What is the typical Canadian dwelling?

According to Doug Saunders at The Globe, it’s this:

The dwelling that’s most Canadian, in its sheer numbers and popularity, is the slab farm – the block of high-rise rental apartment buildings, generally constructed between 1955 and 1979, located closer to the countryside than the city hall, in the suburbs or fringes of major cities.

I’m not sure he’s saying there are more of us in slab towers than single-family homes, but Saunders makes the case that this is a Canadian archetype :

We’re a nation of peri-urban apartment dwellers. Figures* show that Ottawa has more apartment buildings than Dallas, and most are midtown; Edmonton has more than Boston. Toronto’s outskirts are the North American leaders in elevator suburbia: Between Hamilton and Ajax, Ont., there are more than 2,000 of these cement towers, housing more than a million people; one in five residents of Canada’s largest urban area lives in one.

And therein lies a problem:

These slabs were built in the thousands in a postwar vision of blue-collar, car-owning nuclear families escaping the city and living a lower-middle-class high-rise life – and they’re the product of Canada’s unusually enlightened suburban planning, in which governments demanded that lower-income rental units be part of the mix. But, instead, these apartment clusters have become the initial destinations for millions of new immigrants.

… these places are ill-suited to the newcomer’s life: It’s physically impossible, and usually illegal, to open shops, factories and restaurants within them, and escape means a long bus ride.

German architect Thomas Sieverts has dubbed these apartments on the outskirts “cities without cities,” because they have the human concentrations of urban cores without any of the public-transportation links, retail and educational clusters, entrepreneurial opportunities or middle-class housing opportunities that make for successful urban life.

But there’s hope:

Graeme Stewart, a Toronto-based architect who has built his career around the recognition and renewal of these towers … has spent the past several years leading a Canadian initiative, Tower Renewal, which is backed by the United Way and devoted to transforming the postwar slab farms into thriving urban-style neighbourhoods. They have developed a simple set of public transportation, zoning, planning and cultural policies that can turn these cement islands into thriving neighbourhoods (as some have already done).

This spring, Toronto may vote on a proposed new zoning category – residential apartment commercial – that would allow slab farms to become higher-concentration mixes of commerce and housing as a way to bring new life to the empty cement patches between them. The initiative, Mr. Stewart says, is “moving at a glacier pace,” in large part because the condo boom has tied up all the planning resources.

Vancouver did build a few ‘slab farms,’ particularly in Burnaby. [Here’s a profile of Lougheed (below) in Spacing.] But mostly we integrated small privately-built point towers into our existing grid, associated with streetcar villages.  (Here‘s the Kerrisdale example.)
Now that we’re constructing thousands of units in municipal and regional town centres, notably along our rapid-transit lines, we can, if we do it right, avoid the problems that have to be addressed elsewhere in the country and truly build cities in the suburbs.
Meanwhile, in Vancouver City itself, it’s time we took another look at the ‘urban village’ model.  If neighbourhoods are successful at fighting off all but the most token forms of densification, arguing that in theory there’s already sufficient zoned land but confident it can never be consolidated and redeveloped, leaving only the arterials as an alternative, then don’t we have to accept that we truly become a city for the rich while expecting the suburbs to handle the growth?
Otherwise … what else?
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