Silence&Motion
Senior Member
It's fine to stroll or even jog or bike (sometimes) through a cemetery. They're great and unique urban spaces. Kids love looking for the oldest grave they can find. Goths love posing for Instagram photos there. Tourists like visiting the graves of famous people.
Most great cities have great cemeteries. Again, this cluster of cemeteries is only a fraction of the size of cemeteries found in other cities. Check out the cemeteries at the top of Mount Royal in Montreal. It is an absolutely massive sprawl of graves. And I doubt many Montrealers have ever said "think of how many soccer fields and condominium towers we could build if we ripped up all these cemeteries!".
In general though, the thing that makes cities so much more vibrant than suburbs is this juxtaposition of different land uses that have accumulated over time. Sure, we no longer use huge swaths of urban space to build cemeteries. Urban cemeteries are a legacy of a different time. But it's exactly because things like this have survived over the years and we're force to build around them that give cities their vibrancy. If we just bulldozed every land use that was out of step with current times and replaced it with whatever we consider to be the most efficient use of space today, we'd just have a homogeneous suburb.
And even if we really did want to do that, we're not even halfway through building out the East Village to say nothing of the Stampede grounds, the West Village, Westbrook, Currie Barracks, Eau Claire, North Hill, West Campus, etc, etc, etc. It will be generations before the city runs out of large stretches of vacant land that can be redeveloped into master planned TOD-style neighbourhoods.
