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Would Someone Push The Envelope Please?

Jane Jacobs posits in her latest book Dark Age Ahead that we appear to be hitting a point where the experience of living in a truly urban setting has become a forgotten way of life. As suburbanization continues relatively unabated, people have forgotten what it's like to live in a city that has a tangible downtown, can be traversed by a variety of modes and that has a richness and variety in its settings. After looking at the Ottawa Trainyards development that is planned for Alta Vista, a mature 1950s era suburb to the east of downtown Ottawa, I'm beginning to wonder if this is true.

The first page of the sales job tells us that this is a mixed-use development. Not one whole paragraph into the first page, and we have already been fed the first fallacy. The design for the site is "mixed" in one sense: it contains a retail power centre (what a power centre is, I'm not sure), as well as Class A commercial office space. However, it is not mixed in the sense that planners and urbanites speak of. There is no residential component, and the actual mix of uses will be quite limited, given that the retail centre is going to be a haven for big box retailers, so forget about that specialty magazine store you might find on Bank Street, or the neighbourhood video store being anchors on this site. This seems puzzling, when you consider that Ottawa has adopted policies that are meant to limit the proliferation of big box stores, and seems to have some interest in encouraging mixed-use developments that are actually pedestrian-friendly, accessible by transit and that strengthen our Main Streets.

Having said that, I think the City dropped the ball on this one. The Train Yards project is situated on lands that were designated as a corridor for light rail. Whether or not this was the best corridor for light rail is debatable, but the decision to abandon this corridor was not based on such a discussion. That is not good planning. In addition, the Train Yards appear to be inaccessible from Industrial Avenue, the main artery, which takes it one step further away from any semblance of Main Street development. Despite the fact that City Council did wrest some concessions from Walmart (this is actually a big victory, given how pushy Walmart tends to be), this is still an ugly development. From what the site plan reveals, the retail stores face inwards, ensuring that suburbanites will be spared the horrors of looking at a real city street.

This appears to be a common trend in cities that seem to be serious about smart growth: downtown may have aggressive urban design strategies, and may even implement large parts of them, but the suburbs are still 'open for business'. James Howard Kunstler argued in The Geography of Nowhere that we have come to view downtown as a playground, rather than a really city centre. In Toronto, people regularly refer to the 905ers who pour into downtown in droves during the weekend with disdain. Apparently they can't get enough of downtown when it's time to play, taking advantage of the clubs, bars, restaurants and tony boutiques along streets like Queen Street West. However, when it's time to go back to the serious business of working and raising a family, it's time to leave the playground and go back to their boxy houses and the daily commute. Downtowns, with very few exceptions, are not considered to be real neighbourhoods where people raise families and develop lifelong social networks. One can only assume that the major lesson for planners and politicians over the last 30 years is that downtowns are nice make-believe places, but 'real' development occurs in the suburbs, and that 'real' development still takes the form of low-density tract housing and big box retail centres are still the special of the day.

I should add that recently, the City of Ottawa has been fighting a battle to keep big box stores out of urban areas. While this is a step in the right direction, the quality of suburban development has not really changed as of yet. The revitalization of many North American downtowns in recent years certainly indicates that there is a genuine interest in urban living amongst a growing segment of the population. Neighbourhoods such as St. Lawrence in Toronto, which was only built in the last 25 years show that there is also a market for authentic neighbourhoods that have places where people can do their everyday shopping and socializing. This is in part because Toronto has been more aggressive than most cities in Canada at pushing for urban development, not just cookie cutter developments. The question is: when is this sort of policy going to become the norm? When are we going to push the envelope and start taking seriously the segment of society that wants a truly urban neighbourhood to live in?