steveintoronto
Superstar
I'd missed that! Thanks. Chris Selley, IIRC, or one of the few centrist pragmatists at the National Pest, wrote very similar a few weeks back.
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Rail Deck Park (?, ?, ?)
- Thread starter DSC
- Start date
steveintoronto
Superstar
Errr? That's exactly what the trend is away from, for good reason. Pink Petunias every three inches anyone? And can't we get the dirt out of the fish pond and replace it with concrete?
Edit to Add: Please tell me you were in 'sarc' mode!
steveintoronto
Superstar
Here is Section 42:
https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/90p13#BK62
What it states and what I see claimed for what it states don't appear to align.
More on this later when I've had a chance to study it. A number of councillors, the Mayor and Keesmaat are making statements that I'm not reading in the Act.
Perhaps there was a court case that has bearing on the interpretation of this? Otherwise...a lot of claims aren't making sense.
Edit: Example:
Use and sale of land
(5) Land conveyed to a municipality under this section shall be used for park or other public recreational purposes, but may be sold at any time. R.S.O. 1990, c. P.13, s. 42 (5).
Lots more anomalies to the lore being touted on this in the regs.
https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/90p13#BK62
What it states and what I see claimed for what it states don't appear to align.
More on this later when I've had a chance to study it. A number of councillors, the Mayor and Keesmaat are making statements that I'm not reading in the Act.
Perhaps there was a court case that has bearing on the interpretation of this? Otherwise...a lot of claims aren't making sense.
Edit: Example:
Use and sale of land
(5) Land conveyed to a municipality under this section shall be used for park or other public recreational purposes, but may be sold at any time. R.S.O. 1990, c. P.13, s. 42 (5).
Lots more anomalies to the lore being touted on this in the regs.
bobbob911
Active Member
What else do you think grows on a concrete slab? Your choices are flower boxes, turf, or street scape mini trees that typically need to be replanted every 5 years or so.
steveintoronto
Superstar
Hardly. How deep do you think the soil is in Guelph, for instance? One of the loveliest cities I've seen for gardens, so much so that the I don't even know why they have a parks department.
Try a foot...if you're lucky. Most of Guelph sits on limestone rock, and what isn't underlined by rock is heavy gravel, so heavy that when lamp or fence posts are dug, the best way is using the vacuum diggers, often the only way. http://badgerinc.com/
The challenge with slab concrete isn't what you can grown on it or not, it's the underlying drainage. Just like swamps.
Next?
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bobbob911
Active Member
Trees can definitely grow on Canadian Shield rock with not much topsoil. However, you would *never* want to do that on concrete because the roots would damage the structure. (I'm also not sure if the pH of concrete would present difficulties)
steveintoronto
Superstar
Really? Looked at any high rise gardens lately? Take a look up, trees growing on twenty, thirty story buildings. Are the buildings made of wood? Cardboard? Bubble gum?
<a href="https://www.tripadvisor.ca/Location...2650-Sky_Garden-London_England.html#218322650"><img alt="" src="https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/0d/03/56/da/photo8jpg.jpg"/></a><br/>This photo of Sky Garden is courtesy of TripAdvisor
http://www.techinsider.io/singapores-cloud-forest-revolutionizes-green-spaces-2015-11Boeri's previous design, in Milan, was comprised of two similar buildings that featured 90 species of plants and more than 700 trees, all of which had to be airlifted into place.
Forgemind Archimedia/Flickr
Both vertical forests employ similar eco-friendly designs in the interior.
The same water that flows through the building's plumbing system gets diverted back onto the porches to feed the plants.
In the summer, the foliage filters sunlight into the rooms. In the winter, the bare branches let light in.
Forgemind ArchiMedia/Flickr
From Singapore to South Korea to Australia, and now Switzerland, vertical forests are becoming more common.
They coincide with the rise of vertical farms, which serve as a testament to the world's shrinking supply of fertile ground.
SEE ALSO: Singapore is building an entire forest in a high-rise apartment atrium
http://www.techinsider.io/switzerlands-tree-covered-high-rise-2015-11
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howl
Active Member
steveintoronto
Superstar
Indeed, but that's a conceptual drawing, I wanted to demonstrate actual examples. I'm sure there are many in Toronto. I find the assumption that the deck would be something boring akin to a billiard table troubling. It doesn't...it *mustn't* be that. Just as High Line Park in New York is left to Nature in spots, it makes it dimensionally vastly more interesting.
dowlingm
Senior Member
Postage stamp parkettes here or there aren't enough. There needs to be at least a little bit of vista, places to let kids run. Which is not to say this needs to be built *in full*.
steveintoronto
Superstar
Absolutely agreed! What is needed is that it be a contiguous ribbon at the very least to connect greater areas of developed and wild areas such that cycling or walking through the length of the decked over area is possible along the length (or more) described. I'd much rather it be longer and connective than large and un-kinetic.
I'm still having difficulties squaring the examples Tory and supporters are comparing to (Chicago, NYC, Melbourne, etc) when each of those, or any other developed deck-over project, has relied on massive amounts of financing from outside the cities' coffers. Melbourne, for instance, vast amount of financing from the state. There's no way Ontario will finance this!
Melbourne, in fact, is in the midst of *privatizing* assets, and lo and behold, OMERS (Oxford) is front and centre to buy!
OMERS buys piece of Australia's busiest port
The Globe and Mail - 17 hours ago
Tory and minions had best get their story straight and believable. For a Mayor sitting on such empty coffers, the man is full of fantasies. It's a shame, because with a different approach, this could be believable, and believable soon. But not at this rate. Mayor Munchausen...
Getting back to SomewhatSmartTrack....
Absolutely agreed again. And trying to sell this as a massive park "larger than High Park" feeds the fantasy that's the food of failure yet again. It's not just fantasy...it's *greedy* fantasy, as if to embrace the theorem "Don't tell them a little lie, they won't believe it. Tell them a big one, and they will".
That grandiose excess works against getting this done, and even a partial deck in spots will be enough to complete a contiguous park along the proposed length. But this comes back to Keesmaat being so fffing greedy (gist) "Not on my watch, we're not going to share this with developers, we want it all to ourselves".
Good freakin luck with that Jennifer. "You and whose army?"
A deck may not be the best thing in parts anyway. A private developer (or one of the present owners of the air-rights) might want to erect a structure of their own right down to ground level, and/or below that can abut a decking. Done with taste, it might actually enhance the landscape vista, and add utility too for those using the park, not to mention vertical access to the tracks below and platforms.
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bobbob911
Active Member
I didn't say you can't plant anything - obviously shrubs and hedges can be planted in planter boxes, etc. You are practically constrained to smallish trees - you will never be able to grow trees large enough to be really shade producing for example.
The High Line in NYC is a different beast - constrained by width with shade from the buildings around it. I worry the Rail Deck Park would be a massive heat island.
bobbob911
Active Member
Any reasonably large sized parking lot downtown could be turned into a nice park that would support a playground or splash pad, a field, park benches, etc. If the city was serious about this effort it would be entirely doable.
steveintoronto
Superstar
You mean like this?
NEWS
Millennium Park celebrates 10 years
http://abc7chicago.com/news/millennium-park-celebrates-10-years/191825/#videoplayer
bobbob911
Active Member
Millenium Park is awesome, and I have been there many many times! But you should realize it is not entirely built on platform - those trees you see are almost certainly planted in the ground (in fact, in the distance of that picture is probably Grant Park)