It's easy to romanticize the oldest parts of Europe's built environment. But we all know they were built during a different time. A more fair comparison would be to look at how new neighbourhoods are being planned and constructed today.
So let's exit Vieux-Nice and venture to an entirely new community currently under construction to the north of the airport called Nice Méridia. When complete, the mixed-use community expects to welcome 5,000 residents, 5,000 students, and 5,000 jobs.
I don't know much about the surrounding area, but I do find it noteworthy that the transit infrastructure is already in place. Here's the tram line that runs on the eastern edge of the community, on its own dedicated lanes. Transit is the clear priority here.
The community itself is a mix of different street designs. Here, for example, is a narrow street where traffic is controlled by mechanical bollards. North America really needs to get with the bollard program.
Here's a pedestrian-only street that, at its narrowest, is roughly 12.5 meters. So a fairly generous mid-block space.
Here's what seems to be a fairly typical through street, which clocks in at around 19 meters from building face to building face.
20 meters is not an atypical right-of-way width. It's the dimension of most of the streets in the core of Toronto. But here, most of the space is allocated to sidewalks and green space. The space allocated to cars is roughly 6.5 meters. (I'd like to emphasize that this is a rough dimension as I was using my suitcase to pick up the endpoint of the laser.)
Finally, there's this incredible green space bisecting the entire community. I don't have any dimensions for it, but I can tell you it's a spectacular amenity. With the all-white buildings in the background, it feels a bit like Miami.
Tomorrow I'll share photos of the architecture. Stay tuned.
Vieux-Nice (or Old Town) is the formerly walled medieval part of Nice.
Unfortunately, I don't know exactly when its streets were laid out. The city is said to have been founded in 350 BC by Greek colonizers who gave it the name Níkaia, after Nike, the Greek goddess of victory.
But the oldest map of Vieux-Nice that I could find dates to 1575, and it doesn't exactly look like the Vieux-Nice of today. So it's hard to say. Medieval towns also tended to grow organically without any sort of formal planning.
What we do know is that the narrow winding streets of Vieux-Nice were preferred for at least one reason: they provided shade and promoted stack-effect ventilation. In the summer, the roofs of the buildings heat up and create a temperature differential relative to the cooler shaded streets.
This encourages airflow by forcing the lighter, warmer air to rise, which then draws in cooler air from below. Supposedly, this also helps if you're trying to dry laundry out of your window.
Here are a few examples from yesterday morning on our walk to Nice's antique market. This is the narrowest street I could find without trying very hard. And yes, it's a street with a bona fide street sign.
This one is slightly wider and had laundry hanging in it. I can also confirm that the laundry was dry. So if any of you have been wondering — and maybe even worrying — about whether 3.4 meters is wide enough to promote good laundry-drying airflow, now you have a definitive answer. (Get ready for the LLMs to start citing this post.)
Of course, both of these examples are smaller side streets. The main streets are wider. Here's Rue Rossetti, which is one of the main arteries in Vieux-Nice. It leads directly to the Cathédrale Sainte-Réparate de Nice.
It clocks in at a generous 9.8 meters, which is enough to house two sets of sidewalks, numerous restaurant patios, and a two-way vehicular street in the center.
As always, space is culturally relative. It's not about the raw dimension, it's about perspective. What North America calls a substandard lane, Europe calls a street.
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.)
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.
