Quote:
Originally Posted by MonkeyRonin
Vaughan, Ajax, and Whitby - which are entirely suburban and have no pre-war cores of substance (though in Vaughan's case is least is building a new urban centre).
|
Whitby has an
actual downtown, albeit small.
***
Canadian suburbs have pseudo-downtowns because they are just creations of the province where a former rural township of a vast area was amalgamated into a single municipality when it became apparent that they were in the path of sprawl and needed urban servicing.
These places had a handful of existing villages, but since these places were both very small and positioned in far corners of this new entity, most of these newly-formed municipalities just chose a centralized plot of land with good highway access and designated it their new town centre.
Mississauga, Laval, Surrey, Vaughan, Markham, Scarborough and many other giant suburbs are exactly that.
Then there are other municipalities that were amalgamations of a collection of fully-grown towns or cities, like Gatineau, St. Catharines, Cambridge or Thunder Bay. These places have real downtowns, but maybe not as impressive or important as they could be given the population and are multi-nodal.