The buildings, you see, reference heritage via their massing and materials, and evoke maritime culture by...
...and then we end up with this.
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Replying to @CityComforts and @LUrbaniste
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Tristan Cleveland
@LUrbaniste
PhD, MCIP. Urban planner at Happy City. Focused on cities, health & prosperity. Teach history of cities at Dalhousie University.
Tristan Cleveland’s Tweets
Will miss the Coastal Cafe. Yet widening Robie for bus lanes is no doubt the right thing to do. Other than this business, the street is mostly car lots, crab grass, and vacant lots on that side.
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A disastrous neurosis. Once everything must be original, it's game over for beauty. And yet for some reason endless minimalist boxes are never seen as modernist pastiche, it can only be applied to traditional design. A popular uprising is required, I fear.
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Oddly, heritage activists often make this problem worse by requiring new buildings to be similar yet "distinct" from heritage buildings (which usually means bland modernism with a pitched roof). So strange: nothing bad happens if we just build in the traditional style.
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In most places, new buildings erode the character of an area in a steady decline towards placelessness. We must reverse this trend, aiming to rebuild and enhance the character of our places. I write more about this in my new blog for @createstreets createstreets.com/we-should-buil
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Morning bicycle rush hour in Montreal is basically this, but everyday.
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Yesterday was National #BikeRollToSchool day. For Alameda Elementary it was just another Wednesday. Speaker wasn’t connecting so make sure to have the volume up so you can hear the children. It’s so joyful. #BikeBus
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Huge differences between downtowns that have fully recovered from the pandemic, and those that are still running on empty. Toronto is at 47%, based on cellphone data.
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3. Several cities have values of greater than 100 meaning their downtowns are seeing more cell phone activity than pre-pandemic: Salt Lake City (139), Bakersfield (118), Fresno (115), Columbus (109) and El Paso (106).
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Sometimes I feel bad for reply guying the NHTSA on their bad takes. But then I remember their inaction results in thousands of preventable deaths of mostly young healthy people every year and decide its a pretty measured response.
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At a certain scale and speed, streets simply are not safe for people on foot. Dunbrack passes through the centre of Clayton Park. It should be a main street, not a highway.
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"Make eye contact" won't work at Lacewood/Dunbrack
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Pretty excited Disco Prince is an intersection in Nova Scotia. (Sydney).
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Strange that municipalities almost always provide public maps of zones and designations, but often don't provide map s of their street classifications, which can have a massive impact on the future of a community.
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And the Montana Senate just Sine Die'd after sending all zoning reform bills to the governor's desk! #montanamiracle #yimby #prohousing
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The follow-up "best comments" article is almost even more worth reading.
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The urban planning profession has helped to create a housing crisis by creating slow, difficult, often arbitrary approval processes. Turns out Ethics Review Boards for science suffer the same trouble. This is a worthwhile read for planners.
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The modus operandi of zoning in the US is that poor people are a nuisance on par with heavy industry and should thus be segregated by law.
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And there's much more. I might come back a tweet another thread of insights later. I look forward to trying to wrangle this into a book.
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- Recognize that you can't have your cake and eat it too. If you want walkability, it means you do not want large roads and parking lots. It's tempting for politicians to try and make everyone happy, but all this does is waste money on projects that can't succeed.
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- Recognize that car-dependent standards are completely inappropriate for walkable areas. Fire the head of city departments if necessary to ensure people are in charge who have the right goals. Create a team of professionals focused specifically on walkable areas.
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- Give developers an active role in crafting the plan, even sitting on a steering committee (alongside community members & other groups). If developers spend time on a plan — in a room with each other — it signals that they intend to build.
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- Create short-term incentives — like tax breaks — with a hard deadline, like 4 years. This encourages developers to invest now, not later, which can start a ball rolling. I'm not usually a fan of tax breaks but they make sense for this specific goal.
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- Make big public investments — like a library or a new public space next to transit — in just a few blocks, so developers will start to invest in that specific place. This becomes a nucleous of walkable development, which can attract more.
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The central challenge is to convince developers that other developers will invest, because if enough do, they can transform the place into the kind of context where dense, walkable growth can succeed. There are a few tricks for that.
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You can't just overlay downtown-style walkable zoning. When an area is full of parking lots and large roads, no one wants to build mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly buildings. You need to change the underlying economic incentives.
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You can now read my PhD thesis on how to redesign suburban communities to become healthy, walkable places. A few key insights 1/x
dalspace.library.dal.ca//handle/10222/
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The last hundred years of planning and architecture has been a machine to turn the first into the second.
Where is the reverse button?
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Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter.
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Hill I will die on: criterion and datum are dead. Criteria is now singular as well as plural. Data is a mass noun. It's time to move on.
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I actually got lost driving through the middle of this intersection the other day, despite having written the guide on how to use it.
spacing.ca/atlantic/2014/
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Flag of Sweden if Jesus had been killed trying to make a turn at Halifax's Windsor-Chebucto Intersection
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Watch until the 14 second mark. Really shows the power of providing chairs and tables people can move.
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“People tend to sit where there are places to sit” ~ William ‘Holly’ Whyte.
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This is what the future of long-term care homes looks like. Who wants to live out their days in a hospital?
cbc.ca/radio/spark/ho
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Video of 1940s California roads in colour
Our highway standards were written at a time when wide open roads were possible.
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Updated "spiky world" map, showing that the cities that attract research attract more research, in a cycle that leaves big differences between cities.
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Our latest #paper, “Boosting, Sorting and Complexity - Urban Scaling of Innovation around the World”, is available now doi.org/10.1093/jeg/lb. It explores the relationship between #city size and #innovation output in 1120 #regions across 33 #countries and 569 #technologies.
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Brilliant! 2-in-1.
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Replying to @LUrbaniste
I’m also a big fan of NYC’s right-sized garbage trucks fitted with snow plows. 
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Design your firetrucks for your city, not your city for your firetrucks.
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For $131,000 you can live in a garbage home like the tweet below and hate life.
OR, now hear me out, you could do #goodurbanism and build this:
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These Lennar “tiny homes”, 350-651 SF, are like studio apts; barely enough room to fit a car in the “one-car driveway”.
They also feel pretty tightly packed in like sardine cans adjacent to one another. Would you buy or live one of these?
Article below.
offsitedigest.com/2023/04/lennar
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TTC survey on parking lots, which you can't answer unless you already use the lots. That means no feedback from
1) those who would use them but there's no space
2) sensible people who would prefer to see housing built
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The TTC wants to hear from you on our parking lots!
Your feedback on price, parking spaces, and amenities at the lot is important.
Take the Customer Parking survey here: bit.ly/43MEZhd
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The 4th looks amazing. The rest sadly do look like design by spreadsheet.
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30K+ steps today walking recent downtown #Toronto city-building projects. Very dense (in some cases arguably excessively so) with interesting and occasionally bold architecture, but Toronto still has work to do improving how big buildings land at street level.
What do you think?
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Would it kill ya to add a cornice?
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It’s hard to describe to councillors how our conservation areas, the character of which we should be acknowledging and conserving, are negatively affected by buildings that have no aesthetic roots in them.
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Drove past these new builds in the Cotswolds earlier. Absolutely lovely, designs like these are the best weapon against NIMBYism.
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Cool: temporary outdoor gallery. Would love to see more of this.
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"A majority of [students] say that the campus climate prevents them from saying things they believe."
Precisely the opposite of what universities are meant to accomplish.
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