[getsmart-l] New town centres not sustainable

[Terry Fowler]

Here is my take on the widely-praised new "sustainable" communities being built around the GTA. Published in the Toronto Star on August 31.
Terry Fowler
The Illusions of "Sustainable" Citybuilding: They Just Don't Get It

As we slowly begin to comprehend just how unsustainable and devoid of urban vitality the suburbs are, as we start to feel the loss of real community - which goes far beyond "neighbouring" in residential subdivisions - politicians, planners, and developers are rising to the challenge. They are trying to build "satellite downtowns," nodes of high density commercial and residential development combined, or mixed land use, as it is called.

Some of the new developments don't aspire to be "downtowns," but "mixed use communities." These are nevertheless substantial projects, such as Ecoplace Community (yes, you got that right) in Whitby, east of Toronto, which will have 14,000 residents and provide 10,000 jobs. The idea is for inhabitants to be able to walk or bike to work.

These developments are designed physically to be physically concentrated with mixed land use and short blocks - three out of the four "generators of diversity" Jane Jacobs said were necessary for urban vitality. But as she stressed, all four of the generators need to be present, and few people understand the significance of the fourth one: a mixture of old and new buildings.

This mixture is not something we can plan. It is the result of many individuals' decisions and of a determination by public authorities not to build everything at once. Pursued as an ethic, it is an inherent check on building anything too big. A mixture of old and new buildings implies a culture very different from ours, one that sees growth as organic development, not as cancerous replications of look alike units. Jacobs said that it is impossible not to make everything look the same if we build it all at one fell swoop. 

In this sense, principles of organic city growth, if there are any firm ones (I'm not sure there are) are interconnected with principles of appropriate scale, something Kirkpatrick Sale explored years ago in his book, Human Scale. The satellite downtowns and mixed use communities ignore these principles of scale and of the mix of old and new.

Cities need some large buildings, of course, buildings that are appropriate as landmarks or cultural centres, such as Queen's Park, the CN Tower, or the Royal Ontario Museum (we won't go into principles of architecture). But such buildings should be the exception to the economic ebb and flow of city districts. This flow is organic and needs different kinds of small to medium buildings to accommodate the creative dynamism that characterizes authentic urban vitality. These buildings can be residences turned into offices or small factories and then turned back into residences again (or a mix of all three) without much work. New ideas fit easily into their nooks and crannies.

The new mixed-use "centres", their protestations to the contrary, are the farthest thing from urban vitality in the sense that they are not chosen, let alone designed, by the people who are going to live and work there. They are plopped down from above. Their inappropriate scale and cookie-cutter forms are by-products of the rationale for building them: profit. There's nothing inherently wrong with making money, but that's what should be the by-product, if our cities are going to work.

Our cities will become genuinely sustainable when their physical form starts reflecting thoughtful, personal, and local decisions of people who are struggling to participate in the economy in their own ways. Our economy has become more and more non-participatory. Other people (most large companies) build our houses, offer us jobs, grow and sell us food, offer us health care, and even entertain us. Large scale urban development, whether it's "mixed-use", sustainable, or whatever, reflects this passive, compliant dimension of our culture.

Look below the radar and past the breathless news stories in mainstream media, and you will see many people building sustainable areas of the city in districts where big development hasn't cast its deadly pall. Queen Street West was one of those areas, but the city dropped the ball. Still, in the interstices, like weeds coming up through pavement, in every city hundreds of enterprising people and small groups are doing what these phoney new town centres are making a show of doing. There, amidst a seemingly disorganized jumble of old and new buildings, green city initiatives keep popping up. They can't be planned from above. And they are our only hope.

Published in Toronto Star, August 31, 2007, AA8

Edmund P. Fowler is the author of Building Cities That Work and Cites, Culture, and Granite. He lives in Toronto.


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