June 26: ‘Clearly we should favour the U.S. over China.’ Readers debate using Meng Wanzhou as a ‘bargaining chip,' plus other letters to the editor
: I’m an urban planner. When we looked at moving to Toronto in 1972, I took a city map and drew a circle of one-kilometre radius around each subway station. We searched for a house inside those circles, finding one a short walk to Royal York station in the west.
I now live in a condo at Towne Square in downtown Oakville, a comfortable walk or quick bus ride to the train station. Toronto today is making progress to high-density nodes centred on transit. At a different scale, the urban region should be of undulating contours of low-medium-high density, transit-centred nodes of development, separated by parkland.
Given sky-high land acquisition costs, such development would replace some of Canada’s densest-built, most expensive single-family housing – with even more expensive housing, in high-rise form. A “luxury Hong Kong downtown” makes no sense to me; the 3.5 million Torontonians of the year 2050 will likely find their jobs clustered in many parts of the city, not just on Bay Street.
City planning’s focus should be on creating complete communities along transit lines in low-density suburban areas, where land assembly is significantly cheaper. Residential development is already becoming a trend at major suburban intersections, but these neighbourhoods are not yet communities. With transit capacities projected to be scarce even in 2050, Toronto should plan for new suburban centres where residents can walk or bike to work , with what it left missing in several overdeveloped downtown locations: schools, libraries, community spaces, employment centres, social services and green space. Surely we can learn?
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