Johnny Au
Senior Member
The new capital of Ontario because of how much he hates Downtown Toronto?
Innisfil Orbit | ?m | 40s | Cortel Group | Arcadis
- Thread starter AlbertC
- Start date
Midtown Urbanist
Superstar
Time to call a spade a spade. This MZO approval is just for gross urban sprawl disguised by pretty renderings produced by an architectural firm that has never completed a master plan, urban design or public realm project anywhere in their portfolio, as impressive as their other work has been.
Playing around with street grid patterns on Cities: Skylines =/= master planning a new community.
Playing around with street grid patterns on Cities: Skylines =/= master planning a new community.
ADRM
Senior Member
The official word from the Province has been that they will not implement an MZO on non-provincially-owned land unless it is at the request of the municipality. It'll be interesting to see if they amend that pledge in the lead-up to the election.
C
christiesplits
Guest
I’m very pessimistic about this development. I feel like it’s gonna end up being Cornell but with free public wifi.
UtakataNoAnnex
Senior Member
Not so much as that, rather DoFo's take on a planned city is most likely without understanding how that actually works, real, willfully and/or otherwise. /sigh
innsertnamehere
Superstar
I mean the zoning order has a max height of 40 storeys and requires midrise development in much of the development area.. I mean if that’s sprawl what isn’t?
ProjectEnd
Superstar
Northern Light
Superstar
Sprawl is actually easy to define, it's any greenfield development, at all, ever.
We already have thousands of km2 of land available with one-storey buildings and parkinglots.
No need to despoil class 1 or class 2 farmlands for this.
****
Intensified/dense sprawl is better than low density sprawl.
But sprawl is the spreading of an urban area, in this case the GGH, over an ever larger area.
As this area is not currently urban and would become such, it's sprawl.
innsertnamehere
Superstar
it's greenfield development, though the connotation of "sprawl" is a little different I think.
Wikipedia defines urban sprawl as "the unrestricted growth in many urban areas of housing, commercial development, and roads over large expanses of land, with little concern for urban planning." - high density development surrounding a GO station doesn't really qualify under that I don't think.
I also think it makes sense to a certian degree if you think that providing a GO station for Innisfil makes sense (which I don't think anyone would disagree with).
The GO station is going in at 6th line instead of Innisfil Beach Road, where it probably should be, but still. I think it rationally makes sense to permit at least some greenfield development of high densities around the GO Station as the existing Innisfil urban area ends at the rail corridor, even if you hold that no other greenfield development should occur generally. Even if the GO station was at Innisfil Beach Road, limiting growth and development to the existing urban area would waste a lot of walking distance, transit supportive development area.
Northern Light
Superstar
But there is no GO station today. That's what makes it sprawl. That you are building where there is no building today, particularly when there is ample already developed, but underdeveloped land available.
For less money, we could bulldoze the existing sprawl in Innisfil and put back farmland, albeit the quality would be reduced from what it had been.
(by less money, I mean to compare it to the total public cost of servicing this land with sewage, water, roads, transit, parks, services etc etc.)
I don't except the presence of what has already been built.
Only if there's transit. I would prefer none, because it should be farmland.
innsertnamehere
Superstar
wait, what? expropriate everyone's houses and put in farmland in a housing crisis? huh?
This development has very clearly been tied to the GO station. It is one of Metrolinx's privately led go station projects, the developer plans to build the GO station prior to completing even the first building. So yea, transit is an integral part of it. This will be transit oriented development, that's the whole base project intent.
Northern Light
Superstar
I was engaging in a modest bit of hyperbole, in that removing existing housing there would not be the highest priority.
However, it would be vastly cheaper than building this new community which would free up money that could be used for housing elsewhere, where there is already infrastructure to support it.
But again, the existing Innisfil developed area is small, and comparatively inconsequential. Not a priority.
*****
The housing crisis, is a function of both supply and demand. We have, as a country and a province actively promoted the rise in demand, overly concentrated in two urban areas (Toronto and Vancouver) as well; though a mix
of low interest rates, high levels of immigration, and high (record) levels of foreign students.
We absolutely should be building more housing; and I'm pro-immigration and fine w/foreign students; however, we have permitted an imbalance by choice.
To which the answer is not more sprawl.
*****
Destroying among the most productive farmland in the world will get you from a housing crisis to a food crisis in a hurry.
We need to employ more intelligent solutions.
ADRM
Senior Member
Yeah, I too share the concern about both the ability of Partisans to propose a coherent plan for anything remotely of this nature/scale, and also the calibre of the plan itself -- it's dumb, wannabe-starchitect, Epcot Centre-cum Flushing Meadows schlock -- but I vastly prefer this general form of development visioning than pretty much anything else that is envisioned for cities within a reasonable GO of Toronto.
To me, it's an important counterpoint to the prevailing wisdom in almost all broadly similar municipalities in the region, where any substantial densification is seen as a negative impact to be avoided at all costs. I think that's a really important signal and shift.
To me, it's an important counterpoint to the prevailing wisdom in almost all broadly similar municipalities in the region, where any substantial densification is seen as a negative impact to be avoided at all costs. I think that's a really important signal and shift.
Northern Light
Superstar
Barrie, in this area, has finally moved to begin approving towers of serious height ~40 storeys in its downtown.
I would much rather see growth in this general area, concentrated in the already built-up area of Barrie.
Just bulldoze the 1975-2005 era sprawl along Bayfield for a start, and build towers at key nodes and midrise in-between.
Do this for a half dozen key arteries in Barrie and you have a much better solution to the housing/growth needs of this area.
Woodbridge_Heights
Senior Member
I wouldn't even go as far as 40 stories, but 25 - 30 is a good start and will retain some semblance of "small town" that many people seem attached to.
The area around Allendale waterfront station is a prime spot for a dense TOD community.