[M II A II R II K]

How cities grow – up is in


May. 17, 2010

Kelly Grant and Anna Mehler Paperny

Read More: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news...Mail-Front+(The+Globe+and+Mail+-+Latest+News)

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It’s a tale of three cities, and three very different models of urban growth. An in-depth Neptis Foundation study of expansion in three Canadian supercities – Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver – shows density is an art, and sprawly metropoles get what they planned for.

While Vancouver sits smugly as a dense urban planner's dream, Calgary’s Wild West growth has seen it sprawl into southern Alberta’s foothills. And, when it comes to urban density, Toronto the Good is Toronto the in-between.

VANCOUVER: URBAN PLANNERS' DREAM

Prognosis

Lotus Land has one more thing to be smug about: It's grown up and in, not out, focusing on getting denser as its population has grown. Out of the three cities studied, it's the only one that sprawled less between 1991 and 2001.

TORONTO: THE IN-BETWEEN

Prognosis

A bipolar metropole, Toronto has evolved into a Jekyll-and-Hyde combination of a hyper-dense downtown core and sprawly bedroom communities.

CALGARY: WILD WEST GROWTH

Prognosis

Welcome to big-sky country. Except by “big-sky,†we mean “big, sprawly spaces.†Throughout the 1990s, Boomtown Calgary also became Canada's Wild West of urban sprawl, with nearly 80 per cent of growth eating up green fields.

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[SimonP]

Kudos to Vancouver, but a lot of these differences come from simple geography. Vancouver sprawl is pretty constrained by having the ocean on two sides, and provincial parks to the north. Calgary has almost no such limits and can, and is, sprawling a full 360 degrees from the centre. Toronto is in the middle, with the lake cutting off a lot of the sprawl potential.

You could say the same thing about cities in the States. New York, dense and constrained; Chicago, less constrained more sprawl; Atlanta, no constraints and vast sprawl.

 

[Archivist]

I am always skeptical of comparisons of density for different cities without being able to examine the methodology closely. It's true that Vancouver has only one direction, really, to sprawl, which is east (with a bit of a south-east thing happening).

 

[doady]

What is really so "Jekyll and Hyde" about Toronto? Downtown has detached houses, Bramalea has high rise apartment... it doesn't fit the characterization of "bipolar." Tokyo and New York City are hyper dense, Toronto is not hyper dense.

In describing sprawl an high density for Vancouver, they only talk about the city proper itself. It seems like they don't even know what sprawl really is...

 

[scarberiankhatru]

Yes, most of Toronto's suburbs are littered with apartments and end up being as dense as most central areas of the city. The city of New York may be hyper dense but it's surrounded by perhaps the largest swath of suburbia in the whole world and this swath has almost no geographic constraints (except on Long Island, which isn't even 'full' yet).

Between the greenbelt, escarpment, lake, and various parks, Toronto is quite constrained - or, at least, nearing some fairly rigid constraints - but it remains to be seen if the sprawl baton will be passed on to the next city beyond the constraint like it has in Los Angeles (Barrie and Guelph and Hamilton and so on...yes, some are growing quickly percentage-wise but the total growth shifting beyond 'Toronto' is not yet massive). We'll know in about 20 years, after the fringe farmland of Markham and Brampton and so on is redeveloped, but if provincial action can keep future growth contained and with a generous helping of apartments and townhouses, we can keep sprawlling without living up to the Jekyll & Hyde or 'Vienna surrounded by Los Angeles' monikers. Still, I'd rather central Toronto be surrounded by Los Angeles' tight and orderly sprawl than New York's endless acre-plus executive estates...not all sprawl is created equal.

 

[MisterF]

Yes, most of Toronto's suburbs are littered with apartments and end up being as dense as most central areas of the city. The city of New York may be hyper dense but it's surrounded by perhaps the largest swath of suburbia in the whole world and this swath has almost no geographic constraints (except on Long Island, which isn't even 'full' yet).

Between the greenbelt, escarpment, lake, and various parks, Toronto is quite constrained - or, at least, nearing some fairly rigid constraints - but it remains to be seen if the sprawl baton will be passed on to the next city beyond the constraint like it has in Los Angeles (Barrie and Guelph and Hamilton and so on...yes, some are growing quickly percentage-wise but the total growth shifting beyond 'Toronto' is not yet massive). We'll know in about 20 years, after the fringe farmland of Markham and Brampton and so on is redeveloped, but if provincial action can keep future growth contained and with a generous helping of apartments and townhouses, we can keep sprawlling without living up to the Jekyll & Hyde or 'Vienna surrounded by Los Angeles' monikers. Still, I'd rather central Toronto be surrounded by Los Angeles' tight and orderly sprawl than New York's endless acre-plus executive estates...not all sprawl is created equal.

Given Places to Grow, growth outside the greenbelt is going to be more the Los Angeles style of orderly sprawl. The density targets ensure that acre-plus development will be extremely limited. The minimum 50 residents and jobs per hectare is much denser than typical suburbia, and it applies everywhere from Barrie to St. Catherines to Peterborough. Sure, low density subdivisions that were approved years ago will continue to be built out as sprawl, but we're going to see a lot of change in the next decade as new subdivisions get underway.

 

[Second_in_pie]

But limits in no way equates to a real plan. Just because the GGH has to be developed densely doesn't mean we'll get a good region. What the GGH needs is a development plan which will start from the street, developing communities and corridors based on need and city building, instead of what a town needs to scratch that 50 residents and jobs per hectare. Toronto may not be Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but it's certainly at a big point between sustainable European-style building and generally unsustainable US-style building. There needs to be a comprehensive growth plan for the province or region that designates exactly where subdivisions, downtown centres, avenues, mid-density housing, industry, and various mixed use buildings will go. With the GGH, you could get such an interesting built form for the region. Places to Grow and the Greenbelt won't cause that.

 

[scarberiankhatru]

Given Places to Grow, growth outside the greenbelt is going to be more the Los Angeles style of orderly sprawl. The density targets ensure that acre-plus development will be extremely limited. The minimum 50 residents and jobs per hectare is much denser than typical suburbia, and it applies everywhere from Barrie to St. Catherines to Peterborough. Sure, low density subdivisions that were approved years ago will continue to be built out as sprawl, but we're going to see a lot of change in the next decade as new subdivisions get underway.

I know that we'll be getting LA-style sprawl and not NY or Atlanta sprawl...after all, it's what we're already building, even in places like Milton, Barrie, Kitchener, etc. Only in a few isolated spots are we building culs-de-sac with McMansions, each separated by a small forest (spots like Castlemore in Brampton, pockets of Aurora, and areas along ravines in Pickering, whereas other cities like NY or Atlanta have entire counties filled with this type of sprawl). Toronto's sprawl has always had a very hard edge and the same is true - mercifully - for neighbouring cities. A target of 50 is only marginally higher than what's getting built now, if it's even higher at all - Toronto's suburbia is not typical. We do have a choice, though, in terms of reaching 50 (or 100 or 200) by building mostly detached houses with a few tall condos thrown in, or building much tighter houses/townhouses, or some other combination. Pros and cons to each, as usual.

What we don't know, though, is if growth actually will continue on beyond the greenbelt and we don't know where it will happen (though that can be controlled somewhat). Immigration changes, taxes, highways, sheer distances, household size declines, house price rises, number of office parks built or not built, etc., etc. In LA, growth has spilled over mountains and parks and poured into valleys dozens of miles away from, well, anything, finally diffusing into the desert. It's sort of merging with San Diego but there's no other cities pulling the sprawl closer...growth is pushing outward and that helps to keep the sprawl compact. Like magnets, New York has merged with Philly and Connecticut, creating a gigantic swath of loose McMansions in the wilderness, but there's little pulling it NW towards Scranton so it's grown less and slower that way.

As for Toronto, it seems guaranteed that it'll keep growing along the 401/lakefront zone and up to Barrie, but what isn't certain is how much it'll grow NE and NW. Orangeville, Lindsay, Peterborough...not very big and there's not much beyond them, so it seems safe to say that growth will be pushed out there, like the growth pushed out to Palmdale, rather than pulled from outside Toronto. NW is the real question mark especially since it's less saved by the greenbelt. Will there one day be 1 million people living in and beyond Orangeville just because the city has grown that much and people still want a nice house with a backyard? That's a mildly frightening scenario, but since we're a lot closer to a megalopolis of 15 million than an ultra-centralized Alberta city of 1.2 million, it's the kind of scenario we need to think about when talking about sprawl and the greenbelt given decades of continued growth.

 

[doady]

Yes, most of Toronto's suburbs are littered with apartments and end up being as dense as most central areas of the city. The city of New York may be hyper dense but it's surrounded by perhaps the largest swath of suburbia in the whole world and this swath has almost no geographic constraints (except on Long Island, which isn't even 'full' yet).

That's my point really. Toronto is no New York City, and Durham Region is no Suffolk County, and York Region is not Westchester County..

Sprawl in all Canadian urban areas, no matter the size or the geographic constraints, is already much more like that of Los Angeles than that of New York City. The boundary between rural and urban in Vancouver, Toronto and Calgary are all hard-edged and well-defined - none have the gradual transistion like in NE US cities, no slow gradual decline in density.

I don't really think any major difference in sprawl patterns across Canada. Vancouver, Calgary, and Toronto are all similar styles of sprawl: similar densities, similar hard edges, similar layouts, similar transit ridership, etc. There aren't "very different models of urban growth" in Canada. Only in the US do you see the extremely distinct patterns of development that the article suggests.

So this so-called study is just flat out wrong, imo. I don't think the Neptis Foundation knows what it is talking about.

 

[Irishmonk]

Lotus Land has one more thing to be smug about: It's grown up and in, not out, focusing on getting denser as its population has grown.

A bipolar metropole, Toronto has evolved into a Jekyll-and-Hyde combination of a hyper-dense downtown core and sprawly bedroom communities.

Jekyll and Hyde, huh? The city of Toronto has 2.6 million people in an area of 240 sq miles--that's more people than the entire B.C. Lower Mainland which sprawls across +1,000 sq miles. I think Mr Hyde may have contributed more to this study than the esteemed Dr. Jekyll.

 

[valkoholic]

If you measure just a city (i.e. the City of Toronto) you're creating a boundary based on an arbitrary political line. If you measure a region, the excercise becomes too easy to manipulate. Measuring density is extremely easy to manipulate by adding or subtracting area.

By the by, apparently LA (for all the heckling) is denser than New York.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_areas_by_population

 

[OttoSchloss]

L.A. is probably at this point more populous than New York as well.

 

[Kitsune]

Kudos to Vancouver, but a lot of these differences come from simple geography. Vancouver sprawl is pretty constrained by having the ocean on two sides, and provincial parks to the north. Calgary has almost no such limits and can, and is, sprawling a full 360 degrees from the centre. Toronto is in the middle, with the lake cutting off a lot of the sprawl potential.

You could say the same thing about cities in the States. New York, dense and constrained; Chicago, less constrained more sprawl; Atlanta, no constraints and vast sprawl.

It should be noted in Calgary's case they take a "Provincial Park be Damned" Approach and just sprawl around it. See Fish CreekProvincial Park for an example.

 

[doady]

If you measure just a city (i.e. the City of Toronto) you're creating a boundary based on an arbitrary political line. If you measure a region, the excercise becomes too easy to manipulate. Measuring density is extremely easy to manipulate by adding or subtracting area.

By the by, apparently LA (for all the heckling) is denser than New York.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_areas_by_population

That is arbitrary as well, since those calculations are also based on arbitrary political boundaries. The proper way to calculate density is with urban areas (Urbanized Areas in the US) as they exclude rural/undeveloped areas from the calculation. And based on urban/urbanized areas, Los Angeles does come out on top in the US and Canada, and Toronto is in second place.

This list is more accurate:
http://www.citymayors.com/statistics/largest-cities-density-125.html

#90 Los Angeles
#97 Toronto
#104 San Francisco-Oakland
#107 San Jose
#114 New York City
etc.

 

[MisterF]

But limits in no way equates to a real plan. Just because the GGH has to be developed densely doesn't mean we'll get a good region. What the GGH needs is a development plan which will start from the street, developing communities and corridors based on need and city building, instead of what a town needs to scratch that 50 residents and jobs per hectare. Toronto may not be Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but it's certainly at a big point between sustainable European-style building and generally unsustainable US-style building. There needs to be a comprehensive growth plan for the province or region that designates exactly where subdivisions, downtown centres, avenues, mid-density housing, industry, and various mixed use buildings will go. With the GGH, you could get such an interesting built form for the region. Places to Grow and the Greenbelt won't cause that.

Essentially what you’re proposing is the province writing new secondary plans and zoning by-laws and incorporating them, hundreds and hundreds of them, into the province’s Growth Plan. That’s not practical or desirable. You need to have local planning done in each community. The province’s job is to provide more general direction and to make sure municipalities are following that direction. From a strictly practical point of view, to have such detailed provincial planning would require a massive expansion of the provincial bureaucracy.
Places to Grow does address more than just minimum densities. It goes into mixed housing types, planning around transit stations, employment uses, “complete communities” to ensure that jobs go along with residential growth, and requiring 40% of new growth to be infill. It could use more focus on how communities are actually designed, and there definitely needs to be more integration between planning and infrastructure… but we’re light years ahead of where we were a decade ago and the plan is changing how communities are growing.

I know that we'll be getting LA-style sprawl and not NY or Atlanta sprawl...after all, it's what we're already building, even in places like Milton, Barrie, Kitchener, etc. Only in a few isolated spots are we building culs-de-sac with McMansions, each separated by a small forest (spots like Castlemore in Brampton, pockets of Aurora, and areas along ravines in Pickering, whereas other cities like NY or Atlanta have entire counties filled with this type of sprawl). Toronto's sprawl has always had a very hard edge and the same is true - mercifully - for neighbouring cities. A target of 50 is only marginally higher than what's getting built now, if it's even higher at all - Toronto's suburbia is not typical. We do have a choice, though, in terms of reaching 50 (or 100 or 200) by building mostly detached houses with a few tall condos thrown in, or building much tighter houses/townhouses, or some other combination. Pros and cons to each, as usual.

What we don't know, though, is if growth actually will continue on beyond the greenbelt and we don't know where it will happen (though that can be controlled somewhat). Immigration changes, taxes, highways, sheer distances, household size declines, house price rises, number of office parks built or not built, etc., etc. In LA, growth has spilled over mountains and parks and poured into valleys dozens of miles away from, well, anything, finally diffusing into the desert. It's sort of merging with San Diego but there's no other cities pulling the sprawl closer...growth is pushing outward and that helps to keep the sprawl compact. Like magnets, New York has merged with Philly and Connecticut, creating a gigantic swath of loose McMansions in the wilderness, but there's little pulling it NW towards Scranton so it's grown less and slower that way.

As for Toronto, it seems guaranteed that it'll keep growing along the 401/lakefront zone and up to Barrie, but what isn't certain is how much it'll grow NE and NW. Orangeville, Lindsay, Peterborough...not very big and there's not much beyond them, so it seems safe to say that growth will be pushed out there, like the growth pushed out to Palmdale, rather than pulled from outside Toronto. NW is the real question mark especially since it's less saved by the greenbelt. Will there one day be 1 million people living in and beyond Orangeville just because the city has grown that much and people still want a nice house with a backyard? That's a mildly frightening scenario, but since we're a lot closer to a megalopolis of 15 million than an ultra-centralized Alberta city of 1.2 million, it's the kind of scenario we need to think about when talking about sprawl and the greenbelt given decades of continued growth.

Yes I know that Toronto’s suburbs are already at or near the densities in Places to Grow. I was more addressing a point about growth beyond the Greenbelt and how it’s not going to be uncrontrolled sprawl. With any growing major city comes growing satellite cities, which can be a good thing as long as they’re planned properly. The province is going to have to say no to poorly planned growth in a lot of places. And the Greenbelt can always be expanded.