Back in 2016, the New York Times published an article where it cited that at least 40% of the buildings in Manhattan could not be built today because they don't conform to the city's zoning code for one or more reasons. These reasons might include too much density (FSI / FAR), too many units, inadequate setback requirements, or something else.

This is a tricky number to estimate as most cities don't track it, but I asked Gemini and Claude to try for Toronto, and they returned 70-80% and 45-55%, respectively. Claude's estimate seems to be lower because it assumed that all of the subdivided single-family houses are now legal because of the new multiplex permissions.

I don't know about that, but the point is that there's a meaningful, non-zero quantity of buildings in our cities that we decided to make illegal, and generally difficult, or impossible to build again. The thing that I'm most interested in dissecting is: why?

Here's one way to look at it. My follow-up question to both AI models was: What percentage of buildings within a Heritage Conservation District would you say are illegal to build in Toronto today? And both models agreed that the number is 90%+, and probably very close to 100%.

Heritage Conservation Districts are a way of saying "these buildings and this urbanism is so good, that it's worth preserving through extra layers of planning protection." But at the same time, our other policies say, "you shall never build anything like this ever again." It's incoherent.

A more coherent approach might be to call them Heritage Renewal Districts where we instead codify the following: "this district is now illegal based on our current planning rules and so the objective is to tear it all down and replace it with new, approved buildings." Sounds like blasphemy, doesn't it? So then why block more of it?

If it's worth conserving, then it's worth building more of. What ought to be obvious is that we need more rather than less planning flexibility, and we need to legalize the things that have been proven to work, like traditional fine-grained patterns of city-building.

Cover photo by Ayman Hallak on Unsplash

Toronto, by and large, does not like car-free urban streets. I mean, we have very few of them. Let's try and name them. The most notable would be the Distillery District. Next to this would perhaps be the intersection of Gould Street & Victoria Street on TMU's campus. Then there's Willcocks Commons at the University of Toronto, though it's not the prettiest.

After this, I can only think of small, unremarkable or temporary ones. I'm not counting seasonal closures. Technically, the Toronto Islands are the largest car-free community in North America, but I wouldn't call this urban. So I'm now at a loss. If I've missed any noteworthy ones, I would be happy to be corrected.

This concise list makes the recently revealed masterplan for the island formerly known as Villiers — now called Ookwemin Minising (or OM) — all the more exciting. The 16-block plan now includes a 760-metre-long, fully pedestrianized public space called Centre Commons. It runs east-west in the site plan below, and is intersected by a north-south street called The Sandbar Trail.

As designed, Centre Commons is expected to be the longest car-free street in the city and look something like this:

This is the space in between the buildings. Equally important is the fact that the new masterplan unlocks a 27% increase in finer-grained density, without compromising on the quality or quantity of public space on the island. This is a major improvement over the previous masterplan, which had all the hallmarks of bland pseudo-urbanism. Meaning, it was supposed to be urban, but it wasn't actually.

I love the above massing diagram because it feels like a real, organic city, as opposed to just a series of repeating towers on podiums. It has a variety of scales and a more fine-grained urban pattern. This, as we have talked about, is notoriously difficult to achieve in new master-planned communities. But it is possible: loop transit through the island, lower the parking requirements, and give developers the freedom to build.

The design team includes SLA of Copenhagen (landscape architects), Trophic (Indigenous-owned landscape architects), GHD (prime consultant and technical lead) and Allies and Morrison of London (architectural lead). And when built out, OM is expected to support approximately 12,000 new homes (including 3,000 affordable homes) and 2,900 new jobs.

I say we build it.

Cover photo by Allies and Morrison

Aerial image from Waterfront Toronto

Centre Commons rendering by Norm Li via SLA

Area plan and massing diagram by SLA

One generalized truism is that European cities are walkable and transit-supportive, and North American cities are not. This is not universally true, but it's often thought to be directionally true. However, a recent paper called "Car Dependency in Urban Accessibility" reveals that this may not be as true as we think.

The study introduces something called a Car Dependency Index (or CDI). What it effectively does is compare accessibility to jobs and services within a city by car versus public transit. They did this for 18 European and North American cities, and here's what they found:

A positive score (red on the map) means that a car can access more opportunities than public transportation, and a negative score (blue on the map) means the opposite. What's not surprising is how car-dependent the outskirts of most cities are, including European cities. Car dependency was high in over 70% of the urban territories that they analyzed.

What is more surprising to me is that most cities don't have much, if any, blue. The best-case scenario seems to be a lot of white (which represents accessibility parity between cars and public transit). Hmm. Does Manhattan really not have any blue? The glaring exception is Paris and, to a lesser extent, Zurich, though keep in mind these are only city proper boundaries.

Another finding is that car dependency remains a primary driver of car ownership, even when accounting for income. What this means is that if you took two people with the exact same income, one living in transit-rich Paris and the other living in the suburbs of Rome, the person in Rome is much more likely to own a car.

Once again, this supports the obvious fact that if we design cities so that they're inconvenient to navigate without a car, well, then more people will get cars. It's not easy to build a transit network that can compete. Individual lines won't do it. The key word is "network." And you need the right land-use policies to support it.

Cover photo by Alessio Ferretti on Unsplash

Charts from "Car Dependency in Urban Accessibility."