Planned Sprawl in the GTA

[sixrings]

Another style of development that tends to get a bad rap are “towers-in-the-park”. I’m sure many of us are well-versed in the supposed ills of such style of buildings. But it’s not all bad. Large green spaces surrounding buildings, front entrances set well back from the busy main road...it’s actually pretty sweet. Urban meets suburban meets nature. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if a new urban philosophy readopts this style of building.

I would be very surprised if this comes back in style. On all that park around the tower a developer could fit in a couple other buildings which means they are losing revenue. Secondly one of the benefits of living in a tower is proximity to amenities. Most tower in the parks can barely manage to have a convenient store yet alone a grocery store. Today towers are more and more being built with podiums which promise decent retail.

 

[innsertnamehere]

He has been on a bit of a rant streak lately, but I hear what he's saying. 905 planners are mostly out to lunch when it comes to smart growth, and they do have control over things like zoning and neighbourhood design. They are the ones who put employment zones next to highways and ensure that neighbourhoods turn their backs to suburban arterials. I think a lot of them are happy with the status quo - after all, that's why they live in the 905 in the first place.

to be fair the provincial policy statement tells them to put employment adjacent to highways. That one is on the province.

 

[innsertnamehere]

didnt YRT just build a huge new operations centre off of the 404?

 

[wopchop]

didnt YRT just build a huge new operations centre off of the 404?

You might be thinking of the operations centre for the Town of Newmarket?

 

[innsertnamehere]

no, just north of 16th. I watched it get built over the summer.. Its quite an oddly shaped. low slung industrial building. Might be a gigantic bus garage, now that I am thinking of it, actually.

Definitely YRT though, it has their logo on the side of the building.

 

[TJ O'Pootertoot]

no, just north of 16th. I watched it get built over the summer.. Its quite an oddly shaped. low slung industrial building. Might be a gigantic bus garage, now that I am thinking of it, actually.

Definitely YRT though, it has their logo on the side of the building.

You guessed right -a big bus garage. Years ago they were talking about doing it at Yonge/407 before everyone realized the development potential in Langstaff Gateway.

Here's an oldish news story about the garage:
http://www.yorkregion.com/news-story/1934848-work-on-132m-richmond-hill-transit-facility-begins/

 

[ehlow]

Towers in the park can be pretty bad, as we all know, in some un-walkable suburban locations.

But in other walkable locations they have worked out alright: High Park, Yonge & Eg for example.

Having said that, I'm not a big fan of them, I'm just saying there are variations in how they worked out based on the surrounding area.

 

[TJ O'Pootertoot]

We have a few mini-threads bouncing around:
-Employment along highways is not bad by itself. The problem is when it's ALL you build is these cheap, crappy business parks. 404/7 is a well-developed employment centre but, of course, it empties out at 5 pm (and at lunch time, for that matter). But people want things both ways, right? You want your Amazon shipment to come quickly? You want to go into Canadian Tire on a whim and pick up a tent that of course they have in stock? Well, those things happen because we've shifted massive distribution centres etc. to the suburbs. So you want the suburbs and you need the suburbs, but then you hate them for being the suburbs, eh? (I'm speaking of "you" generically!)

As pointed out above, the PPS talks a lot about preserving employment lands and earmarks highways as prime corridors for some types, and mixed-use nodes for others.

(Placing a transit garage at the intersection of 2 major highways strikes me as so obvious, I'll just let that sit there.)

-Towers in the park are terrible. There's nothing wrong with towers or parks, but together they have not worked and it's been proven. They kill street life and, at worst, you get places like Regent Park that have to be torn down because they force everything into a dead interior space. There's probably some way to build a "tower in a park" that works, but no one's really nailed it yet. clearly the planning thought has shifted from that to things like appropriately scaled street walls, so you can cram lots of people into a small space, without making it totally inhospitable at ground level.

 

[44 North]

Re: Towers in the Park - I’m not promoting a full 1:1 replication of the Corbusier style, or what can be found scattered across TO. But perhaps a style that heavily borrows from the philosophy? I like urbanism, I like nature and greenery. Some may say never the twain shall meet; but I think it shall. There’s no question people like parks and green space. And anyone that has kids knows how important it is to have a place to play that’s away from traffic.

Basically what I’m imagining here is New Urbanism meets the Garden City Movement meets Streetcar Suburbs. Imagine if Don Mills were created today, with similar principles applied as when it was first built.... but more urban, less auto-dependent, and tweaked to 21 st C standards. Or if the City allowed a major development on the Islands – how would this completely car-free development look?

For all the supposed ills brought about by Tower in the Park, it can’t hold a torch to how awful this type of development (10 York) is. Ultra-high density, but shoved between an expressway, a highway, a highway offramp, and a road that’s basically a highway. If Jane Jacobs ripped on Corbusier, what would she say about this?

But yeah, I guess this may be off-topic.

 

[TJ O'Pootertoot]

Re: Towers in the Park - I’m not promoting a full 1:1 replication of the Corbusier style, or what can be found scattered across TO. But perhaps a style that heavily borrows from the philosophy? I like urbanism, I like nature and greenery. Some may say never the twain shall meet; but I think it shall. There’s no question people like parks and green space. And anyone that has kids knows how important it is to have a place to play that’s away from traffic.

Basically what I’m imagining here is New Urbanism meets the Garden City Movement meets Streetcar Suburbs. Imagine if Don Mills were created today, with similar principles applied as when it was first built.... but more urban, less auto-dependent, and tweaked to 21 st C standards. Or if the City allowed a major development on the Islands – how would this completely car-free development look?

For all the supposed ills brought about by Tower in the Park, it can’t hold a torch to how awful this type of development (10 York) is. Ultra-high density, but shoved between an expressway, a highway, a highway offramp, and a road that’s basically a highway. If Jane Jacobs ripped on Corbusier, what would she say about this?

Depends how you look at it. That York tower is a good example of intensification. Sure, it's beside a highway but it's a tiny plot of land, 5 minutes walk to the country's biggest job centre and transportation hub. I sure wouldn't want a whole city of those but by itself? No problems. You want problems, look at the top of that picture, where Cityplace is basically the 1990s/2000s version of towers in a park.

Neither of us wants to circle back on it (!!) but, really, if you want to combine New Urbanist ideals where density and greenspace co-exist, I can think of a (still unbuilt) neighbourhood or two that captures that. Really, Garden City + New Urbanism + Streetcar suburbs= Calthorpe. If you don't believe me,
pick up one of his books, where he talks about all of those things (e.g. The Regional City, where Robert Fishman's intro is all about how the book explicitly updates those ideals).

But he's new enough here that those ideals are as yet unrpoven, whereas Cityplace, which once looked so great and shiny, is already raising all sorts of concerns and looking ever more like the last of a dying breed.

 

[W. K. Lis]

Towers in the park can be pretty bad, as we all know, in some un-walkable suburban locations.

...

Towers in the park are generally wasted land. They can't be used as a park. Try to have some kids play a game of pickup football, and you'll get complaints from the neighbours overlooking them.

 

[44 North]

Neither of us wants to circle back on it (!!) but, really, if you want to combine New Urbanist ideals where density and greenspace co-exist, I can think of a (still unbuilt) neighbourhood or two that captures that. Really, Garden City + New Urbanism + Streetcar suburbs= Calthorpe. If you don't believe me,
pick up one of his books, where he talks about all of those things (e.g. The Regional City, where Robert Fishman's intro is all about how the book explicitly updates those ideals).

But he's new enough here that those ideals are as yet unrpoven, whereas Cityplace, which once looked so great and shiny, is already raising all sorts of concerns and looking ever more like the last of a dying breed.

Meh. That Calthorpe plan I view as similar to the Doug Ford / Eric Kuhne waterfront plan. Like the Kuhne vision, Calthorpe’s proposal looked really out of place, out of scale, far-fetched, and it seemed there were a few glaring issues that needed to be sorted out.

As well, with Calthorpe’s plan densities seemed way too high, transit mode share projections appeared preposterous, job expectations were shaky, and nothing really stood out as unique or interesting about the site. Unlike TO’s waterfront (which even as a polluted undeveloped brownfield is urban and interesting with a lot of potential), Langstaff Gateway’s only redeeming quality is that 1% of the site fronts onto Yonge Street. Otherwise, it’s merely a tract between a toll highway and cemetery.

Another similarity was that the Doug plan chose a very odd form of transit (monorail). But with LG (aside from the astronomically-priced subway) Personal Rapid Transit was picked. This is way more inane than monorail ever could be. For a site that’s supposed to be a CityPlace-esque mixed-use mini-metropolis - recommending PRT is preposterous. Like Eric Kuhne, was Calthorpe hand-picked / sole-sourced by Markham to come up with something? Or were there other plans for LG that were a tad more down to earth?

Long and short, I don’t think it’s fair to compare what was planned for Langstaff to a Garden City. And ditto for the comparison to the streetcar suburbs of yore. The majority of LG is nowhere near the planned subway station, and there was no streetcar/LRT planned for the site. Even improved GO was snubbed so as to boost the case for a subway extension. If the site actually was planned as a streetcar suburb, or Garden City, or something like West Don Lands where a streetcar spur led into a midrise site with ample parkland - it probably would've been pretty cool.

 

[TJ O'Pootertoot]

Meh. That Calthorpe plan I view as similar to the Doug Ford / Eric Kuhne waterfront plan. Like the Kuhne vision, Calthorpe’s proposal looked really out of place, out of scale, far-fetched, and it seemed there were a few glaring issues that needed to be sorted out.

Clearly we beg to differ on Langstaff but to compare it to Doug Ford's vision (a hotel you can park your boat at!) is grossly insulting. We both know Doug Ford doesn't know WTF a streetcar suburb is and he wouldn't know Ebenezer Howard from Howard the Duck.

On the other hand, Langstaff aside, the combination of factors you describe are perfectly encapsulated in Calthorpe's vision of transit-oriented new urbanist communities. I wasn't talking about Langstaff specifically, anyway, as much as NU-TOD as a re-visioning of the Garden City, which is most certainly explicitly is. Again, read Fishman's intro to The Regional City.

Calthorpe also did work in Markham Centre, updating the original plan and whether or not that meets your definition, I don't know. But specific local developments aside, if you're looking at a 21-st Century version of the Garden City and streetcar suburbs (i.e. a balanced, polycentric urban whole with ample green space and development concentrated along transit corridors), that's Calthorpe in a nutshell.

 

[Silence&Motion]

It's difficult to separate the inherent qualities of towers in the park from the fact that it is the built form we most closely associate with poverty. It's not Le Corbusier's fault that the economic conditions of the late 20th century meant that the vast majority of North American families could afford their own detached suburban home complete with front and back yards and two-car garage. Given the choice between a small apartment in a tower in the park or your own "house in the park", who would willingly choose the former?

As the average price of a detached house pushes past the $1 million mark, and the city becomes filled with condos, I suspect that any remaining towers in the park that don't get redeveloped (a la Emerald City) will gain a new level of appreciation.

They do have a certain charm when surrounded by a dense urban landscape: https://www.google.ca/maps/@40.7472...ata=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1sfFpyOte7lXoAOm5FJMgIgg!2e0

 

[Silence&Motion]

I should add that most examples of "towers in the park" in this city would be better described as "towers in the parking lot", since that's what occupies most of the property.