[scarberiankhatru]

As far as portraying green surroundings go, the rendering is actually far more accurate than average...there is a forest to the south and Albert Campbell Square will supposedly have a grassy extension towards the new condos.

 

[samsonyuen]

Cool thread. I love the Civic Centre. The map is hilarious, Simpsons and Eaton's? The area is quite unpedestrian, and reminds me of Mississauga City Centre: Huge Mall surrounded by condos that don't have much street presence or pedestrian activity.

 

[scarberiankhatru]

Mississauga Centre is an order of magnitude more pedestrian friendly than Scarborough Centre...there's almost no comparison, really.

 

[dashingdan]

'Mississauga City Centre" and "pedestrian friendly" used in the same sentence? Am I hallucinating, Scarberian? Of course you are comparing it to Scarborough Centre, but still...
I think MCC is becoming more pedestrian oriented, with the new condos going up, and the upcoming Square One north parking lot redevelopment, but its still not pedestrian "friendly". It's merely walkable lol. As a life-long Mississauga resident, that's my opinion. Port Credit and Streetsville are both infinitely more pedestrian-friendly than MCC.

 

[wyliepoon]

I don't buy your MCC- Scarborough Centre comparison either, Scarberian. Tell us why you think so.

 

[scarberiankhatru]

You're serious?

Because MCC doesn't have a bus trench running through it? Because it has sidewalks everywhere? Because it isn't split in two by a multilane divided highway (McCowan)? Because its streets are actually straight, allowing buildings to come pretty much up to their edge, not a mess of on/off-ramps and a completely unecessary excess of futuristic vertical layers in the area's infrastructure? Just look at a map, it's blindingly obvious that there's a massive difference between what's being built around Square One and what's being built around STC.

I never said MCC had a satisfactory level of pedestrian friendliness, but it's 10 times better than SCC. Borough Drive and Progress have absolutely no pedestrians...zero...if you see one they're probably lost or work nearby and didn't want to wait 20 minutes for a bus. Brimley has none, McCowan has none, people living south of Ellesmere do not walk to the mall, people living in the condos are barely able to walk around the area by crossing the patchwork of parking lots. At least MCC has a level grid of roads - the main problem is the scale, while at SCC, the main problem is physical barrier after physical barrier and they're doing nothing to improve it...SCC is not walkable, let alone pedestrian friendly to any degree aside from the bridge from the RT station to the mall and the walkway to Albert Campbell Square...that's it.

 

[wyliepoon]

I do agree with you on most of the criticisms of Scarborough Centre on pedestrian barriers, but I just can't see how Scarborough is any worse than Mississauga right now. On my trips out to Mississauga I see about the same level of pedestrians as I see in Scarborough- virtually none except for people walking from the transit terminal to the mall. The square in front of Mississauga City Hall is empty whenever I'm there, whereas Albert Campbell Square has people sitting in it.

The only major difference I see between Scarborough and Mississauga is that Mississauga is doing "placemaking" exercises to improve walkability, while Scarborough no longer has control over its city centre.

 

[Ed007Toronto]

And Scarborough did such a wonderful job when it controlled its city centre didn't it?

 

[ahrvojic]

Pedestrian friendliness isn't just about how many people are out walking around at a given time, but also how easy it is to get where one needs to go on foot in a reasonable amount of time and with minimal frustration owing to needless detours.

Scarberian's point about MCC's level grid vs. SCC's futuristic ramps is dead-on in my experience, as well as the point about MCC's problem of scale vs. SCC's physical barriers. The huge square city blocks in Mississauga are in the process of being broken up, but other than razing it all and starting over as was humorously suggested, how will we fix SCC?

At a glance (a little zooming and panning may be necessary):

MCC
SCC

 

[scarberiankhatru]

"but other than razing it all and starting over as was humorously suggested, how will we fix SCC?"

I wasn't kidding. Raze everything other than the Civic Centre and let Moriyama complete his initial vision for the area...there's a site plan floating around the internet somewhere but I can't find it right now. The civic centre would have been expanded, a theatre and library added, etc. Had a solid core been established decades ago, the outer fields and parcels might not have been thrown to the big box wolves and the condos may not have been so putridly awful. With the 401 to the north, industrial land to the west and east, and preserved woodlots to the south, it's an incomplete, half-assed island of misery that's far, far more hopeless than the suburbs surrounding it.

 

[wyliepoon]

^ or move the city centre elsewhere and start again. Kingston Road, perhaps? Property prices there are high, it's close to the Bluffs, the lake and the subway, and it's a potential LRT corridor. Could be a place to start Scarborough's North York Centre or a Port Credit.

 

[Darkstar416]

I don't know if I'd support moving SCC to Kingston Rd, but after biking around there last night, Kingson Rd really does have a tonne of potential and probably already feels more like a downtown than SCC will in 10 years.

 

[scarberiankhatru]

If Agincourt Mall was turned inside-out, it would also work as a downtown. If Scarborough Town Centre wasn't there, the subway would have just run up the rail corridor to Kennedy and Sheppard and west from there. It was a mistake locating "downtown Scarborough" and the mall in the same place - just compare Mississauga with North York - and if the civic stuff had been along Sheppard, Kingston, even Eglinton, Scarborough today might have a real pseudo-downtown instead of an imaginary pseudo-downtown. If Scarborough wasn't so damn big but was split up somehow, Agincourt would be the downtown of a suburb called Agincourt (population, 200-250K).

 

[adma]

I don't know if I'd support moving SCC to Kingston Rd, but after biking around there last night, Kingson Rd really does have a tonne of potential and probably already feels more like a downtown than SCC will in 10 years.

But the potential is still only in a "Port Credit vs Mississauga City Centre" way...

 

[cassiusa]

I'm convinced that the only way to fix the SCC is to demolish the Town Centre and rebuild all the shops on a tightly-knit streetgrid pattern with residential on top of most of it.

It's already the place where many Scarberians go to shop and I think would continue to shop at even after a redevelopment. How many stores are in the STC, about 250 or so? That's a lot of stores that could go on ground-level of a number of mid-highrise residential buildings. Allow 24hr on-street parking.