Bruno Carvalho has just published a new book that is right in the wheelhouse of this blog. It's called The Invention of the Future: A History of Cities in the Modern World.
The book starts in the mid-18th century with cities like Lisbon, Paris, and London. However, more than being just a history of cities, it is (from what I've read) the story of how city builders throughout history have tried to predict and create the future, only to often get it wrong.
In the words of Carvalho (via CityLab): "The constant of urbanization is change, so we have to always imagine our solutions as being contingent."
The same is, of course, true today. For example, building tunnels for Tesla cars may seem like a clever and futuristic solution to urban traffic congestion, except that it's hard to imagine it actually working (also via CityLab):
"One of the values of history is to give us a sharper sense of what’s new in the present. Many people imagine solutions that to them represent the great rupture, but that’s not always the case. The tunnels are a good example; they bring together the problems of cars having very low carrying capacity and subways being very hard to build. That doesn’t strike me as a very futuristic approach to mobility, but rather one that just hasn’t learned enough about the past."
I now have Carvalho's book on my reading list, and I thought I would share it here in case some of you would like to do the same.
Cover photo by Michiel Annaert on Unsplash
I'm a big fan of walking. I like it for the health benefits, the freedom to explore, and the simple luxury of being able to walk to things. In fact, it's an important housing prerequisite for me: can I walk to stuff?
But as we often talk about on this blog, the ability to do this depends largely on the prevailing land use patterns, the overall built environment, and, to a great extent, when a neighborhood was built.
It is commonly argued that the "best" neighborhoods were all built before the widespread use of the car, and there's a lot of truth to this. (This makes me wonder if self-driving cars will eventually create a similar "pre and post" divide in our built environment.)
However, not everyone sees it this way. I just read an article about how residents in the suburbs of Minneapolis-St. Paul are vehemently opposed to the construction of sidewalks in areas where there are currently none.
Perhaps I haven't been paying enough attention to the suburban sidewalk wars, but this is the first time I've seen this level of opposition. Some people view sidewalks as a feature, and some people view them as a bug. Clearly, there are residents in the Twin Cities who view them as the latter.
Why? Because they interrupt large front lawns:
“I chose my home with the nice big lawn out front,” Edina resident Melissa Cohen told the mayor and City Council at a Dec. 8 hearing about proposed sidewalks for streets in Prospect Knolls. “We are in a quiet neighborhood. This does not require a sidewalk.”
And for some people, they're unsightly:
In 2007, a Golden Valley resident named Charles Upham told the Star Tribune “sidewalk is a four-letter word. U-G-L-Y.”
You could call it a kind of rural ideology, where sidewalks symbolize the opposite: the city. I suppose there are also practical considerations, like the fact that snow removal on sidewalks often becomes the homeowner's responsibility.
But it appears to me that a large part of this opposition stems from wanting to maintain some semblance of pastoral exclusivity, even if we're talking about higher-density suburbs and the opposition is masquerading as an environmental preservationist movement.
On the flip side, there are practical benefits to sidewalks. They give you a safe place to walk. So, what I wonder is to what extent are the people opposing these sidewalks also anti-walkers? Or is it that the traffic flows in these neighborhoods are so low that people simply feel comfortable walking on the street, like here?
Not surprisingly, there's lots of data to support that people who live in neighborhoods with sidewalks are significantly more likely to walk and be active. If you want people to walk more, build sidewalks. If you want people to ride bikes more, build bicycle lanes. And if you want people to drive more, build roads and highways.
This is how this behavioral stuff works. We're not completely independent actors; we're products of our environment.
Cover photo from The Minnesota Star Tribune
Yesterday we spoke about the merits of fine-grained urbanism and why the direct and obvious way to achieve this is to just, you know, encourage more small-scale development. So today, let's talk about some of the specific things that would likely need to happen in order to unlock all of the small and under-utilized sites that today are not being developed at scale.
I'm going to speak from a Toronto perspective and talk specifically about small-scale "apartments," which in today's planning environment are generally buildings with seven or more dwelling units. Under this threshold, we have new terminology like "houseplex." But I'm sure that much of what I raise will translate to other cities and building types.
Here's my working list (I've also added a few items from this Twitter discussion):
As-of-right zoning permissions (the key, though, is that what's as-of-right needs to be economically viable)
No side-yard and front-yard setbacks
No site plan control approval (currently required for projects with 10 or more homes)
No/lower development charges
No parkland dedication fees
No required parking
No required amenity spaces (the city is the amenity)
Curbside garbage collection (as opposed to internalized collection facilities)
Reasonable servicing connection costs (I'm specifically looking at you Toronto Hydro)
No Record of Site Condition, or a streamlined process (Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks approval)
Single egress stair
Flexible elevator sizing
No rental replacement
Predictable financing terms from agencies like CMHC
There's a lot on this list. But there isn't just one thing standing in the way of more fine-grained development. If you think I missed anything (or you just disagree with my line of thinking), feel free to leave a comment below.
What Toronto has demonstrated with its efforts to expand housing options in its neighbourhoods is that, when it makes economic sense to do so, people will actually build small. Today, the market is building single-unit laneway houses, and increasingly, it is building things like fourplexes and sixplexes.
So, what's standing in the way of more 10-, 20-, and 30-unit projects? It's the barriers and hurdles we have erected.