Planned Sprawl in the GTA

[lenaitch]

May I suggest my hometown of Port Perry. Waterfront park well lit up with Christmas lights right now.

Good point. I have no idea if or how the communities I have mentioned have 'winterized' their waterfronts.

 

[jje1000]

Interesting distillation of many problems with 20th-21st century city planning.
- Traffic woes- Runaway effect of car-oriented development, where planning is both informed by the need to accommodate the car, and yet perpetuates that need in its requirements (i.e. parking requirements, fire access).
- Failure of large-parcel projects- inability of inhabitants/users to take agency/ownership and adapt poor planning/oversights- they give up and the space slummifies (Regent Park)/is never born (large areas of Toronto Waterfront). Spaces like suburbs can end up in a stasis of slow entropy (trapped in a certain lifestyle, greying and aging).
- Failure of city governance- local representation is centralized into increasingly distant representatives who end up applying top-down, all-inclusive policies that can be incompatible with local realities.

We think there are three big elements. The first is a profound failure of governance. For hundreds of years, English towns had been run by their corporations and alderman, regulating their markets, managing almshouses, licensing traders. Some were active. Some were sleepy. No doubt many were modestly corrupt. But the fortunes of the merchant mayors and councillors were tightly tied to that of their towns and, on the whole, they governed quietly.

No one could accuse twentieth-century town councils of lacking ambition. Overawed by town architects such as Donald Gibson in Coventry — who described German air raids as “a blessing in disguise” — and by prophets of “traffic modernism” as preached by the Architectural Review, they confused the intoxicating freedom of a rare car on a 1930s country road with how our towns centres should function.

The careful accretion of beautiful, practical human-scaled streets and squares — good for trading and talking, for meeting and living — was thus brutally swept away in the name of a false vision of progress: fast roads and overly-scaled, under-detailed buildings. Complex and adaptable towns were replaced with urban monocultures, often under single ownership which were unable to evolve.

If Britain is truly to prosper, we need stronger towns. This doesn’t mean naive “regional development policies” to “pick winners” or to subsidise employment where it would not otherwise go — the jobs tend to end when the subsidy evaporates. But it does mean allowing our towns to rediscover their true purpose as a place for people profitably to congregate for business and pleasure. And that will normally mean helping them become cleaner, more pleasant places in which it is easier and cheaper, to live, work, spend time, set up businesses and raise children. Towns like Bradford, Altrincham and Macclesfield are starting to achieve this through partially community-led high street revitalisation.

All politics is not local. Politics is place. Most of our towns are nearly 900 years old. Treat them with a little love and they will be good for thousands more to come. For all our technological advances, people, after all, are still the same.

Reclaim the streets | Nicholas Boys Smith | The Critic Magazine

Which century saw the creation of more new towns than any other in English history? The prosperous industrial nineteenth? The booming mercantile eighteenth?

thecritic.co.uk

Brockville and Goderich (moreso before the tornado) andperhaps Gananoque, in my view three of the prettiest towns in Ontario, have very walkable cores. No doubt, big-box-land has occupied the outer fringes.

Seaforth has one of the most intact 19th century Main Streets in Ontario. Unfortunately, not much economic on-goings there- but then again, I suppose the best way to preserve is to forget.

 

[lenaitch]

Seaforth has one of the most intact 19th century Main Streets in Ontario. Unfortunately, not much economic on-goings there- but then again, I suppose the best way to preserve is to forget.

Agree and fair observation. I tend to lean to communities on or near water.

 

[innsertnamehere]

There are also lots of "weak" downtowns in the province, it just depends where you are. Simcoe, St Thomas, Brantford, etc. all have fairly poor downtowns. Brantford has been improving as of late, but it's not quite there yet.

My wife is from Simcoe, and it was really a shock when I first went there when we started dating. The downtown feels very american with essentially no major functions or useful retail spaces. No restaurants of note, etc. The library and Municipal offices are essentially the only reason to go there. Otherwise everyone drives right through to the strip on Highway 3. That type of downtown is common across the US, but less so in Ontario I find.. most small towns have managed to keep the cores at least semi relevant with restaurants, useful boutique shops (think book stores, bakeries, hair salons, etc.), nice park spaces, and some form of civic function, creating a reason for people to go there regularly. Some (like Port Perry) even manage to retain larger format retailers like grocers which successfully compete with the edge of town strip plazas.

 

[Copper1212]

Better in the summer if work/lifestyle permits. I imagine the waterfronts are pretty bleak and uninviting this time of year and most amenities would be closed. Brockville refurbished their downtown railway tunnel (oldest in Canada apparently) as a tourist attraction. It's about 1/2 km long and the geology and 1850s construction is interesting if you are into such things. Alas, closed until Spring.

Cobourg for one lights up its waterfront

There's also a skating rink

 

[lenaitch]

There are also lots of "weak" downtowns in the province, it just depends where you are. Simcoe, St Thomas, Brantford, etc. all have fairly poor downtowns. Brantford has been improving as of late, but it's not quite there yet.

My wife is from Simcoe, and it was really a shock when I first went there when we started dating. The downtown feels very american with essentially no major functions or useful retail spaces. No restaurants of note, etc. The library and Municipal offices are essentially the only reason to go there. Otherwise everyone drives right through to the strip on Highway 3. That type of downtown is common across the US, but less so in Ontario I find.. most small towns have managed to keep the cores at least semi relevant with restaurants, useful boutique shops (think book stores, bakeries, hair salons, etc.), nice park spaces, and some form of civic function, creating a reason for people to go there regularly. Some (like Port Perry) even manage to retain larger format retailers like grocers which successfully compete with the edge of town strip plazas.

I'm not so sure it's as much towns managing to keep their cores relevant as fighting hard to bring them back. Box stores and chain restaurants moved into the fringes where land was available, cheaper and had more parking, which put pressure on the older mom-and-pop's downtown. It strikes me that if the 'main drag' is a current/former provincial highway or other major artery it's often harder.
It's also a function of the local economy. It seems the downtown of Sault Ste. Marie seems to cycle with the fortunes of the steel plant, and I imagine (but don't know fore certain) the St. Thomas was hit hard by the closure of the Ford plant.

 

[MisterF]

One small town that has a core worth visiting is Almonte. The waterfall at the centre of town is spectacular, and the main street right next to it isn't bad either. Nearby Carleton Place has a nice core as well.

Brockville and Goderich (moreso before the tornado) andperhaps Gananoque, in my view three of the prettiest towns in Ontario, have very walkable cores. No doubt, big-box-land has occupied the outer fringes.

I've never been to Goderich but what always stuck me about its downtown from looking at it on Street View is how wide the main street (the circle) is. It has diagonal parking, three full one way driving lanes, and another lane for parking. It's enormous. Some of the streets radiating out from the circle are actually worse, with around 7 lanes worth of pavement. Drastically reducing the road space on these streets would make a world of difference in complementing the unique town layout.

 

[lenaitch]

Viewing mid 1800s town design through a 21st century high density urban lens.

Some of the streets are wide (can't say I recall seeing any that are 7 lanes wide, but anyway . . . ) but narrowing them at great taxpayer expense would only result in wider boulevards. It's a town of about 7000 people that has essentially been stable for 40 years, not urban Toronto.

 

[christiesplits]

Out of curiosity I looked at the walkscore in Markham and was stunned by just how low the score was in the 'new urbanist' jewel of Cornell.

 

[innsertnamehere]

There is basically no retail in Cornell, or much of anything beyond houses and schools. Everyone has to drive over to Markham Road to do their shopping.

There is a planned retail and commercial area along Highway 7, but it hasn't been built yet. About 5 years ago a developer tried to do some marketing for a retail plaza there, but apparently the market uptake from tenants was terrible. the Walmart plaza south of the 407 is dead too, Smartcentres hasn't been able to find many tenants for it in a decade+. For some reason the area is just a retail desert.

 

[Midtown Urbanist]

1960’s planning was on another level. The province planned (and actually built the first few houses) a new city of 150,000 on the shores or Lake Erie, laid out the modern GTA highway network even though the first phase of the 401 had opened but a decade earlier, and saw the rapid growth outward of the suburbs.

stuff like square one was built because they knew the whole area would develop in quick order.

Much like how the Halton Hills outlet mall is in the middle of nowhere today, in 30 years it’ll be completely surrounded by development.

Was this supposed to be Nanticoke? Where can one learn more about that aborted plan?

It's actually Townsend, which is north of Nanticoke.

I find it very interesting how a larger city located on the Ontario side of Lake Erie never happened, considering Toledo, Cleveland, Erie, and Buffalo all exist. I've been out in Nanticoke/Port Dover area and it always seemed like it was supposed to be bigger than it actually was. Interesting to know that there was an attempt at making it happen.

This larger city on the Ontario side could have had Crystal Beach Amusement Park relocated there (and significantly expanded) to compete with Cedar Point in Sandusky, OH, which is across Lake Erie from Leamington, ON.

Maybe something that should not be ruled out completely long-term, given the GTA's rapid population growth. Though there remains the tricky problem that seemingly plagued the original plan of how do you induce employment to relocate to the new area? That Stelco steel mill in Nanticoke is probably not long for this world either.

That being said, there is a lot of land ripe for intensification in the GTA already, including here at Square One.

I wouldn't rule it out completely either, but I doubt it would be as a result of the GTA's growth. There is a lot of land to still be eaten up and intensified in Peel, York, Halton, Durham, and more by the GTA's growing footprint before anything near Lake Erie gets consumed. There are lots of other malls like SQ1 in the GTA that will be redeveloped eventually to create dense highrise communities. I doubt the GTA would even be able to get that large in footprint either.

Industry over there would not be enough to sustain a city, between the Stelco Plant, Imperial Oil Refinery, and the Port of Nanticoke, so any community there would have to be completely planned with the provincial/federal government having a heavy hand in building new industry. Even back in the day with the OPG coal plant, it still probably wasn't enough to sustain a full community, and it being shut down was probably the final nail in the coffin for the area.

As the wikipedia article said, instead of the growth concentrating in Townsend workers in those (new at the time) plants simply moved into existing communities in the area. Norfolk County has a population of a little under 70,000, just spread out over a large area. My in-laws live down there and my father in-law worked at the Nanticoke Generating Station for his whole career before he retired. They live in Simcoe, not Townsend.

Anyway, we are way off topic. Didn't mean to take it this way. Maybe we should start a thread elsewhere on the topic or something?

It is off topic but also kinda relevant. Ontario could really benefit from having another large urban area to help spread out the population a little bit.

Outside of the gta (+hamilton) theres basically just kw+guelph and london. Given we're surrounded by lakes there's definitely place for new urban centers to rise. Doesnt even have to be along Erie. I could see something along the shores of huron popping up to. Particularly Georgian bay given its proximity to Barrie

Why not Barrie itself? I could easily see it growing to +500k.

It is off topic. If you'd like to continue down the New Town Road (sorry), please create a new thread in the General Discussions forum!

42

Bringing discussion over from another thread. The question asked is "Would Ontario benefit from having another large urban area to help spread out the population a little bit?"

I enjoy the idea of strong mid-size cities. I am not sure about the viability of creating a new urban centre from scratch, but I do see places like Niagara Region with it's various population centres rapidly growing in the coming decades.

Also noted in the previous discussion that it is quite peculiar that Southern Ontario does not have any large population centre on the banks of Lake Erie or Lake Huron. If creating a new urban centre from scratch, where should one be placed?

 

[W. K. Lis]

When was the last time you've seen any SUV with four people in it, during rush hour?

What no parking ticket?

When was the last time you found an empty parking space on the street at your destination?

This is why it is so hard to compete against propaganda like this that doesn't reflect reality.

 

[ericmacm]

Bringing discussion over from another thread. The question asked is "Would Ontario benefit from having another large urban area to help spread out the population a little bit?"

I enjoy the idea of strong mid-size cities. I am not sure about the viability of creating a new urban centre from scratch, but I do see places like Niagara Region with it's various population centres rapidly growing in the coming decades.

Also noted in the previous discussion that it is quite peculiar that Southern Ontario does not have any large population centre on the banks of Lake Erie or Lake Huron. If creating a new urban centre from scratch, where should one be placed?

It would absolutely be a boon to Ontario to see another area or two be able to take some of the growth load off of the GTA for the sake of spreading out population. We already have Ottawa as a large secondary metropolitan area to the GTA, but I would like to see Windsor and Sudbury become the size of Ottawa, which would put Ontario with 4 major metropolitan areas about 4 hours apart from each other (4 hr from Windsor to Toronto, 4.5 hr from Toronto to Ottawa, 4.25 hr from Toronto to Sudbury). I an highly doubtful anything like this would happen for either Windsor or Sudbury, but the separations would insure that they would remain distinctly independent instead of growing into each other.

In terms of a new population centre on Lake Huron or Lake Erie, it becomes a harder question because the coast lines are so far out of the provincial paths of commerce. For Lake Erie, I figure the closest shot would be seeing London sprawl towards the lake and eventually merge with St. Thomas and Port Stanley. I see it being more viable on Lake Huron, with Wasaga Beach, Collingwood, and Barrie all eventually growing into one area.

 

[innsertnamehere]

I've always thought that Own Sound would be a good spot for one as it's out in a bit of a population desert in North-western southern Ontario. North of Orangeville there is a huge rural population base but without any really major population centres.

The problem is that its sort of isolated, much like the failed "townsend". The only reason you have to go there is to go there.

Most of Ontario's mid-sized cities are successful because of their location along the main corridors of trade between the major centres.

A typical strategy to try and move pressure off a burgeoning city is to move government jobs away from it. It seems to be the best way of taking the pressure off, but has been met with mixed success in the past. Perhaps its time that Ontario move it's capital and shift most of it's provincial employment to a new city on the shores of Lake Erie or Huron? It would have to be a huge undertaking, for sure.

 

[NotAToy]

In terms of a new population centre on Lake Huron or Lake Erie, it becomes a harder question because the coast lines are so far out of the provincial paths of commerce. For Lake Erie, I figure the closest shot would be seeing London sprawl towards the lake and eventually merge with St. Thomas and Port Stanley. I see it being more viable on Lake Huron, with Wasaga Beach, Collingwood, and Barrie all eventually growing into one area.

I think that 2 things could happen to make the GTA less grow-y.

1. Ottawa can grow. A GO style train to Buckingham, Carleton Place, Cumberland etc. could work.
2. London needs to be given more attention. Densification, maybe a new city center south of the 401 could help. *Uninformed opinion.*