Communities, urban design and planning issues

[lagatta]

I didn't find any thread on this subject that keeps cropping up in the Environment forumn, and we don't have an urbanism/town planning etc board. Quoting a bit of a conversation on glass condos here:

Thread drift begins (my fault) on the "comfort food" thread, because comfort food leads to talk of what we are doing:

lagatta: I'm listening to CBC news about the "glass high-rises" that are shodilly built and have no serious insulation and how they will become slummy in 10 or 15 years. Fortunately not too many of those here; people wouldn't want to live in a building that isn't masonry.

sparqui: Are those glass high rises the ones with self-contained ventilation (no windows that open)? There are a couple of downtown high rises that have been upgraded to all glass facades being rented as luxury units.

antonia: Those glass highrises are all they seem to be building nowadays here. No wonder the windows go flying out. The building I bought into is a solid stolid slab of concrete and brick. No wonder architecturally but that's okay by me.

The radio show was probably referring to all the towers being build in the King-Bathurst-Spadina area. 30+ stories, 400 sf "lofts," great for first time singles. But it really is A Clockwork Orange slum in the making.

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I (lagatta) continue: I'd like to find more about these things, beyond the CBC radio report. spacing.ca and its progeny (such as spacingmontreal, spacingottawa, spacingatlantic etc - I think there is also a spacingvancouver now, but will have to check - dunno about Prairie cities and communities, or Northern ones) often have good visual reports on urban planning, design and community issues.

A guy I know in Toronto who has worked in the building trades says a lot of those condo projects, despite the hefty price tags, are very shoddily built, cutting all kinds of corners. The very design (so much glass which is little protection against either heat or cold) does seem problematic as well.

Very tall residential buildings are problematic as well, from an environmental as well as a safety standpoint. While sprawl is an environmental disaster not only because of car dependency but also due to the high cost of public infrastructure (electricity, sewers, roads etc) and the waste of valuable farmland (Canada is huge, but the good farmland is scarce, and of course that is where most cities have grown up) extremely tall buildings are also very energy intensive due to the need to get water up to the top levels and evacuate waste water, the fact that practically everyone will use the lifts all the time and many other factors. They also seem problematic in terms of evacuation during fires and other disasters, especially when people are sleeping.

Here in Mtl we have height limits so as not to obscure the view of our so-called Mountain, and most arrondissements also have more severe height limits for harmony, and while there has been a condo boomlet in recent years, most have been fairly lowrise blocks or even buildings not higher or larger overall than past rows of triplexes, the generic Montréal housing form.

Ottawa has similar limits in respect to the Parliament buildings.

In Toronto along the lakeshore, the very high condos extend as far west as Etobicoke at least, eliminating almost all of the old motels (of dodgy repute in recent decades)...

[Antonia]

The story from The Star that inspired the radio show ...

Here’s the nightmare scenario: in a few years, once the massive steel-and-glass buildings in the city’s largest residential development start to age, the young condo-dwelling crowd decamps to a trendier area. Cut off from downtown by highways and rail lands, and with little in the way of street life, the towers fall into disrepair and become inhabited by families who can’t afford to live anywhere else. Can we avert a civic disaster at CityPlace? 

As for falling glass, here's a map from the Globe.

And this is just a random Google search.

I'd post a photo of my new (to me) condo building but won't for obvious reasons. Suffice to say that our condo critic didn't think it beautiful but did say it was solid.

[lagatta]

Here is a post from Montrealize blog about a campaign for more sustainable and less petroleum-dependent urban design:

http://montrealize-montrealize.blogspot.com/2011/11/campaigning-for-different-quebec.html

referencing this site: http://www.imaginerlequebecautrement.org/

Of course the latter is in French, but it is mostly pictures of such topics as:

Écoquartiers - Ecodistricts
Mixité et services - Mixed use and services
Densité - Density
Mobilité durable - Sustainable mobility
Rue partagée - Shared streets (these are quiet streets where pedestrians take priority)
Gestion des déchets - Waste management
Énergies renouvelables - Renewable energies
Bâtiment vert - Green building

On sustainable urban design, with examples mostly from northern European cities and towns.

Edited to add: Of course there is a lot of dreadful design in those countries too. Moreover, most of the pictures appear to show middle-class areas inhabited mostly by 'Indigenous' northern Europeans, not "visible" immigrants. However, I have seen good sustainable design in more multiethnic, working-class areas in Amsterdam and Rotterdam.

[lagatta]

Holy Condo! (And I don't mean a project in a deconsecrated place of worship).

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/city-to-partner-with-tridel-in-75-storey-waterfront-condo/article2245511/

Build Toronto is in a partnership with a developer to build a 75-storey waterfront project on a "vacant sliver of city land".

Yep, another tall, skinny glass thing. I hope Toronto isn't in an earthquake zone!

[sparqui]

Figures that Doug Ford is involved with this. 

The thought of having to take an elevator to the 75th floor (or anything above 25th) multiple times on a daily basis makes me queasy.

[Antonia]

That's just a couple of blocks from where I am now sitting. A stunning amount of highrise condos have erupted here, right over the Gardiner expressway. I don't know how people can live like that.

At least Tridel has a rep as a good builder.

Meanwhile, this is going up, but further north, at Gerrard and Yonge.
Aura, Canada's tallest condo.

[lagatta]

Well, I don't know how people live in the suburbs either; that seems at least as hellish. But perhaps we could find a vertical equivalent to "sprawl"? All that energy spent several times a day going up and down very long lifts has a huge cost, and there is a similar cost for water, waste, everything going up and down, in and out. The sustainable cities schemes shown in the blog mentioned on the cycling board here are all relatively low-rise (though far denser than sprawly suburbs).

Moreover, I can't imagine people in those things "nipping down to the shops" to pick up some milk or bread, a bottle of wine or some missing spice.

Tall, guarded buildings are also a feature of some Global South cities where there is a huge divide between the wealthy - or even the upper-middle-class - and the vast majority of people. In this case the buildings also imply car ownership and underground garages, so there is not even the benefit of these condo owners at least walking most places nearby.

[sparqui]

I checked out that Aura project and they are selling the penthouse as one 11,370 sq ft unit. That's huge. I wonder if it includes servants' quarters.

[lagatta]

I dunno. Usually except for the exploited nanny, don't most rich people nowadays prefer to have the help live at a distance?

I have NO idea what anyone would do with so much domestic space. Think the thing has already been sold. Wonder to whom, among the 1%?

[Boom Boom]

I live in an old trailer that sits on a cement basement with a laundry room and entrance way addition to the side. Last year I rebuilt the entire unit with new windows and siding. This year I'm rebuilding the exteriors of my garage and woodshed - next year I'll rebuild the interior of the garage. None of this would have been possible for me without that very low interest CMHC mortgage done through my credit union.
 
I'm really stunned at the lifestyles of the 1%, high rise condos and the like. Last time I was in Ottawa, a huge, expensive set of condos opened up across from the side of the Chateau Laurier on Sussex Drive corner of Wellington - absolutely stunning to behold.
 
I think we need a revolution in this country to boot out the 1% and return power and resource income  to the people. Oil production, for example, should be nationalized and the profits used by governments for social program spending. Screw the 1% - they're already screwing the rest of us.   
 
 
 

[lagatta]

Actually in terms of architecture, I much prefer those Ottawa ones. I suppose there are very strict heritage laws there. They aren't the glass wall things - they look like some kind of masonry. And of course they can't be anywhere near as tall as that nosebleed Toronto place because nothing is allowed to overshadow the Peace Tower; we have similar rules here about Mont-Royal.

The most famous resident of that condo block was Belinda Stronach.

Yes, our co-op also has a very low interest loan; if not I hate to think about where at least half of us would be living right now. Certainly not somehere safe, heatable and clean, in a neighbourhood walkable to every type of service - though a closer public library would be nice in the wintertime; alas municipal funding restrictions mean the district has slowed down building a library and community centre (with a swimming pool) ten minutes' walk from here, moreover most of it walking through the ugly but practical rue St-Hubert "semi-mall" with its tacky 80s-style glass awnings - that do provide protection from cold rain and snow.

Of course we need to get back all the speculative funds stolen by the 1% and use them for social programs  - these include affordable housing, whether in the form of social housing (low-cost housing and co-ops) or low-interest loans for slightly-better-off working-class households. But we must avoid making the mistakes made in the postwar era, when there was such social progress for returning veterans, but it had the perverse effect of fuelling suburban sprawl and car dependency - going so far as to rip out streetcar systems in many cities throughout North America. Now it is proving very costly to bring them back, although modern trams are one of the cleanest, most universally-accessible forms of transport and are a boon to every city that boasts them. The best have their own lanes or sites, so they don't get stuck in traffic jams and can be practically as swift as métro lines.

Well, we're talking ecosocialism, eh? Providing a pleasant, liveable environment that also minimises pollution and maximises social interaction.

I tend to think condo towers as high as the new Toronto ones limit social interaction at least as much as suburban sprawl did and does, and are probably at least as polluting for other reasons. For one thing, they mean no "eyes on the street" in the famous words of Jane Jacobs.

I don't agree with everything Jacobs advocated - she had little to say on social issues and could be downright contrarian - but she was certainly right about that. Actually, those Ottawa condos look fairly sustainable - they are certainly walkable to everything one could possibly need, from Parliament to the Byward market to facilities at U of Ottawa - but the problem is that they are a ghetto for the very rich.

[Boom Boom]

Yes, that is what I was getting at - those Ottawa condos at Sussex and Wellington are for the very rich - not the rest of us, the 99%. And, yes, they are nice looking compared to Toronto's nightmare sky-rises.
 
I just found out yesterday that a nice retirement home is going up in Natashquan (birthplace of Quebec  folk singer Gilles Vigneault), 44 km west of here (Kegaska). It sounds tempting to me, because once I have my mortgage paid off in five years, I probably by then will need some kind of assisted living arrangement - last night the power went off, and I almost gave myself a heart attack trying to start a frozen generator. Finally had to bring the bloody thing into the house to thaw out;  luckily I have enough basement space for the thing. Once it thawed out, the power came on.
 
Once the renovations are done, I can relax a bit. In the spring I'll be painting the woodshed and other things around the house. In October I'm going to rebuild the inside of the garage - insulate it, line and floor it with 4 x 8 plywood, and put in an industrial electric heater - the insurance company doesn't want me to put a wood stove inside the structure; if I do, my rates will go up quite a bit. I would only need the place for short durations anyway, when I'm doing woodwork jobs, or to thaw out my skidoo in the winter.
 

[lagatta]

That sounds nice, Boom Boom. At least there is a road! Is there better medical care in that village?

[Boom Boom]

That sounds nice, Boom Boom. At least there is a road! Is there better medical care in that village?

No - same as here. You have to drive or fly to Sept-Iles for most appointments; however there is a nurse 24/7.

[Antonia]

Find out if there's a waiting list. Get on it pronto.