In terms of "blame" here, I think a lot of the built form is to blame on city planning - but there is a lot of blame to go to Pemberton and Wallman too in finishes, landscaping treatments, architectural design, and the overall crazy density.
I'm going to start by coming back to the idea that in general, government should deliver what the people want. That's a fundamental tenet of democracy. We all recognize that there is a need for compromise and sometimes tough medicine, and equally, that change of any kind can be difficult. For all of that.....the end game goal should be to make the broadest number of people happy with the society they've built.
This applies to social programs, healthcare, policing/crime, and architecture/planning.
In that context, outside of urban fora, skyscraper geeks, developers and some critics..........the public is broadly opposed to tower-dominant communities. I'm not opposed to towers, but I am opposed to their over-use and to the failures in their design that fail to respect what people like.
Even here on UT, among skyscraper fans, there is a general agreement on consistently bad at-grade/podium/retail expresssion, and a general lament for lack of colour and variation in design.
The broader public is much harsher. Given a choice, the largest number of people prefer an SFH/low-rise configuration to their communities, with some midrise on main streets.
The next most popular expressions are low-rise apartment/row house, and midrise architecture on main streets; followed by midrise dominant forms.
Tower-dominant forms consistently come out at the bottom. They're also the most expensive to build on a per ft2 basis, and only make sense because of artificially goosed land prices.
Tower-dominant forms also have the lowest environmental performance. A typical SFH does better when considering everything from carbon-intensivity in construction, to energy efficiency to retaining permeable landscapes with
biodiversity, to the urban heat island effect.
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We keep coming back to this idea that the City and developers should be allowed to impose their will no matter how unpopular and how objectively bad the ecological performance and cost numbers end up being.
I fundamentally disagree; I would reverse this entirely starting with abolishing any appeal of Council decisions other than through divisional court based on denial of due process; and then move on to impose minimum unit sizes, which would be vastly larger than what's being built.
I would also set a maximum evacuation time for a building that would virtually outlaw most residential hirises, setting a very high barrier on fire proofing, fire and smoke mitigation that would make it prohibitive to go tall in most cases. I would also require that you can never build to a height that wouldn't get water service without the use of pumps.
I'm fine with height, I'm fine with density, I generally agree with most people that typical suburban sprawl is ick, too car-centric, insufficiently dense and too expensive to service.
But I don't want the opposite either. Too crowded, too dense, too expensive to build, too expensive to operate, too endangering for residents, and just too damned ugly.
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Ok.....I think we're getting a tad OT, which I will agree to having contributed to, but time to move along.
