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Throughout October UrbanToronto is featuring a special State of Housing 2026 editorial series to examine the pressing housing challenges facing Toronto and the Greater Golden Horseshoe.
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It is a feeling that we are all familiar with: walking through a new neighbourhood, with brand new streets and buildings designed with high quality streetscapes and architecture, but there is still a certain something... missing. A feeling of whimsy and charm that you get when walking through older neighbourhoods, a certain je ne sais quoi, that seems to be absent as you wander the streets of newer housing developments. This absence in our contemporary cities is what Smart Density founders Naama Blonder and Misha Bereznyak have tackled in their new book, Building Charm, which outlines their approach to designing neighbourhoods that reintroduces the charm that seems to have disappeared from modern developments.
The book starts with the basic questions of what is charm, and what makes a neighbourhood 'charming'? Blonder and Bereznyak summarize four key experiences that create charm in our cities: neighbourhoods must be accommodating, lively, engaging, and connecting.
Accommodating places provide protection from noise, traffic, and interruption, offering spaces that support both staying and moving with ease, reducing the cognitive load of navigating the environment. Lively places are defined by the visible presence of people and everyday activity, while engaging places encourage people to slow down and notice their surroundings through detail, variation, and change. Finally, connecting places support the formation of community through repeated, informal encounters over time that do not require deliberate social effort.
The authors then outline their Scaling Down System, a new approach that redefines our priorities when designing new neighbourhoods while still achieving the requirements needed for that neighbourhood to function. The system addresses two main factors that contribute to the absence of charm in contemporary developments: the lack of spaces and buildings designed to the human scale, and the impact of vehicles on how we create neighbourhoods.
"We all know what great neighbourhoods feel like, because we go and spend our vacation money there and we photograph them and we pay a premium to live in them", Blonder explained. "We have all the guidelines you can aspire to have, and yet, when you walk in some of the contemporary-built neighbourhoods, it's completely lacking human scale. It's highly repetitive, and you find yourself having a tower on a podium, which is one of the basic formulas today, and that podium is massive... How can we try to translate the old charm that we find in older neighbourhoods? And this is not about nostalgia or mimicking architecture that is in certain styles. There's basically two main aspects: building at a human scale, and the impact of vehicles on our built environment."
Interestingly, Smart Density argues that age is not a factor in creating charm in neighbourhoods; it is simply the physical attributes that determine a successful neighbourhood versus a cold and uninviting one. "It happened to be that these old neighbourhoods are built to human scale, and now they are old, but we can still build at a human scale, and it will not be related to being a historic neighbourhood," Blonder explained. "It's just because our best practices have changed and accommodated the car so much. Everything is built in oversize today. You go to Vaughan Metropolitan Centre and their most intimate streets are 20 metres wide."
While Smart Density are strong proponents of low-rise density, typically around four storeys, they are also in favour of building high-density towers, and do not believe that the two are mutually exclusive. In their book, they argue that charming neighbourhoods can still accommodate towers, so long as the street network and building frontages are designed to a human scale with the pedestrian experience in mind.
They use the example of the Distillery District, one of Toronto's most charming and most popular neighbourhoods, which despite being a historic district, is also in fact a high-density tower neighbourhood. But due to the placement of the towers, the relationship between the buildings and the street, the street layout and widths, and the active uses at grade, the towers are barely noticeable. Despite being home to thousands of residents and buildings exceeding 100 metres in height, it is still a charming neighbourhood.
Another charming neighbourhood in Toronto is Cabbagetown, whose streets and buildings date back to the 19th century. On a recent walking tour promoting their book, Blonder made a direct comparison between a street in Cabbagetown and a newly-built street in Regent Park. Both were lined with low-rise residential rows of roughly the same size and height, but their experience could not be more different. While the narrow streets of Cabbagetown provided an intimate environment, the sheer width of the Regent Park street, which accommodated two-way traffic, parking, sidewalks on both sides, and a setback from the street, felt far less charming, despite having almost the same built form.
"Good architecture cannot save a bad street", Blonder stated, "and if you don't have the bones right, nothing could help it, not the materials, not the articulation, not the architecture. So, we're saying in order to achieve charm, it's to build back in the human scale. And you know, when you open those design guidelines, they're always minimums. Minimum width, minimum height, minimum distance. What we're saying is that to achieve human scale, you actually need to apply some maximums, because there's a maximum to what you would consider walkable."
These principles apply to public spaces as well. Blonder uses the example of St. Andrew's Playground next to the Waterworks Building as one of the best new parks in the city, which is actively used at nearly all hours of the day. She compares it to Regent Park, which has similar amenities and is also widely used, but is much larger in scale. It only takes a few people to make St. Andrew's Playground feel lively and vibrant, whereas the shear size of Regent Park would require a large amount of people in order to make it feel equally as lively. One is at an intimate human scale, while the other is not. And while a city needs both, often new developments place less emphasis on the smaller scale open spaces and their importance in creating charming, liveable neighbourhoods.
Building Charm goes into far greater detail as to what makes a neighbourhood charming, and how we can achieve that in contemporary developments. The book also delves into the different physical components of a neighbourhood, how each can be designed to a human scale, and provides examples from around the world of successful neighbourhoods with plenty of charm.
Building Charm is now available for purchase at your local bookstore.
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Throughout October, UrbanToronto will be publishing features that examine the housing crisis in depth. Follow along as we present stories and perspectives that capture the state of housing today, and the ideas shaping how the region meets its growing need for homes.
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UrbanToronto's research and data service, UTPro, provides comprehensive data on construction projects in the Greater Golden Horseshoe—from proposal through to completion. Other services include Instant Reports, downloadable snapshots based on location, and a daily subscription newsletter, New Development Insider, that tracks projects from initial application.
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Thank you to the companies joining UrbanToronto to celebrate State of Housing Month 2026.
