If I can extract one overarching takeaway, it's maybe this one: We need to be big and bold (have a compelling vision!), while at the same time getting out of the way of small-scale urban innovation. Joe Berridge, for example, felt strongly that Toronto is not taking full advantage of its waterfront. We've been too focused on bike lanes and parks, rather than on creating noteworthy global draws and aggressively marketing ourselves externally. Toronto needs its Sydney moment — something like a globally significant Opera House that attracts people from all around the world. I don't disagree. Cities need to do things that are remarkable.
At the same time, we spent a lot of time talking about the micro scale. Some of the most loved urban environments from around the world have the simplest built form: fine-grained and humble buildings fronting onto human-scaled streets — streets like Ossington in Toronto and seemingly every street in Paris. But that was then. This kind of built environment is mostly incongruent with how we plan and develop new communities today. We develop big, we impose top-down planning, and we no longer have the same inherent flexibility that our older building stock had.
Take, for instance, Toronto's East Bayfront, which is where this conference is taking place. It's a recently developed community with many or most of the hallmarks that constitute good urban design today: handsome architecture (including mass-timber buildings), pedestrian-friendly streets, well-designed public realms, and more. And yet, the area is largely void of any urban vibrancy. Other than the boardwalk along the water and a handful of restaurant patios, there's very little public life. Many of the buildings are also connected by bridges, which is not in and of itself a problem, but it further removes life from the street.
Here are a few photos of the area that I took while leaving the panel:
The buildings are ugly, or at least nondescript. None of the tenants are following a consistent signage standard. There are no sidewalks. And there's an overhead rail line bisecting the street. And yet, it's vibrant. It's a successful urban street. Most older cities have areas akin to this, but it's a real challenge to create it from scratch in new developments (see above). I'm very interested in this challenge and, as we have talked about many times before on the blog, I think part of the answer lies in allowing flexibility and ground-up change. It's impossible to predict what an area could become and, for that reason, top-down planning will never get it exactly right.
Thinking about it this way, urban design isn't dead; it just maybe needs a refocusing. And what I propose is approaching it along the lines of Jeff Bezos' old management adage: You want to be stubborn on vision, but flexible on the details.
One of the fundamental principles that we espouse on this blog is that land use and transportation planning are integral to one another. This matters if you're trying to build a big, bad global city because there are limits to what you can accomplish with car-oriented planning. Eventually traffic congestion becomes unbearable and the model starts to breakdown (consider Toronto and Atlanta right now).
This means that, if you'd like to continue scaling, eventually you'll need to start getting serious about transit-oriented development and other forms of mobility. Japan is one of the best examples of this. But the key prerequisite for this is urban density. This is the unlock that makes transit practical and convenient for people.
That's why this week's planning announcement is a big one for Toronto. On August 15, the Government of Ontario (through the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing) approved, with some modifications, 120 Major Transit Station Areas and Protected Major Transit Station Areas in the City of Toronto. Here's a summary of the MMAH's decision via the City's website, and below is a map of the transit station areas. (Note that some station areas are missing from this map and are still under review.)
Here in Toronto, we have something known as "Type G" loading spaces. They're used for collecting garbage and they are generally required in multi-family buildings with 30 or more homes (though exceptions do exist). The problem with these spaces is that they're highly consumptive. Below is an excerpt from a recent article in Azure by Kelly Alvarez Doran and Mitchell May:
In order to accommodate a truck’s large arms to swing a garbage bin up and over its frame, residential buildings require what’s known as a “Type G” loading space, which measures at least 13 metres long, four metres wide and 6.1 metres tall. While the area of the loading space alone is significant, the required turnaround space — allowing trucks to navigate in and out of the building — is often double or even triple its size. Current City of Toronto regulations require this loading space to be designed in order to allow a garbage truck to enter the site, collect the waste, and exit the site without the need to reverse onto a public road — resulting in T- or L-shaped paved areas to accommodate the turns of a wide wheel base. Due to the site constraints and density of these developments, Type G loading is often internalized within the building’s footprint. The outcome? A truck’s manoeuvring effectively consumes the ground floor at the expense of retail space and street-level activity.
They go on to analyze what would happen if you took a typical Toronto main street and then intensified it with buildings requiring Type-G loading. The result, for a particular stretch of Dundas Street between Dufferin and Brock, was that you'd end up losing somewhere around 44 storefronts just to accommodate all of this loading.
Here's their diagram showing the Type-G loading areas in blue:
At a high level, these are areas that fall within an approximately 500-800 meter radius of transit stations, and would therefore be less than a 10-minute walk for most people. It's land that is best suited to transit-oriented development and that would strengthen any new/existing transit investments. For example, if you have an existing station that is underperforming from a ridership standpoint, the best solution is more density within its immediate catchment area.
Because of this, Ontario's Provincial Planning Statement prescribes the following minimum density targets for MTSAs:
200 residents and jobs per hectare for subways
160 residents and jobs per hectare for light rail or bus rapid transit
150 residents and jobs per hectare for commuter or regional rail
And to satisfy these requirements, cities need to demonstrate how they have planned for these minimum targets.
PMTSAs are a subset of MTSAs and come with some additional features, such as minimum unit counts and/or floor space indexes (floor area ratios). These are also the only transit areas where cities have the option of enabling Inclusionary Zoning, which is something they may do when the market rents in an area are high enough that the subsidies required to build affordable housing can be shifted onto the tenants paying market rents. (My views on inclusionary zoning can be found, here.)
Over the coming weeks, everyone in the industry is going to be analyzing the implications of this new approval. Overland (which is a legal firm that we work with) just posted on their blog that their review is underway and that they'll be posting something shortly. But in the meantime, I'd like to say that this is meaningful progress (and one that has been a longtime coming).
It acknowledges the important link between land use planning and mobility, and it better aligns our policies to support a post-car city. Of course, in many ways, this is an obvious thing to do. I started this post by calling it a fundamental principle of city building. But city planning happens slowly and incrementally. If you're following along, you'll see that Toronto is in fact growing up as a big, bad global city.
New developments are often criticized for how they perform at the ground floor. But a big part of this has to do with all of the back-of-house services and other requirements that they need to accommodate. Type-G loading is a big one and it's simply not feasible on smaller projects. Projects between 31-60 homes can apply for an exception, but I think this flexibility should already be built in.
Beyond increasing the unit trigger, what else could we do? Well, the obvious ones are (1) make the trucks smaller and more nimble and (2) centralize garbage collection. Our approach to garbage collection is decentralized. It is collected from every house and every building. But there is the option to cluster the pickups, which is what many European cities do.
Here's Barcelona via Google Street View. Note the bins.
Admittedly, this isn't nearly as convenient as having a truck come right to your door or building, and it's not the most attractive way to decorate a street. So I'm inclined to start with option one. And for that, there are cities like Tokyo we can look to. Tokyo is famous for its strict garbage collection rules and for its smaller, cuter trucks. Here's a comparison to North American trucks via ChatGPT (meaning, I can't be held liable for any inaccuracies in this chart):
We aren't quite Tokyo. Few cities are. But surely there are ways we can be just as functional and take up a lot less space. This would not only benefit our main streets, but also improve the overall viability of infill housing.
