Why urban density is actually good for us
By Helen LuiWe constantly hear about the problems with density: tiny shoeboxes in the sky, looming towers and their shadows, traffic congestion, and overcrowding. But despite popular discourse, denser living can actually be good for us and our communities.Density as healthDensity brings public servi...
She's right.
Density isn't the enemy. Bad arrangement of dense population is.
I live in a very densely-populated city (1200/km² or 3200/sq.mi.) but it's arranged semi-sanely. Within comfortable walking distance of my home are two parks, a Daoist temple, several schools at levels ranging from primary to 2nd-tier university, two (large!) farmer's markets, three shopping centres (two of which have sizable supermarkets), uncountable numbers of restaurants ranging from holes in the wall to fancy banquet halls... You get the idea. Within 3 stops of the nearest subway station or 5 stops of the nearest bus stop all that expands dramatically. I'm not sure I could even realistically count them all except to say that it doubles the number of Daoist temples and adds a sizable Buddhist one. (The nearest church is about 5 subway stops away, maybe 6.) Outside of work (which is an hour's commute by subway and bus away) I could live my entire life without being more than 20 minutes away from my home ... and never be bored or finding myself in a rut.
I can't say the same for Ottawa when I lived there. Hell, within fifteen minutes of DRIVING I couldn't find much in most of the places I lived.
1200/km² or 3200/sq.mi.
At first you had me thinking, there is no way 1,200/km² is very densely-populated. That's like small town where everyone has a big lawn in the front and a pool in the back kind of numbers. But then I read 3,200/sq mi and realized you flipped the units.
That said, even 1,200/km² is perfectly dense enough to allow walkability to everything if done right. But the appeal of being a farmer is too great for the average person. They want to have to get into a vehicle every time they go to do something.
Flipped the units? I've never seen density measures as km²/person! Where are you seeing density measured as area per person?
Ottawa is a big mixed bag, and covers a huge area. I lived there some decades ago, so it might be different now:
Regions north of the 417 are generally pretty walkable; and the transit way (looks like it was replaced with the OTrain) was quite effective at moving me, so long as it was along that spine. The transitway was so good that a bus from Bayview to the south (Greenboro/south keys?) was faster than the train.
When I lived in Kanata, there was sweet jack shit to walk, or even bike, to and the transit was pretty horrendous. The one plus, was that the express busses were pretty spot on for getting me to work, but probably only because I happened to be working on the transit way at the time (Ottawa U area).
In the times I've visited since, Ottawa seems to be doing the right things in individual neighborhoods, but is struggling a bit with making each of these good things connect to each other.
I lived in Orleans, Kanata, and Nepean. Nepean was almost worth it. (Almost because although there was a massive shopping centre a road-crossing away from me, it was a road you couldn't conveniently cross and it took 20 minutes+ to get to it if you didn't want to take your life in your own hands.) Orleans and Kanata were suburban wastelands.
The Transitway was great if you lived in the suburbs and worked downtown. Feeder route to Transitway to downtown in the morning. Transitway to feeder route to home in the evening. If you had any other movement pattern OC Transpo was a nightmare of missed connections and half-hour buses that came once every hour. Basically if you weren't a civil servant working downtown or someone servicing the same, a car was obligatory if you were in Orleans or Kanata. (May God have mercy on your mortal soul if you needed to take THREE buses!)
When my friends (who live in Bells Corners) visited me here they were amazed at buses that came every five minutes except very late in the day (where that became ever 15), even on the weird distant routes. They were amazed at a subway system that got you 80% of the way there most of the time. And they were amazed at how little they had to use it when they weren't visiting specific places (like a museum or other such touristy tat).
What we really need in Canada is for companies and jobs to spread out across multiple cities in Canada instead of being all concentrated in Toronto.
Then maybe everyone and their grandmother and all immigrants won't be trying to cram themselves into one small place in a country that has one of the largest areas on earth.
The point of this article is we can and should make room in Toronto. There’s plenty of space if we accommodate with a better built form that isn’t sprawling detached homes.
Building density is not as simple as just putting up more apartment buildings. it requires planning for how to expand schools, make sure that utilities are not over burdened, traffic congestion and ways to mitigate it etc. Expanding suburbs have all the same problems and more. It absolutely can be done, but doing it right requires proper preparation otherwise you create new and different problems.
That’s on the government to build out cities in remote locations and then have extremely low costs for people/businesses to bring them in
Also needs high speed commercial rail between the cities
We HAVE other cities across Canada already that could be used as other locations for companies. We don't need to build more.
What the government needs to do is provide incentives for companies to move. But that could mean job losses in Toronto/Ontario. Would they be willing to make that sacrifice? I don't think so.
I agree with the high speed rail thing though.
Toronto easily has space to grow to 4 million residents plus. There are vast swaths of Canada's largest city that are built like some far-flung suburb, and that needs to change sooner rather than later
Calgary is on it.
Feels like a bit of a disingenuous article when it won't openly talk about the downsides of density. The downtown core of Toronto got denser and it got completely soulless. It's tower after tower that block daylight from reaching street level, leaving no sunlight but for those living at the top, and endless stretches of shoebox apartments where you're lucky if you get a balcony. There's no independent shops left and all the real estate is owned by massive corporations and banks that are always trying to extract as much money as possible from their tenants.
Their solution of bowling over all single family housing to replace with midrise apartments is also not exactly going to be popular.
I get that we need to density and we need land reform but your proposal is going to have a real hard time gaining traction if it boils down to "let's tear down everything here that all the existing residents chose and replace it with something else that we think is more logical".
“let’s tear down everything here that all the existing residents chose and replace it with something else that we think is more logical”.
This feels like a dishonest interpretation that misses a lot of the nuance presented in the article.
Seriously. In most cases residents did not choose large swaths of single family home suburbs, the planning commission did by zoning everything R1 and washing their hands of it.
Density shouldn't be big tower. It should be 4-5 story building very close together.
The downtown core of Toronto got denser and it got completely soulless. It’s tower after tower that block daylight from reaching street level, leaving no sunlight but for those living at the top, and endless stretches of shoebox apartments where you’re lucky if you get a balcony.
Sorry kid. You can't have space AND fit people as well. Since every rooftop needs to be a garden, at least that's a nice place to hang out.
You can't solve it by mid-ride or low-boys, either -- you need the economies of scale and minimal-density to save on infrastructure; and get better transit that is sufficient on property taxes before the user-pay system and road-tax ideas both die. Because no one's paying for the absolute shit Translink pulled these last few years. You need the high density to create and maintain the shared greenspace between the clusters, so it doesn't end up looking like Detroit or Jersey. You need the high densite to get that land BACK, as well as pull people out of the delta where we NEED that land for responsible local farming. (didn't think of that in your mid-rise plan, did you?)
Sorry. Towers are the reality if you want to live in the cities -- just, if we do it right, with greenways of sanity to break up the tower clusters and cool things down.. Kitimat's nice, though.
