I am writing this post on a Porter flight from New York back to Toronto.

For my last day in New York, my close friend and I rented scooters and rode all around Manhattan and Brooklyn. It was a great way to cover a lot of ground, but also a great way to still absorb the city. It’s harder to do the latter in a car and I never have any desire to drive in New York.

Because the great thing about New York is that as a pedestrian you feel like you control the streets. When you’re waiting at a crosswalk, you’re never actually waiting. You walk off the sidewalk and onto the street so that you can assert yourself in front of the cars and wait for an opening. This serves to narrow the portion of road that the cars can actually drive on and reminds the drivers who is boss.

At the same time, there are many instances throughout the city where New York has purposefully reallocated the space dedicated to pedestrians (and cyclists) and the space dedicated to cars. They’ve created new public spaces, widened the areas where people can walk, and seemingly blanketed the city with bike lanes. And that makes a lot of sense given that in many (most?) areas of the city, pedestrians greatly outnumber cars.

So does that mean New York is at war with the car? (I’d be curious to know – in the comment section below – if those kinds of discussions take place in the city.)

I suppose you could spin it that way. But New York also does things for cars. While riding around on the scooter today, I was so impressed by how well timed the streetlights were along the avenues. It made it incredibly easy to go downtown or uptown. In Toronto, I often feel like we time our lights to make driving as slow as possible.

But make no mistake; New York is not a driving city. 

New York is about walking, biking, taking transit, and hailing cabs. There is a reason they have the highest transit ridership in the US. The city is built for it. And unless driverless cars and ride sharing completely changes the equation, I will continue to believe that transit is the most efficient backbone for any big city.

One of the things I noticed this past weekend when I was on my Porter Escape in Quebec City was that there’s still evidence of the seigneurial land use system. I saw it on île d'Orléans.

Established in 1627 in New France, the seigneurial system was a feudal way of distributing land and creating subsistence farming for those who occupied it. It was ultimately abolished in 1854, but you can still see vestiges of it.

With the seigneurial system, a typical farming lot was a long and narrow strip of land emanating from the water, which in this particular case was the St. Lawrence River. Here’s a map from 1641 showing what that looks like:

The reasoning behind this spatial arrangement was rather simple. By having long narrow lots, it meant that you could maximize the number of farmers who had direct access to water. This was needed for navigation, but also for many other obvious reasons. This was an efficient layout.

At the same time, the long strips meant that each farmer had access to a broad cross section of different kinds of land. They had fertile land for growing, land for their home, and frequently land with trees so that they had material to build, fuel to burn, and so on. It also meant that, despite the overall lot sizes, people actually lived fairly close to each other. It created communities.

Of course, there’s a lot more to the seigneurial system than just its physical form and there are reasons it was eventually abolished. But today I just want to focus on spatial layout. Because I think there are parallels to how we continue to plan our communities.

If you live in a city you’ve probably come across a narrow rowhouse, a narrow townhouse, and/or a long and narrow condominium – which many people like to pejoratively refer to as a “bowling alley” plan. In these cases, the width of the home could be somewhere between 10 and 13 feet.

If you stop and think about this, it’s exactly the same spatial principles as the seigneurial land use system. But instead of maximizing the number of people with access to the St. Lawrence River, it’s about maximizing the number of people who front onto the street and who have access to natural light.

In tight urban conditions, it’s not uncommon to have no “side yard windows.” In my case, I live in a condominium with 20′ feet of windows on one side only. The other 3 sides of my box have none. And that’s a fairly common urban condition.

I find this interesting because as much as the world is rapidly changing, some things don’t actually change all that much.

Image: Wikipedia

I just checked into the Chateau Laurier Quebec after a busy day touring the city. I don’t have a ton of time to write this post before dinner (though I have a few post ideas brewing). I did however want to share some of the day’s events and some of my photos.

After I landed I went straight to Île d'Orléans. I had never been there before so I’m glad I got the opportunity. It’s about twice the size of Manhattan and it has a population that hovers somewhere between 7,000 and 10,000 people depending on the season.

The first stop was a “sugar shack”, which is apparently a big deal in Quebec and in the springtime. The place was packed. Here I had a traditional Quebec lunch (which was great) and I learned that all of the Canadian stereotypes are actually true. We really do put maple syrup on everything.

After lunch I then asked if we could stop at a few of the local wineries. I love wine and I love wine culture.

I picked up one bottle of “wine” from Cassis Monna & Filles. It’s actually made from black currants though, which I was told was illegal to grow in North America for a long time. It’s far more popular in Europe.

The winery is run by a father and his two daughters. And I thought they did a great job with their brand story and their overall identity.

After leaving the island, I then went to the Montmorency Falls. I had no idea Quebec had falls, but they do. And the vertical drop is bigger than that of Niagara Falls.

Finally, I finished the afternoon with a quick tour of downtown and the OMA designed expansion to the fine arts museums. It has one aggressive cantilever.

Here’s a video of the project. Click here if you can’t see it below. 

[vimeo 111133943 w=500 h=281]

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