[allabootmatt]

So--herewith a question I was thinking about, which might spur some interesting discussion here. Many cities have a distinctive city-ness that informs locals' ideas about how an urban place should function. In the Paris region, new developments (La Defense excepted) follow a basically Haussman-esque model, in southeast England new construction tends to be built out along the lines of outer London (red-brick semi-detached houses, etc). Both of these models work well in their respective contexts.

Which makes me wonder--is there a Toronto urbanism? A way of building and thinking about cities that instinctively makes sense to people in the city and region? I would argue that there is. For me, 'Toronto Urbanism' is best expressed in places like the Annex or Riverdale or the Beaches--compact single-family homes on narrow streets, giving way to 2-4 story commercial strips served by subway or streetcar. These are punctuated with pockets of extreme high-rise density. I would argue it's a pretty distinctive model, and one that almost everybody in Toronto claims to be OK with.

The closest analogue is probably inner Montreal, though it has considerably more triplexes and small apartment buildings mixed in, and almost no ex-downtown clusters of highrises--making it certainly of a somewhat different genus.

This leads, in my mind, to an interesting question: why is so much government-directed planning aimed at a different kind of urbanism? The 'Avenues' plan and the West Don/East Bayfront programmes are certainly laudable from a design perspective, and do draw on internationally accepted best practices. Yet they're trying to create urban spaces with almost no precedent in Canada. How do we know that they will work in our culture/climate?

So, if there is a Toronto Urbanism, can its lessons be applied to these new neighbourhoods? Or is it such a product of specific times and places, and 'Accidental City' happenstance, to be replicated reliably?

I know this contains more questions than answers, but perhaps others can develop the topic further.

 

[TrickyRicky]

I think there really is a unique Toronto urbanism, or rather there is a constantly evolving Toronto urbanism with successive layers of concepts overlapping, overlaying and destroying work from previous eras. I think that some of what we are building today is greatly enhancing the built form and experience of the city. On the other hand much of it, including most of what is considered cutting edge urban planning and architecture today, will be considered highly dated and unfortunate by future generations.

On the brand or type of built form, I think in isolation nothing that we build or was built in Toronto is truly unique. However, it is the combinations and contrasts, acidents of policy and geography, idiosyncrasies and evolution that created a whole experience that is singularly unique to Toronto.

This mass of space was imagined and built by thousands of men and women trying to make a good life for themselves. The style of building was largely inspired by what they saw around them, what was there before and what worked for others. It was shaped to a large degree I think by mundane legal and financial considerations. We often ascribe too much significance in these matters to designers, who are actually providing a service to the enterprising individuals who front the capital, take the risk and imagine the possibility of the human activity that could take place. The lack of residential buildings in the city for instance with say 6-12 units is a direct result of mundane financial, legal and regulatory requirements that make that type of building inefficient to build and operate for an enterprising individual here. Somewhere else in the world the opposite could be true and this type of building could give a builder, owner or operator a strategic advantage.

 

[kettal]

This leads, in my mind, to an interesting question: why is so much government-directed planning aimed at a different kind of urbanism? The 'Avenues' plan and the West Don/East Bayfront programmes are certainly laudable from a design perspective, and do draw on internationally accepted best practices. Yet they're trying to create urban spaces with almost no precedent in Canada. How do we know that they will work in our culture/climate?

The Victorian era of urbanism, unfortunately, is not economically viable today. Sure, it would be great to build streets with small shops who have a large apartment on top, but developers won't even touch building small shops, because the only retailers who will pay pre-construction these days are large-format retailers.

 

[savannahurbanist]

So, if there is a Toronto Urbanism, can its lessons be applied to these new neighbourhoods? Or is it such a product of specific times and places, and 'Accidental City' happenstance, to be replicated reliably?

I know this contains more questions than answers, but perhaps others can develop the topic further.

I'd love to hear some more detail to what you would describe these lessons/principles of Toronto's unique urbanism. It would satisfy my curiousity about this topic from observation of Toronto via Google Streetview. (Sadly, I have yet to visit your city, but I'm enormously intrigued).

 

[wyliepoon]

I would argue that there is. For me, 'Toronto Urbanism' is best expressed in places like the Annex or Riverdale or the Beaches--compact single-family homes on narrow streets, giving way to 2-4 story commercial strips served by subway or streetcar. These are punctuated with pockets of extreme high-rise density. I would argue it's a pretty distinctive model, and one that almost everybody in Toronto claims to be OK with.

The closest analogue is probably inner Montreal, though it has considerably more triplexes and small apartment buildings mixed in, and almost no ex-downtown clusters of highrises--making it certainly of a somewhat different genus.

I agree with you that the "city of neighbourhoods" is the best way to define Toronto's urbanism. Except for the high-rise clusters, Toronto's model resembles that of pre-WWII Detroit or Buffalo, with the housing stock mostly made up of single family homes built on a street grid, with low-rise commercial strips served by streetcars.

This leads, in my mind, to an interesting question: why is so much government-directed planning aimed at a different kind of urbanism? The 'Avenues' plan and the West Don/East Bayfront programmes are certainly laudable from a design perspective, and do draw on internationally accepted best practices. Yet they're trying to create urban spaces with almost no precedent in Canada. How do we know that they will work in our culture/climate?

I think good urban design (like architecture) will work well no matter where you build it, so I don't really care what the "context" is. For example, most of the best urban neighbourhoods in Chinese cities like Shanghai are not the ones built by the Chinese, but rather the ones that were built by Europeans, or inspired by European planning (such as The Bund, the French Concession, and Xintiandi in Shanghai), even though the Chinese are capable of good urban design themselves. I hate to bring this up, but in a time of globalization, one of the things Toronto needs to do to become "world class" is to accept various built forms in various styles, as long as they don't interfere or destroy our current urban fabric (and as long as they don't end up as white elephants). I don't think Torontonians should be barred from enjoying urbanism designed in another country simply because it's not Canadian.

As to the climate issue, it's definitely tough to design urban spaces for the Canadian winter because people prefer staying indoors during the winter. However, the Canadian winter might be an opportunity for Canadian designers to turn generically good urban design into something uniquely Canadian. One example of this is the outdoor water pool that transforms into an ice rink in the winter. This is a feature of urban design that I think is unique to Canada, since almost all decent-sized city in Canada has something like that.

So, if there is a Toronto Urbanism, can its lessons be applied to these new neighbourhoods?

Sure we can. We still build single family housing, but definitely with less architectural detail and not on street grids. Commercial strips are a lot harder to replicate, as kettal points out. Nothing can be built these days with the parking requirements municipalities impose, requirements that make old-style commercial strips impossible to build today.

 

[golodhendil]

As to the climate issue, it's definitely tough to design urban spaces for the Canadian winter because people prefer staying indoors during the winter. However, the Canadian winter might be an opportunity for Canadian designers to turn generically good urban design into something uniquely Canadian. One example of this is the outdoor water pool that transforms into an ice rink in the winter. This is a feature of urban design that I think is unique to Canada, since almost all decent-sized city in Canada has something like that.

Frog Pond in Boston, Somerset House in London and Lasker Rink in NYC are all ponds/pools that turn into skating rinks in winter, and there are many more examples in Chicago, NYC, London, Seoul, Tokyo, etc where plazas or lawns become reconfigured into rinks during winter, so I wouldn't say this idea is particularly unique to Canada. (Canada might have started doing this earlier though, I cannot say for sure)

 

[MisterF]

Frog Pond in Boston, Somerset House in London and Lasker Rink in NYC are all ponds/pools that turn into skating rinks in winter, and there are many more examples in Chicago, NYC, London, Seoul, Tokyo, etc where plazas or lawns become reconfigured into rinks during winter, so I wouldn't say this idea is particularly unique to Canada. (Canada might have started doing this earlier though, I cannot say for sure)

I think the difference is how common they are in Canada - they're in small and medium sized cities like Kingston, Kitchener, and even Cobourg.

 

[scarberiankhatru]

What makes Toronto unique is the way our inner city, filled with preserved neighbourhoods that each resemble and function as a small town, gives way to an outer city filled with some of the Western world's 'best' suburbs (thanks to a super-grid that focuses development and transit and to a generous and intentional scattering of high-rise clusters that seriously concentrates sprawl while diffusing problems like excessive homogeneity). Both work and both have some redeeming qualities that new developments could copy. It's worth noting that the Avenues development, the places where implementation is realistic, at least, is somewhat limited to the no-man's land of 1940s/1950s suburbia between the inner neighbourhoods and the outer Metro-era 'suburbs that work'...plazas along Eglinton, the central stretch of Sheppard and Finch, etc. Semi-detached houses and 2 storey commercial buildings just aren't dense or profitable enough to satisfy either developers or the city, while the towers-in-a-park Metro clusters are functional but flawed, so we're left with little choice but to take lessons learned from these areas (and there are many, from the importance of building main streets with retail to the importance of spreading around affordable housing and preempting ghettoes and slums) while ditching the physical forms themselves.

Since Little Italy or the Beaches can't be reproduced and the uber-planned Metro clusters like Warden & Finch or Rexdale are near the nadir of their popularity and won't be reproduced, we're left with whatever a city like Vancouver is doing, or we're left with the magic of 8 storey buildings with cafes at street level, the magic of linear parkettes, the magic of light rail, etc., as driving ideologies and models. That's just what Toronto thinks is trendy now, based on the photos planners find on the internet and the cities they vacation in and the words of their professors. We could look elsewhere for inspiration, like the transit station-oriented high-rise clusters in Asia, but we don't (well, that model does require actual transit lines).

The West Don Lands is a bit different in that it was partially an attempt to copy adjacent areas like Corktown and St. Lawrence and paste them onto a new site rather than break the mould completely and veer off in a new direction...unliike an Avenue along Finch or Lawrence, it won't be an island or a Potemkin veneer, but a hopefully real addition to the city. CityPlace is different again, since it makes little to no effort to mirror existing adjacent areas and stands in contrast to the west "King." Some new developments are strictly regulated in terms of massing and height and so on, while others are not. Some have huge areas being site-planned by developers while others are fractured into smaller sites held by many developers working towards the city's goals. Some get trashed or improved by the OMB, and others do not. Flexibility and randomness are unavoidable, which isn't always a bad thing. Of course, we're fooling ourselves if we think that sheer ambition and 'good design' are enough to get the city we want when projects and infrastructure are almost absurdly pervaded and regulated by building codes and by-laws and engineering standards and financing.

 

[savannahurbanist]

What makes Toronto unique is the way our inner city, filled with preserved neighbourhoods that each resemble and function as a small town, ...

How are these neighborhoods typically defined? Are they circumscribed by the commercial streets they abut - and the commecial edges have their own corridor identity? Or do these low-rise mixed use streets typically form the "centers" of the neighborhood unit - i.e. the single family neighborhoods on either side of the low-rise street get their identity from the corridor?

 

[Hipster Duck]

It was shaped to a large degree I think by mundane legal and financial considerations. We often ascribe too much significance in these matters to designers, who are actually providing a service to the enterprising individuals who front the capital, take the risk and imagine the possibility of the human activity that could take place. The lack of residential buildings in the city for instance with say 6-12 units is a direct result of mundane financial, legal and regulatory requirements that make that type of building inefficient to build and operate for an enterprising individual here. Somewhere else in the world the opposite could be true and this type of building could give a builder, owner or operator a strategic advantage.

This is very true, Tricky, but I will add a caveat: culture and custom ultimately precede the use of financial instruments and policy documents to structure the built form of the city a certain way, even if it defies "sensible" (and I use this term very loosely) building regulations and financial practices. For example, the culture of building grand union streetcar interchanges (where streetcars from all directions can turn left and right) makes no financial sense and is more cumbersome to regulate because you have to approve the use of more complicated switches and electrical equipment. Nevertheless, the TTC has been building grand unions for 100 years and that's what their engineers and their streetcar operators are used to, so it wasn't surprising that during the fiscally restrained and litigious 1990s, the Spadina streetcar ROW was built with at least two grand union interchanges.

 

[scarberiankhatru]

Hipster Duck, what would you say about the culture and custom of something like standardized roads/streets? It's usually the case where engineers and planners employing relatively recent science determine road widths, turning radii, light standards, building setbacks, linear parkettes/strips of grass or ridiculously wide sidewalks necessary for snow storage, etc., and this dictates much of the character of new developments (the ones where new roads are built, anyway). Even if we tweaked enough regulations to make 3 storey buildings with apartments on top of stores viable, you can't build a new Annex or Beaches in an arterial sea of concrete and asphalt so wide you can scarcely read a store sign or recognize a face on the other side. We just don't build at an intimate scale anymore.

How are these neighborhoods typically defined? Are they circumscribed by the commercial streets they abut - and the commecial edges have their own corridor identity? Or do these low-rise mixed use streets typically form the "centers" of the neighborhood unit - i.e. the single family neighborhoods on either side of the low-rise street get their identity from the corridor?

No neighbourhood units - those are what fills our outer, Metro-era city. The mixed-use main streets are the spine of the "small towns," with the street grid branching off them, and are a significant source of character and identity - but not the only one. As with most large cities, defining neighbourhood boundaries is a municipal pasttime, but, generally, most downtown neighbourhoods merge into each other where they share residential side streets (although official documents and realtor and BIA maps and the like always insist on hard edges), while most outer neighbourhoods are defined by the concession roads around them (they might have a mall/high school/apartment cluster at their centre, but their edges are often big box stores, industry, and arterials lined with parkland and the backyards of townhouse complexes).

 

[Hipster Duck]

Hipster Duck, what would you say about the culture and custom of something like standardized roads/streets? It's usually the case where engineers and planners employing relatively recent science determine road widths, turning radii, light standards, building setbacks, linear parkettes/strips of grass or ridiculously wide sidewalks necessary for snow storage, etc., and this dictates much of the character of new developments (the ones where new roads are built, anyway). Even if we tweaked enough regulations to make 3 storey buildings with apartments on top of stores viable, you can't build a new Annex or Beaches in an arterial sea of concrete and asphalt so wide you can scarcely read a store sign or recognize a face on the other side. We just don't build at an intimate scale anymore.

Yes, I'm not sure where the culture and custom of road and street design evolved from. My point was that it's sort of a chicken or egg question about whether regulations inform societal practice or whether societal practices inform regulations. It could be that science led to street design or that a city with unusually wide streets prior to the development of transportation engineering as a discipline was used as a template.

On another note, I would say that wide roads are more versatile than we give them credit for in Toronto. Most of Berlin's best neighbourhoods have unusually wide sidestreets - some of the sidestreets I saw in places like Prenzlauer Berg were easily as wide as College between Bathurst and Spadina, or St. Clair west. It was interesting to see how they had been configured for both late 20th century purposes (diagonal parking) and reconfigured again to suit early 21st century values (bicycle lanes, temporary cafe patios, etc.).

 

[timeo]

I think there IS a certain Toronto-style of urbanism that is different than other places. I'm not going to be bold and say that it's exclusively unique to us since I haven't been to every city around the world, but from my experience living in Toronto, Seoul and Berkeley, California, I would say that Toronto has been different since its density and streetscape is typified as what one Toronto planner called "Vienna surrounded by Phoenix". As a result, I think it's important to note that there are two if not three forms of urbanism really: a downtown version, an inner city and a suburban style that we should talk about. Even then however, the urbanism in each part of downtown is different; to speak of how one experiences the Annex is completely different than how one experiences Bloor-Yonge. To talk about Toronto urbanism, one should reflect the different realities of living in Toronto I think.

Anyways, living in California nowadays, personally, I find that the downtown Toronto urbanism that I prefer and am more familiar with (Annex, West Queen West etc), is very much a semi-British style of "high streets" where there is a focus on a certain main street as the centre of the neighbourhood, combined with vast swathes of surrounding residential. In the older parts of San Francisco, and to a lesser extent in Berkeley, there seems to be a much more dispersed type of urbanism where there don't seem to be clusters of restaurants/stores/activities (with the exception of Shattuck Ave. in Berkeley which is essentially the main street). Instead, these stores are peppered throughout the city, with restaurants and stores often placed by residential zones, which then means that you walk more to different places. I've found that downtown Toronto urbanism is very intersection-based: many of the most successful neighbourhoods are centred around nodes and from which retail and urban life stretches to the next prominent node (think of all the shops along the subway lines). Due to the surveying by Simcoe and others, Toronto's blocks are also incredibly long as the plots used to be split into concessions for farming. I'm not certain, but I think this is why a lot of Toronto's neighbourhoods feel linear rather than rectangular or block-like when compared to say neighbourhoods in San Francisco which seem much larger. Like SF though, Toronto is very much a city of neighbourhoods. I think what really captures the way that Toronto is is this concentration of certain commercial activities on certain corridors and vastly residential surroundings that support these strips. In recent years, it seems like this formula has been added to with the creation of tons of condos that add more people into neighbourhoods and make city life more vibrant.

 

[scarberiankhatru]

My point was that it's sort of a chicken or egg question about whether regulations inform societal practice or whether societal practices inform regulations.

On another note, I would say that wide roads are more versatile than we give them credit for in Toronto. Most of Berlin's best neighbourhoods have unusually wide sidestreets

I thought I had a sentence about chicken vs egg but I guess I deleted it when copying my post over (I find the new forum layout tricky to handle, especially on my fuzzy monitor, so I write them elsewhere and then paste them in the reply box). Roads are definitely something that have sort of gotten away from us. At least we can use some of these mega-roadways for transit and bike lanes and landscaped medians and whatnot, but we don't always make streets better by insisting that everything including the kitchen sink gets a share of the road space on [increasingly] every road. It'd also be very hard to scale back our desire for grand boulevards that also satisfy the planners/engineers, which is really a great notion on paper. I don't know what we'd build instead of Avenues...an additional 100km of Bay Streets? That won't work.

I'm sure whoever first pushed for 20 feet of grass alongside every arterial road thought it'd be a brilliant way to beautify, and to leave room for snow storage while also leaving room for road widenings. 'The people' do benefit from this, but more or less than they'd benefit from having buildings hug the road? In 2010, we're still building roads this way, from the Morningside Heights area to the North York Centre service roads (Bremner got a sea of concrete instead, but it gets a pass for being Grand and Important).

My point about old-timey roads deals with the original question of why what already works in Toronto isn't being replicated. Comparing the Annex to a new development, it's easy to place lots of emphasis on superficial design and mixed use and tenure and height and FSIs and so on but it can all be squandered in an instant when the basic characteristics of the road (sidewalks, setbacks, etc.) aren't the same. Newly developed areas also have their soil and slopes and trees scraped away...that didn't happen a century ago. We can't have a new Kensington Market with bike lanes and a transit ROW and 20 foot sidewalks and landscaping and 4 lanes of traffic. If we can't build a new Little Italy or a new Yorkville, and if we won't intensify with towers-in-the-park like the Don Mills or 427 corridors (not in the age of Tower Renewal), we don't have much choice but to look elsewhere for inspiration...we need to find urban forms that fit our mega-scaled, Metro-scaled infrastructure. Maybe it's a good idea that we're looking at trendy Euro-stuff and doing whatever we think the Germans would do, because it doesn't seem like much else will improve Sheppard or Finch. We should also be looking at the Asian model of mixed-use hyper-clusters at suburban transit stations – I'm sure such a cluster would work better for Downtown Markham than the mini-Paris they're currently building. The massive Langstaff project looks promising, though it depends on, first, actual transit being delivered some day and, next, building more than just a billion condos.