wonder if CDN is the last truly "urban" neighborhood developed in North America, it has a very high density and there's nothing "suburban" about it really.

[manny_santos]

The first developments in postwar Byron, then outside London, was developed between 1945 and 1950. Some, though not all of the initial houses built there were bungalows.

https://www.lib.uwo.ca/madgic/projec.../A12512_30.jpg (photo is upside down, so south is at the top)

https://www.google.com/maps/@42.9551...8192?entry=ttu

Unlike Don Mills, however, the initial development was grid-based, and I get the sense it was not "planned".

[SignalHillHiker]

Originally Posted by manny_santos

Unlike Don Mills, however, the initial development was grid-based, and I get the sense it was not "planned".

Ours was the opposite - planned, but not grid-based. Churchill Park (completed 1942) was leafy streets and cul-de-sacs.





Of the surviving original buildings, the most common feature of the neighbourhood is the corner windows. Most have been renovated once or twice since the 40s, though, and there's even some infill with double-sized garages and the like.

[Kilgore Trout]

Originally Posted by Docere

Unlike Toronto, where the city proper (at the time) was fully built out by 1930, Montreal which had a bigger land area still had some unbuilt areas at the end of WWII. Cote-des-Nieges and Snowdon weren't built up until the 1940s and 1950s. I wonder if CDN is the last truly "urban" neighborhood developed in North America, it has a very high density and there's nothing "suburban" about it really.

CDN is interesting because I would argue that it actually was a suburban neighbourhood, because the way it was built broke quite significantly with the traditional ways Montreal developed. Instead of piecemeal plexes built by individual property owners or small-time developers, you had larger developers that built huge blocks of freestanding apartment buildings and/or attached duplexes, all of which was more car-oriented than any older part of Montreal. Most of those apartment buildings have garages or parking areas which was unusual at the time. It just happened to be on a grid which is why it feels more urban today, and the density reflects a relative lack of zoning restrictions compared to other Canadian cities.

In a way it's similar to how many cities in Spain (or many other countries for that matter) are still developing today: you have mass-produced blocks of apartments right up to the edge of the city, on the other side of which are farm fields and old villages. CDN in the 1940s would have been similar.

[Docere]

I was incorrect about Park Royal being the first shopping mall. It was Norgate in Ville St. Laurent.

[Docere]

It would be interesting to see a map of the built-up area of Montreal Island in 1945.