Price Tags 106
Price Tags 106
Price Tags 106
Issue 106
November 18, 2008
Vaughan
There is a Colossus Drive in Vaughan that leads to the Colossus cineplex . that is part of the Riocan Colossus Centre across the freeway from the Vaughan Corporate Centre.
The Colossus sits next to a huge interchange where Highway 7 crosses over Highway 400.
One kilometre further south of Highway 7 is another interchange where The 400 meets The 407.
Its blocks are defined by the intersections of the arterial roads - wide, fast and far apart.
3.5 kilometres
Less than five would take in all the Downtown and West End of Vancouver
3.5 kilometres
Blocks of asphalt are surrounded in turn by acres of emptiness, awaiting more big boxes, more asphalt.
This is a landscape designed by civil engineers and surveyors to be big and simple.
It is meant to handle cars and snow lots of space to park and pile. It is vehicle-dependent and high carbon. Wasteful. Hostile. And very vulnerable.
Its designers and builders, private and public, have produced a place that no one likes very much.
It spreads across suburbia, extending auto-dominant urban form wherever the arterials go.
There are similar places all across the Greater Toronto Area north of Steeles Avenue - stretching in a band from Brampton to Markham. This is the 905 Belt named after the area code. The belt is connected and shaped by its freeways - the 401, the most congested road in Canada, and the 407, the first electronic toll road in Canada, now privatized.
Smart!Centres
In the last decades of the 20th century, when government disregarded the kind of transit-based urban form that had made Toronto one of North America's most enviable cities, suburban growth blew past the borders of the Metropolitan area and sprawled its way north. a time before sustainability was taken seriously, when money was easy and oil was cheap and expected to stay that way into an unbounded future.
Motordom at its zenith. A world so car-dependent that its leaders couldnt allow themselves to imagine a world that didnt look like this.
Ultimately the unconstrained growth of the 905 Belt generated its own backlash, justifying a freeze on development and the introduction of planning concepts, like smart growth, that had been ignored heretofore. With the introduction of provincially directed regional planning for the first time since the 1970s came a change in planning emphasis: namely, 'intensification' - using existing developed land to accommodate growth while at the same saving open space and creating de-facto urban-growth boundaries. . Now called "Places to Grow," the plan was formalized in 2006. New urbanist Peter Calthorpe calls it was of the best frameworks for regional planning he has ever seen. Calthorpe is also working on an urban-centre plan at Langstaff where Yonge Street meets the 407. Five kilometres east of the interchange, the City is also trying to create a more mixed-use town centre with a sense of place. Thornhill Town Centre now offers the lifestyle centre alternative.
The impetus for change is the extension of Torontos Spadina subway. Plans anticipate it will cost $3.5 billion (2006$) and take seven years an ambitious attempt to transform this amorphous entity into a downtown, connect it with the metro core, and make it a place, much more urban, that people might care about.
[For more on the history of regional planning in Ontario, go here for an excellent paper by Richard White of the Neptis Foundation.]
In truth, Vaughan, after realizing what it ended up with, doesn't much like the Vaughan Corporate Centre either.
to take those 900 ha and create a real downtown: mixed-use, pedestrian-oriented, transit-served.
So far, the conception for the Vaughan Corporate Centre is promising, but still looks dominated by its colossal scale, suburban design vocabulary (buildings plopped on large blocks) and continued car dominance.
Perhaps the Vaughan Corporate Centre was a necessary failure - so large it couldn't be missed. Unfortunately, it's too far away to be an immediate lesson for the Lower Mainland. Where we seem to be determined to replicate its worst parts.
We too build the same SmartCentres, the same Colossus, the same asphalt-and-box complexes at the interchanges where the roads are being widened.
Colossus
Highway 1 to be widened
Langley Township
(40 km from Vancouver)
200th Street widening
SmartCentres Langley
DUNDAS SQUARE
Until the late 1990s, the Yonge-Dundas Square site was occupied by a block of retail stores, and considered by many to be a "seedy" or dangerous corner. In 1998, as part of its Yonge Street Regeneration Project, the construction of Dundas Square, Toronto City Council approved the expropriation and demolition of the buildings on the site, and the construction of Dundas Square.
- From Wikipedia
The square has delivered on its promise of vibrancy a Toronto Times Square. It suffers from weak street walls on the south and east, and from being cut off by roads on all sides. There are no cafes that can spill into the square from the adjacent buildings. But it is a well proportioned urban room (big enough when there are crowds, small enough to feel safe and lively when there arent.) Its well located, well programmed and well policed. Its the place to go when you want to go to the place that everyone else will go to too.
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