Areas that are not quite urban, not quite suburban

[innsertnamehere]

I feel that Sheppard ave is quickly approaching this stage.. I feel that it will never have a true urban feel to it, but the "semi-urban" feel is fast approaching for it.

 

[Hipster Duck]

I feel that Sheppard ave is quickly approaching this stage.. I feel that it will never have a true urban feel to it, but the "semi-urban" feel is fast approaching for it.

Yeah, Sheppard is approaching urbanization in a very half-assed way. There are those midrise "avenues" style apartments near Wilson Heights Blvd. but they don't have real retail in their bases and the sidewalk is of the embarassing 3-foot-wide-suburban-cul-de-sac variety separated from the road by a large grass median. In the wintertime, these sidewalks are positively forelorn.

Sheppard East between Bayview and Leslie still has too many strip malls and a narrow sidewalk, despite the presence of a subway underneath it.

 

[adma]

Though in a lot of these present-day suburban cases, I wonder whether demographic/cultural trends also work against the old gentrification-compatible patterns, i.e. the gripe about Toronto having fewer and fewer West Queen Wests on the horizon being negated by there being fewer and fewer of the white-Anglo/white-Euro class to generate such phenomena. IOW it's less about Gladstone than Gangnam these days...

 

[Lenser]

I don't see it that way. Cool is cool, no matter what colour or flavour it happens to take. All you need is youth and their innate desire to bond with certain trends. Cool is an international language, and few people speak it as fluently as the young people of the world.

 

[adma]

I don't see it that way. Cool is cool, no matter what colour or flavour it happens to take. All you need is youth and their innate desire to bond with certain trends. Cool is an international language, and few people speak it as fluently as the young people of the world.

And again: what I'm talking about. "Cool" might mean something different to those of non-Western origin, or those conditioned by an increasingly "Easternized" pop/mass culture.

Next to that, you might find that the old etched-in-stone notions of "cool neighbourhoods" are fated to be rather greybearded conceits...

 

[W. K. Lis]

It would help if there was an end to free parking at malls and offices in the suburban areas. A commercial tax parking levy or tax for a start.

See this article, at this link, on Paying for transit in the GTHA,1: Commercial Parking Levy.

 

[TrickyRicky]

I don't know Hipster, when you say not quite urban not quite suburban, I would almost have to say all of it. What I mean is that most of this utterly vast expanse of city (and I'm only talking 416 here) could be described in those terms. When I came back from Asia this summer the cab was going down Ossington and I was almost hallucinating from sensory deprivation. The contrast in relative levels of urbanity was that stark.

Also, I feel as though the search for the "next thing" belies the actual level of build-out and investment. We talk about areas that barely even have a pulse yet as being "done". I think we have a long way to go. There are very few areas that have even graduated to the level of business activity that justifies rents that can breed densification. Try even keeping a business alive in "discovered" areas like Ossington, Leslieville, or the Junction. Or forget that, try keeping a business alive in an established area like College Street, Queen Street, Chinatown, or the Danforth. Building owners in the old established stretch of Queen West are overreaching their rents, count the number of empty stores down there right now.

I'm not saying times are bad, times are good and look even better in the future. But beyond the hypothetically I think we are over estimating the real market conditions and under estimating the area of interest.

 

[Lenser]

"Cool" might mean something different to those of non-Western origin, or those conditioned by an increasingly "Easternized" pop/mass culture.

Next to that, you might find that the old etched-in-stone notions of "cool neighbourhoods" are fated to be rather greybearded conceits...

Cool is whatever is current. It's youth which drives cool - or at least, youthful thinking. I would love to agree with you but you need to define what "old etched-in-stone notions" of cool neighbourhoods actually means. That would be helpful, no?

Nor do I think it's instructive to view city neighbours strictly along the lines of eastern culture vs. western. Again, we'd have to define what the hallmarks of those cultures are. It just feels like a slim premise to hang your viewpoint on. What makes you think eastern culture is taking over? If anything, we're seeding a richer DNA, a polyglot urban mix that's neither wholly eastern nor wholly western. It's something the world's never seen before... masses of people with relatively fluid mobility and a huge urge to live in richly urban settings. The world has seen many a port city (or an otherwise equally strategically-placed one) graced by citizens and traders from all over the map, but this is magnitudes richer. The lines are blurring in such cities. Where you come from is not as important as what you're doing now, how you're doing your part to define the city you live in.

Idealistic, I know. But something of that exists in Toronto and in many other cities around the world.

Finally: seems to me that "cool" doesn't particularly favour one culture over another. It's grandly indifferent to efforts to pin it down, isolate it, define its limits.

 

[CDL.TO]

Interesting thread.

When you say "areas that are not quite urban, not quite suburban", I can't help but think of those areas built just before or after the war. In these areas generally the street widths are more like downtown and, more importantly, there is sidewalk-oriented street retail. The houses are detached, but the areas are still fairly dense. But the big thing which still makes them somewhat suburban and will prevent them from becoming a truly vibrant neighbourhood is the lack of rental stock integrated into the community as a whole. There are rental buildings, but they tend to be bunched together and kept separate from the single-family housing (these rental outcrops are often the most vibrant patches in the neighbourhood).

This includes area like Leaside, Mount Pleasant, Forest Hill, parts of former York and East York.

You can see the progression quite clearly. Start on St. Clair anywhere west of Bathurst (urban: residental stock is generally all but low/midrise rental), go just north of St. Clair (urban: perhaps a 50/50 split between houses and lowrise rentals), hit midway to Eglinton ("not quite suburban": mostly houses, with midrise rental buildings mixed in 1-3 at a time), and north of Eglinton (inner suburbs: completely segregated, mid/highrise rentals in large clusters. Retail also changes to parking lot-oriented).

 

[Hipster Duck]

Also, I feel as though the search for the "next thing" belies the actual level of build-out and investment. We talk about areas that barely even have a pulse yet as being "done". I think we have a long way to go. There are very few areas that have even graduated to the level of business activity that justifies rents that can breed densification. Try even keeping a business alive in "discovered" areas like Ossington, Leslieville, or the Junction. Or forget that, try keeping a business alive in an established area like College Street, Queen Street, Chinatown, or the Danforth. Building owners in the old established stretch of Queen West are overreaching their rents, count the number of empty stores down there right now.

I'm not saying times are bad, times are good and look even better in the future. But beyond the hypothetically I think we are over estimating the real market conditions and under estimating the area of interest.

Yes, good points, but I think I raised this post as presenting two options for how we can urbanize.

The first, which is sort of the path we're taking, is to concentrate everything in a relatively small portion of the city. Granted, to a person who flew in from Hong Kong or Seoul, the "intensification" of downtown seems like peanuts, but to North Americans outside of New York, it's positively dizzying. The news today that a 90 storey Gehry building might replace an entire block of King and that, kitty corner from that, restaurant row is threatened to be eliminated by a wall of tall, if not quite as tall, condo towers might even give pause to a Shanghaiite.

The second, which is kind of the one I'm trying to nudge us toward thinking about in this thread, is to take areas that have the potential to evolve into the kind of avenues and low-rise development that has defined so much of Toronto and gently make them urban and walkable. Unlike the first model, it actually has about 150 years of precedent and has seemed to work pretty well. Also, it offers certain things that the other model doesn't: the option to live in walkable urbanism and still have things that are important to most born and naturalized North Americans: a ground-level entrance you can walk right out of and some semblance of a yard.

 

[adma]

Cool is whatever is current. It's youth which drives cool - or at least, youthful thinking. I would love to agree with you but you need to define what "old etched-in-stone notions" of cool neighbourhoods actually means. That would be helpful, no?

Nor do I think it's instructive to view city neighbours strictly along the lines of eastern culture vs. western. Again, we'd have to define what the hallmarks of those cultures are. It just feels like a slim premise to hang your viewpoint on. What makes you think eastern culture is taking over? If anything, we're seeding a richer DNA, a polyglot urban mix that's neither wholly eastern nor wholly western. It's something the world's never seen before... masses of people with relatively fluid mobility and a huge urge to live in richly urban settings. The world has seen many a port city (or an otherwise equally strategically-placed one) graced by citizens and traders from all over the map, but this is magnitudes richer. The lines are blurring in such cities. Where you come from is not as important as what you're doing now, how you're doing your part to define the city you live in.

Idealistic, I know. But something of that exists in Toronto and in many other cities around the world.

Finally: seems to me that "cool" doesn't particularly favour one culture over another. It's grandly indifferent to efforts to pin it down, isolate it, define its limits.

However, the blurring-of-lines might well wind up isolating, in the end, the kind of c20 patterns of older-nabe hip-bohemia gentrification--and maybe it's such present-day blurriness that explains labelling conceits like "Stuff White People Like". A sensibility for whom today's apparent version of "cool" youthcult seems as alien as the kinds of airheaded young dorks who embrace supertalls over grungy Victorian store frontages...

 

[Lenser]

But isolation itself is neither new nor abnormal; in order for something to be cool something else has to be uncool. In order to consider oneself "in," a whole pile of other people must be dismissed as being "out." As for white people vs others, it's a red herring... it's going to be increasingly irrelevant in a city like Toronto. Besides, a certain amount of exasperation and tension regarding profound cultural differences is to be expected; when people get annoyed at a dominant culture, another, more representative culture comes to the fore. Cities are always enduring culture clashes - they're nothing new and the best of cities endure despite these common travails, no matter how much drama they generate.

As for grungy old Victorian frontages vs. supertall salivating, the gist of it is also old hat. Plenty of cities have witnessed, at one point or another, the destruction of great areas in the rush toward some vaguely-perceived progress - only to find, decades down the road, that the wholesale erasure of certain grand edifices was perhaps a colossal mistake. Cities which continually plough under their own histories could well be seen as tragic but, sadly, they're hardly uncommon. I would love to see room for both the old and the new and I'm a great fan of architectural styles and sensibilities that have long ago lost their currency. That said, I don't hold out much hope that nearly enough cool old stuff will be preserved. But perhaps I ought to be more optimistic. I would love to think that Toronto itself is changing. Alas, with so much new stuff going up in the core, the old stuff is being displaced at a harrowing rate.

Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you got 'till it's gone.

 

[allabootmatt]

This is an interesting question, especially wrt Toronto's ever-accelerating gentrififation. Is it just me, or has the timescale from 'up and coming' to 'heavily covered in Toronto Life and on The Gap's expansion list' is getting hugely compressed?

That said, there's still a fair bit of old-school urbanity still to go. Bloor between Koretown and High Park is only just starting to go upscale. Gerrard East is also a great candidate. Parts of Queen East still have some ways to go. And more broadly, I think the whole downtown eastside is going to find itself on the map in a big way in a few years' time--Sherbourne, lower Parliament, Richmond East etc.

The discussion of urban-suburban areas is one that's more comMon in the US, I think. The coolest small city in North America if not the world, Austin, TX, has almost nothing of what we would recognize as urban except for about three blocks downtown. But it works, with the sort of big-sky aesthetic opening new possibilities--huge outdoor spaces at restaurants and coffee shops, food truck corrals in the many, many parking lots, and so on.