I spent a lot of time in the suburbs over the holidays and it got me thinking.
For all the talk about intensification here in Toronto, adapting our car dependent suburbs to become, well, less car dependent is going to be an enormous challenge. Once you’ve built out an area around the car, it’s almost impossible to go back.
One of the biggest challenges is going to be figuring out how to turn the suburbs from inward to outward. If you think about it, the suburbs are an incredibly inward type of development pattern.
Retail plazas typically have their entrances—not off main streets—but off internal parking lots. And residential areas often have backyards facing the main streets because nobody wants a house fronting on a major thoroughfare. These are the design principles we’ve used to create our suburbs.
But the result is that we’ve created environments that are inhospitable to pedestrians. What enjoyment would you get out of walking along a street where everything has its back turned to you? This is the anthesis of animated street life. And in this case, Margaret Thatcher would probably be right: I would feel like a failure taking the bus.
To compensate for this kind of environment, we’ve made it virtually mandatory to have a car. It’s the only reasonable way to get around. Writer Rebecca Solnit put it best when she said:
“In a sense the car has become a prosthetic, and though prosthetics are usually for injured or missing limbs, the auto-prosthetic is for a conceptually impaired body or a body impaired by the creation of a world that is no longer human in scale.”
And that’s precisely it. We built around the car and not around people. And in doing so, we made ourselves dependent. I don’t know about you, but there’s something liberating about being able to walk to all the things I commonly want—food, money, coffee and so on. But maybe that’s just me.
A few days ago I asked a reader of this blog if there was anything, in particular, that she’d like to see more of on here. She responded by saying that she’d love to learn more about how other cities—outside of Toronto—are managing urbanization, as well as how we shape cities and cities shape us.
Would love to read how other cities are managing the growth of urbanization, how we change cites and they change us @donnelly_b
It’s an interesting and important question because, frankly, the challenges are greater outside of Toronto. One of the stats that often gets cited here in the media is how the Greater Toronto Area gets approximately 100,000 new immigrants every year. This doesn’t include domestic migration though, so I would assume that our total number is even greater.
But if we stick with 100,000 for now, it means the GTA receives about 11.4 new immigrants every hour (100,000 people / 8,765 hours in a year). Lagos, Nigeria, on the other hand, receives between
I came across an interesting op-ed in the New York Times this morning called “What Tech Hasn’t Learned from Urban Planning." It basically talks about how, despite the fact that tech companies are increasingly moving from the suburbs to the city, they haven’t yet figured out how to be urban.
"The tech sector’s embrace of urbanist lingua franca and its enthusiasm to engage with urban problems is awesome, and much welcomed. But these folks need to become better urbanists."
The problem—Allison Arieff argues—is that they create sterile and insular environments. Breakfast, lunch and dinner are served to employees so they don’t need to leave the building. And private social spaces are created just for them.
It strikes me as being terribly ironic that these companies—a great number of which are committed to making the world more open and connected—actually suck at doing that in real life.
I spent a lot of time in the suburbs over the holidays and it got me thinking.
For all the talk about intensification here in Toronto, adapting our car dependent suburbs to become, well, less car dependent is going to be an enormous challenge. Once you’ve built out an area around the car, it’s almost impossible to go back.
One of the biggest challenges is going to be figuring out how to turn the suburbs from inward to outward. If you think about it, the suburbs are an incredibly inward type of development pattern.
Retail plazas typically have their entrances—not off main streets—but off internal parking lots. And residential areas often have backyards facing the main streets because nobody wants a house fronting on a major thoroughfare. These are the design principles we’ve used to create our suburbs.
But the result is that we’ve created environments that are inhospitable to pedestrians. What enjoyment would you get out of walking along a street where everything has its back turned to you? This is the anthesis of animated street life. And in this case, Margaret Thatcher would probably be right: I would feel like a failure taking the bus.
To compensate for this kind of environment, we’ve made it virtually mandatory to have a car. It’s the only reasonable way to get around. Writer Rebecca Solnit put it best when she said:
“In a sense the car has become a prosthetic, and though prosthetics are usually for injured or missing limbs, the auto-prosthetic is for a conceptually impaired body or a body impaired by the creation of a world that is no longer human in scale.”
And that’s precisely it. We built around the car and not around people. And in doing so, we made ourselves dependent. I don’t know about you, but there’s something liberating about being able to walk to all the things I commonly want—food, money, coffee and so on. But maybe that’s just me.
A few days ago I asked a reader of this blog if there was anything, in particular, that she’d like to see more of on here. She responded by saying that she’d love to learn more about how other cities—outside of Toronto—are managing urbanization, as well as how we shape cities and cities shape us.
Would love to read how other cities are managing the growth of urbanization, how we change cites and they change us @donnelly_b
It’s an interesting and important question because, frankly, the challenges are greater outside of Toronto. One of the stats that often gets cited here in the media is how the Greater Toronto Area gets approximately 100,000 new immigrants every year. This doesn’t include domestic migration though, so I would assume that our total number is even greater.
But if we stick with 100,000 for now, it means the GTA receives about 11.4 new immigrants every hour (100,000 people / 8,765 hours in a year). Lagos, Nigeria, on the other hand, receives between
I came across an interesting op-ed in the New York Times this morning called “What Tech Hasn’t Learned from Urban Planning." It basically talks about how, despite the fact that tech companies are increasingly moving from the suburbs to the city, they haven’t yet figured out how to be urban.
"The tech sector’s embrace of urbanist lingua franca and its enthusiasm to engage with urban problems is awesome, and much welcomed. But these folks need to become better urbanists."
The problem—Allison Arieff argues—is that they create sterile and insular environments. Breakfast, lunch and dinner are served to employees so they don’t need to leave the building. And private social spaces are created just for them.
It strikes me as being terribly ironic that these companies—a great number of which are committed to making the world more open and connected—actually suck at doing that in real life.
Brandon Donnelly
Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly.
If you take a look at the complete list of the world’s fastest growing cities (all estimates, of course), you’ll likely notice that the vast majority of the cities are in the developing world. And that’s really the challenge. The world is rapidly urbanizing and becoming the most urban it’s ever been, but the changes are the greatest outside of developed nations. This poses entirely unique challenges.
Of the kinds of cities I’m talking about, I’m most familiar with Dhaka, Bangladesh. In my last year at Penn, I was part of a studio led by KieranTimberlake Architects that focused on water and housing issues in that city. It was a partnership with the University of Dhaka. We spent roughly 2 weeks there and it was an eye opening experience.
Here’s a telling slide from our final presentation:
What we were trying to do with this chart was compare population and per person land value for our development site according to various city types. In other words, we were essentially asking: If we were to build out our proposed site in the same way, as say, Dallas, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, or what is typical for Dhaka, how many people could we fit and what would be the resulting per person land value?
I don’t remember where we got the land value figures from, but we were trying to be cognizant of the fact that every city requires a unique solution. Using the same per person land values in Dhaka as in Dallas would be unimaginable because Dhaka has over 40,000 people per square kilometre (top right on the diagonal line above) and Dallas has under 1,400 per square kilometre (bottom left on the diagonal line above).
The challenges of urbanization in the developing world are profound, particularly in places like Dhaka where most of the city is subject to severe annual floods. By some estimates, 18% of the city’s land area gets flooded every year—talk about adding another layer of city building complexity.
We didn’t solve all of the problems in that studio and we’re not going to do it here, but I do think it’s important to fully understand the problem. One of my favorite books on cities is called “The Endless City." It examines New York, Shanghai, London, Mexico City, Johannesburg and Berlin, and has a ton of great data and diagrams.
Here are a two that outline densities and land use patterns for the above 6 cities (same order starting on the top left):
If you take a look at the complete list of the world’s fastest growing cities (all estimates, of course), you’ll likely notice that the vast majority of the cities are in the developing world. And that’s really the challenge. The world is rapidly urbanizing and becoming the most urban it’s ever been, but the changes are the greatest outside of developed nations. This poses entirely unique challenges.
Of the kinds of cities I’m talking about, I’m most familiar with Dhaka, Bangladesh. In my last year at Penn, I was part of a studio led by KieranTimberlake Architects that focused on water and housing issues in that city. It was a partnership with the University of Dhaka. We spent roughly 2 weeks there and it was an eye opening experience.
Here’s a telling slide from our final presentation:
What we were trying to do with this chart was compare population and per person land value for our development site according to various city types. In other words, we were essentially asking: If we were to build out our proposed site in the same way, as say, Dallas, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, or what is typical for Dhaka, how many people could we fit and what would be the resulting per person land value?
I don’t remember where we got the land value figures from, but we were trying to be cognizant of the fact that every city requires a unique solution. Using the same per person land values in Dhaka as in Dallas would be unimaginable because Dhaka has over 40,000 people per square kilometre (top right on the diagonal line above) and Dallas has under 1,400 per square kilometre (bottom left on the diagonal line above).
The challenges of urbanization in the developing world are profound, particularly in places like Dhaka where most of the city is subject to severe annual floods. By some estimates, 18% of the city’s land area gets flooded every year—talk about adding another layer of city building complexity.
We didn’t solve all of the problems in that studio and we’re not going to do it here, but I do think it’s important to fully understand the problem. One of my favorite books on cities is called “The Endless City." It examines New York, Shanghai, London, Mexico City, Johannesburg and Berlin, and has a ton of great data and diagrams.
Here are a two that outline densities and land use patterns for the above 6 cities (same order starting on the top left):
