Yesterday afternoon and evening was a series of interesting discussions about city building in Toronto. First, I met with Jeff Ranson of Northcrest Developments for a tour of YZD. This is the 370-acre former Downsview Airport lands that is now the biggest urban redevelopment project in North America.
The tour also involved the two of us e-scootering around the property, which was timely given yesterday's post about not hating on them so much. Jeff is up next on Globizen's Global City Builder series, so stay tuned for that.
After that I was on Ben Myers' Toronto Under Construction podcast. After 80+ episodes, he finally invited me to join (wink wink). It was a great discussion with Rob Spanier of the Spanier Group and Ilana Altman of The Bentway. When the link comes out, I'll be sure to share it on the blog.
But one of the common threads across both discussions, that I'm now thinking about, is about how city builders can better provision for flexibility in new urban projects. Flexibility is an important feature because cities need to be able to grow and adapt over time.
Consider some of the older main streets in Toronto where it's very clear that the shop or restaurant you're in used to be someone's home that has now been converted. This is a very good outcome. It's the city iterating.
But this isn't always possible with newer developments. Condominium corporations, land use restrictions, and a variety of other factors can make this largely impossible. It's for this reason that I'm always drawn to things like live/work suites. They already contemplate a greater degree of flexibility.
Two specific examples that come to mind are the live/work suites fronting onto Fort York Boulevard (in CityPlace), which have over time become more retail oriented, and loft buildings like 90 Sumach Street, which is known for housing a lot of creative professionals.
Cities are at their best when they are able to change and adapt. So I think it behooves us to spend more time thinking about how we can encourage greater flexibility through different design approaches, flexible land use permissions, legal carveouts, and whatever else might be necessary to fully unlock the potential of our cities.
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.
I like and agree with this tweet: "You can have bad urbanism with good architecture, and good urbanism with bad architecture." The two provided examples of this are (1) Brasilia and (2) what appears to be some random little street in Japan.
Brasilia is the capital of Brazil. It's a masterplanned city designed by Lúcio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer and Joaquim Cardozo in the 1950s. And it was all part of a plan to move the capital from Rio de Janeiro to a more central location in the middle of the country.
The result is some incredible architecture by Oscar Niemeyer that, for me, is emblematic of the country. Brazil was one of the first countries outside of Europe to adopt modern architecture and it's precisely for this reason that Brasilia is high on my list of places to visit. (Rio is also one of my favorite cities.)
But whenever I tell a Brazilian that I want to visit the city, the usual response is, “Why?” I then have to explain that it’s because of Niemeyer and the architecture, and then they say, “Oh, okay, that makes sense. But besides the architecture, there isn’t much else to see or do there.”
Part of the reason for this could be because the city has objectively bad urbanism. When you look at it in plan view, the layout of the city resembles a plane or bird in flight, and that is, I guess, symbolically cool when you view it on Google Maps. But on the ground, cities are not at their best when they're designed around abstract symbols.
They're at their best when they're designed around people. And this is what example number two does well. The architecture is ugly and nondescript, but the street is narrow, the road is shared, and the buildings contain a mix of fine-grained uses.
It's a dead simple approach, but it works — really well. It's good urbanism.
Cover photo by Thandy Yung on Unsplash
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.
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