Who knows?
But if any of you are attending the Council for Canadian Urbanism Forum in Toronto today, I'm going to be on a panel later this morning discussing this very topic.
I'll let you know what we uncover.
The Azorean adventure is over. But it wouldn't be a trip to Europe without some sort of post about street dimensions.
So here's a primary retail street in downtown Ponta Delgada — 6.7m from building face to building face, or about the size of a standard two-way drive aisle in Toronto.
And here's the narrowest street/lane that I came across on the island. I couldn't find a street name, but it did have utility meters on it, and it was about the size of a residential building corridor.
We also stumbled upon quite the street party in this same area. There's a lot happening in this photo.
I did also manage to find a memory card reader for my camera at a Continente (supermarket) along the way. So make sure you're following Globizen's Instagram page.
Regularly scheduled programming will resume tomorrow.
I came across this tweet the other night showing Toronto's Yonge Street.
Tall buildings now line up along Yonge Street in behind the low-rise commercial storefronts that have lined the street for decades. In this image looking northwest across Yonge at the corner with Wellesley Street by UrbanToronto Forum contributor Lachlan Holmes, the new
In the foreground are small, two-storey main street—type buildings. And behind them are tall buildings. This is very Toronto. What you're seeing here is a condition that occurs all around the city. Though in many ways, it feels counterintuitive. I mean, shouldn't the tallest buildings be right on the main street?
In my opinion, this condition is happening for at least two reasons.
The first is that Toronto's historic main streets tend to have a fine-grained lot fabric, which means they're more challenging to assemble for larger developments. Assemblies are a complex art, and they get exponentially more difficult the more property owners and feuding siblings you add into the mix. So the path of least resistant is larger and chunkier sites.
The second reason has to do with context. We tend to want to preserve the feel of our historic main streets. One Delisle is an example of this. The podium of the tower is scaled to exactly match what was there before — an Art Deco-style facade from the 20s that will return to the site.
However, we didn't have this same constraint on its other elevation (Delisle Avenue) and so we fought not to have your typical podium + setback tower. Instead, we wanted a street level experience that had more presence and urban grandeur.
This, to me, is an important distinction to consider. Are we setting height back because of history and context? Both of which are important. Or are we setting it back because we're pretending to still be a provincial Anglo-Protestant town? Sometimes it seems like it's because of the latter.