Last night when I was thumbing through Twitter before bed, I came across this blog post describing Vancouver’s land use types. The blog itself is called Mountain Doodles, but it’s not exactly clear who the author is. 

In any event, what she/he did was analyze Vancouver’s land use dataset to come up with a series of charts that break down the percentage of each type: residential single detached, residential low-rise apartment, commercial, green space, and so on.

Here’s what the chart looks like for Metro Vancouver:

And here’s what it looks like for just the City of Vancouver, proper:

When you look at the metro area, green / open space dominates. Although, the author states that, given the dataset, there could be a small overstatement of green space. There’s also the question of where the overall boundary was drawn.

When you look at only the City of Vancouver, it’s land for residential housing (detached and duplex) and roads that dominate, with green / open space coming in a somewhat distant third.

Of course, this does not speak to the intensity in which any of the above land might be used, such as the apartment lands (i.e., the third dimension). But from a two-dimensional perspective, you certainly get a sense of what we – for better or for worse – have chosen to privilege.

When I was a kid growing up in the suburbs of Toronto, I never played in the backyard. I played in the streets. That’s where all the kids came together.

We would play baseball in somebody’s driveway, using one of the garage door “squares” as the strike zone. We would play football on corner lots, where it was tackle on the grass and “two-hand touch” on the street. And we would wax our curbs so that we could skateboard them.

None of these spaces were ever really intended for baseball, football, or skateboarding, but we kids repurposed them.

As people, including families, continue to move into urban centers around the world, I have no doubt that the next generation of children will once again repurpose spaces for play. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have work to do when it comes to properly preparing our communities for people of all shapes and sizes.

One of the most interesting design challenges facing us today has to do with our towers.

Architects have long been obsessed with the idea of vertical villages. Le Corbusier’s Unité d'habitation in Marseille had two shopping streets embedded within the tower that were intended to act as public spines. I don’t know how well they did, but it was a highly progressive idea for the time.

Following on this idea, I was recently watching a TED talk with architect Ole Scheeren (thanks Mariane) and I was fascinated by his obsession with breaking down the raw verticality of towers.

His belief was that, yes, cities are and will continue to become more dense through tall buildings, but that most towers isolate rather than connect people. His work strives to do the opposite.

And this one of the big trends that I think we will see more of in our cites. We will see new forms of urban connectedness and a blurring of private, public, and semi-public spaces. Screw Euclidean zoning.

On that note, I am reminded that I owe the ATC community a post on my predictions for 2016. I hope to get that out shortly.

Diagram via Büro Ole Scheeren

Here in Toronto there’s a push for more family-sized apartments. That’s what the planners want to hear.

Because the city has been trying to encourage developers to build more of them for years, but the challenge has always been that they didn’t sell or that they took a long time to sell. The market wasn’t ready.

But as I discussed earlier this week, that is starting to change. I think Toronto is reaching a tipping point where low-rise housing has simply become too expensive and people are starting to look to alternatives, mostly at the mid-rise scale.

It’s interesting though that something of the opposite appears to be happening in New York. I don’t know enough about the New York new construction market to really comment on overall unit mixes and sizes, but there definitely seems to be a push to create more affordable micro-units.

Curbed published this last October:

“…a report currently under public review, called Zoning for Quality and Affordability, recommends relaxing density caps and eliminating the 400-square-foot minimum for studio apartments, thereby creating more housing for single people. Almost 50 percent of the city’s population is estimated to be single, but only seven percent of the housing stock is studios.”

And just recently, New York completed its first all-micro-unit apartment building called Carmel Place. Rents start at $2,650 per month for a 265 square foot apartment. 

As a point of reference, that works out to be $10 per square foot per month and more than 3x the highest rents you could reasonably achieve in the more desirable areas of Toronto, today.

The model suite is 302 square feet and looks like this:

All of the above photos are via Curbed.