You can link in the post below to Province columnist Keith Morgan where he writes about the “Upside of adding new asphalt to landscape.”
A few weeks ago I had a chance to visit an asphalt landscape – the most asphalty I’ve ever seen – and I didn’t see much of an upside.
Twenty kilometres northwest of Toronto is the Vaughan Corporate Centre, where Highway 400 intersects with Highway 407, the electronic toll road that the Ontario government built and then privatized (unwisely) to serve the northern sweep of what is called the 905 Belt (named after the area code) in the Greater Toronto Area.
It had quite an impact on me – much of which I have tried to convey in the latest Price Tags.
Download an issue, and judge for yourself.
Off to Portland for a few days. See you next week.
Terrific issue Gordon. Even without your great commentary, the pictures tell a very compelling and distressing tale. I recall taking a drive along the bleeding edge of the GTA several years ago, and was struck by the scale of the destruction of some of the most superb agricultural land, and lovely rural landscape, in Canada and its replacement with the desolate concrete waste that this issue so grimly documents.
The large blocks are likely the result (a historical holdover) from the previous farming uses of the area – much like Richmond’s main roads are No.1, No.2, No.3, No.4, No. 5 and No. 6 roads.
The creation of new roads (oh, no, road expansion!!) to reduce the size of the blocks would require the expropriation and replotting of significant areas, would cost a lot, and likely result in property owner outrage.
Look at downtown Richmond – a lot of its connector side streets do not allign and are relatively haphazard. Only recently has Lansdowne Road been punched through to Minoru Blvd.
WRT Dundas Square, you omitted a photo of the “Toronto Life Square” building which was built by PenEquity on the site of some of the City-expropriated lands after years and years of delay. It’s a rather “ugly” building. Here’s a picture of it on Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/7791383@N05/2308776056/
Off to Portland? Can we expect some more pricetags reports on your take of what’s happening in that city?
Also, great issue, the pictures and plans really do tell the story and good job relating it to the west coast in Langley (and other areas, even Burnaby on Marine). I also enjoyed many of the links as well, though one of the links on the Vaughan corporate centre was dead. Got a working one? Thanks.
Author
From Keith Thompson:
The lower mainland has been pushed down the path of intensification a little earlier than Toronto if only because of the ALR – which was reviled by its opponents at the time it was introduced and is now being chipped away. What we don’t have is a transit system to rival Toronto’s. People whine about the subsidies involved in running the West Coast Express, for instance, but don’t see twinning the Port Mann etc., as subsidies for cars. Urban areas with good transit systems are more efficient, free people to move around at lower cost, and get a lot of economic benefits from that mobility of the work force. Urban areas dependent on auto transportation incurr increasingly higher costs in the form of pollution, travel time and costs, and reduction in quality of life. Sprawl requires cars – lots of em!
Fantastic work on the “Vaughan” issue Gordon. Having grown up in the 905 belt myself – I agree that it is an amazing place indeed. And Vaughan is truly one of the most remarkable 905 municipalities, taking pedestrian hostility to another level entirely.
John Barber – city affairs columnist for the Toronto edition of the Globe and Mail – has written several excellent articles on Vaughan that your readers would find interesting including:
A foul whiff from ‘City above Toronto’
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20080306.BARBER06/TPStory/?query=john+barber+vaughan
A metropolis that knew where to draw the line
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/Page/document/v5/content/subscribe?user_URL=http://www.theglobeandmail.com%2Fservlet%2Fstory%2FLAC.20070602.BARBER02%2FTPStory%2F%3Fquery%3Djohn%2Bbarber%2Bvaughan&ord=79004260&brand=theglobeandmail&force_login=true
Gordon, if you haven’t seen it already, you might enjoy the examples of sprawl community transformation on this page:
http://sierraclub.org/sprawl/community/transformations/index.asp
Click on the names of the various communities, then click on “next photo” in the window that pops up, to go through examples of what sprawl can be turned into.
That’s a very interesting take on the Vaughan Corporate Centre. However, I believe your perspective is wrong.
I work in an office just one block of the Centre. This has helped me keep up my interest in this development. However, I am an IT guy, so urban design is definitely not my strong point. I do work for a construction company, though, so I’ve got to admit I’m enjoying watching the dirt being moved around in preparation for the new subway station here.
Introductions aside, I want to point out to you that there is a difference between the Centre as a whole, and as its core. Let me explain: the core is defined by a ring road that is really a (rounded) rectangle that is 1000m long and 400m wide. It is only this area that is intended to be the high density downtown. The average block will be 100m x 100m. Is that still too large for you? Immediately outside this core are other lands that will still carry the monniker “Vaughan Corporate Centre”, but are definitely intended to be lower density.
So, when you draw a 5km line to denote the Centre, then superimpose it over downtown Vancouver, you do the City of Vaughan a bit of injustice. You should be showing a 1000m by 400m rectangle for a proper comparison.
SmartCentres is involved with development within the core, to be sure. But their first (and only one so far) building within the core is the FutureShop at the northwest corner of Millway and Hwy 7, right at the subway station site. This two-story building has multiple small-shop units on the ground floor that are currently vacant. The parking lot they “built” on the west side of this building represents the space of two more blocks that eventually will be replaced with two more buildings. Then, between that parking lot and Edgeley Blvd. is a fourth block that will house another building (likely a residential condo). In this particular example, the blocks are each 75m wide and 100m high. (You can actually see how that works in the design map you show in PT 106 labeled as Jane Street Smart Centre.)
So the city is forcing these developers to maintain the footprint of any new buildings to fit within a 100m x 100m block. With the Hilton Garden Inn (SE corner of Edgeley and Hwy 7) it looks like they’re willing to bend the rules a bit and allow buldings with a footprint that fits two blocks.
One aside: the large Toromont factory at the SW corner of Hwy 7 and Jane Street will be vacated around June of this year and torn down.
The last thing the city must really be concerned about is how to minimize the congestion on the six-lane Highway 7. However, they proved by accident that it can be possible — the sinkhole that closed down the complete Hwy 7/Jane intersection a few years ago for four months did not cause too much of a problem.
The drug store sells an eight ounce bottle of medicine; the meat packer sells a pound of beef. ,
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