Archive for April 21, 2010

Do a Jane’s Walk!

April 21, 2010 / Wendy Waters / No comments

 Jane Jacobs was an urban thinker ahead of her time.  When the great thinkers of the day were promoting freeways and auto-centric suburban development, she spotted what was being lost.  To her, the best cities and neighbourhoods were organic, constantly evolving communities, or networks of relationships.  People knew each other and looked out for each other.  Walkability was a key component in her vision of what made a city livable.

One of her famous lines was that to know a city, or to know a neighbourhood, you needed to walk it.

She died just a few years ago, in her adopted home of Toronto.  To honour her, friends in Toronto began the tradition of prompting people to host walks through their neighbourhoods, pointed out what they like, or what Jane might have liked.

In a recent interview that discussed neighbourhoods and Jane Jacobs, Richard Florida offers some reasons why we might love our home area:

So in essence a neighborhood is not just a set of individuals, but a set of relationships. I think that’s right. And the relationships are fluid. Some are longstanding and some you can plug into and play. And the places that enable those relationships to form are the places that do better.

Every time we come back to these neighborhoods that are exciting, that are great, there’s a long history behind them. 

A Jane’s Walk is a chance to learn more of the local history and relationships that made local history.

I’ve attended walks the past two years.  The experience of learning dozens of new things about your own city, and how cities work at the ground level is amazing.  This year I’ll also try the experience of hosting, and sharing some recent history of my own neighbourhood.

Find one in your city, or offer to host one… Click here for Canada or global cities. In the US try this direct link.  They will happen simultaneously across North America and around the world on May 1 and 2, 2010.

Category: communities, planning policy, public spaces, urban history, urban lifestyles /

Supermarket parking lots as new neighbourhood hubs

April 20, 2010 / Wendy Waters / 6 comments

Could supermarket parking lots in now-dense urban areas become public squares? or be re-designed as great public places in other ways?

Neal Pierce recently penned an intriguing piece about supermarkets on Citiwire.net.

We perfected the buy-and-drive model from the post-World War II expansion onward. But is it necessarily the future?

No, asserts my Seattle friend and urban design planner, Mark Hinshaw. He sees a dramatically transformed role for supermarkets. They’ll actually become the anchors of new and walkable neighborhoods, he predicts in a Planning magazine article co-authored with markets analyst Brian Vanneman.

Why the shift? Americans’ high personal consumption levels were starting to wind down even before the Great Recession. Households have shrunk in size and the population is aging, with more taste for close-by shops and facilities. Many young people are eschewing the scattered suburban pattern in favor of denser urban living. Buying a house on the urban fringe, once seen as a ticket to wealth-building, now looks to be a big risk. Walking for health and weight loss has begun, for many Americans, to outshine the sedentary lifestyle of using an auto for every conceivable errand. And many people are looking for ways to reduce their carbon footprint.

Neighbourhoods that offer the option of walking to do one’s errands have grown in popularity for all the reasons cited above.  In some places this has resulted in homes (including town homes, mid rise and high rise buildings) now surrounding what used to be a more isolated supermarket with a massive, attached parking lot.

In these cases, it seems that turning this space into something more could be great for everyone.

  • If additional small stores or service businesses were added to the space, it would attract more shoppers–great for business.
  • If there was some public space like a small playground, or a sitting area to enjoy one’s coffee, people would come to connect with their neighbours and not just to shop.
  • And if this space connected to other walkable–perhaps retail–streetscapes, more customers would be drawn in.

The owner of the supermarket and parking lot could also benefit through increased property values or options.  A redevelopment of the space might allow for the creation of office or residential space above.

To be sure, parking would still be required at these new versions–sometimes the groceries you need to get are heavy and the car is the logical option–but perhaps fewer spaces, or underground.

While many suburban supermarkets-and-parking lots will likely remain auto-centric destinations for a while.  There are places where density has grown up around these expansive uses and the whole community could benefit from the “accident” of having a big empty space that can now be used for community building rather than parking.

Category: commercial development, public spaces, third places, urban history, urban retail trends /

What ever happened to world’s fairs?

April 7, 2010 / Wendy Waters / 11 comments

In the 20th century, World’s Fairs were major events celebrated in the host city and globally.  Daily news items emerged from these three-to-six month celebrations that also showcased new products and ideas.  Even if you did not attend, you could share in the experience via television and newspapers.

Some fairs today remain legendary worldwide such as the Chicago (1892-3) and Montreal (Expo 67) fairs.  Others have more regional legacies in terms of how they transformed part of a city or the landmark legacies. Seattle’s Space Needle, Vancouver’s Canada Place with the sails, St. Louis’s Forest Park, London’s Hyde Park, were built for their respective World’s Fairs.

Over the past decade, I don’t recall much or any coverage of world’s fairs.  Actually, the last one I remember hearing much about was in Seville in 1992.  According to the Bureau International des Expositions (BIE) there have been 8 since then, with another one scheduled for later this year in Shanghai.

Why do they seem less important today.  Here’s what I could come up with but I welcome your additional thoughts.

1. In the past, countries demonstrated their modernity and industrial prowess by hosting fairs and by displaying at these fairs.  More recently, hosting an Olympic Games or the World Cup of Soccer has arguably become the stage for displaying a city or a country’s progress.  (Recent or pending World Cup and Olympic hosts include China, Korea, Japan, Brazil, South Africa.)

2.  The Internet allows us to learn about every country in the world, or the topic of a particular world’s fair (many of them are theme focused on issues like transportation, housing, the oceans, etc.).

3. World travel has become cheaper.  Instead of attending a world’s fair to learn about places and issues, people can visit more locales themselves.

What am I missing?

Category: urban history /

Higher fuel, living green and a new normal for home prices?

April 3, 2010 / Wendy Waters / One comment

Over the past few years, many urban residents have become increasingly interested in more sustainable as well as more time efficient lifestyles.  Thousands (even millions worldwide) are choosing to live closer to work, even if it means a smaller home–whether to save money, spare the environment or save time (or all three).

Simultaneous with the above there has been a significant escalation in housing prices in the older, urban cores of Toronto and especially Vancouver (much more than in their auto-centric suburbs).  (I’m still working on finding electronic stats showing the price shifts–post some links if you have them.)

Some argue this is a bubble.  Maybe.  But at least in my neighbourhood I don’t see one sign of bubble froth–speculation.  Families are buying these houses to live in, themselves, and to raise their children.  Flippers and speculators are rare.

Prices are quite possibly at a cyclical high (different from a bubble) and will ease off as mortgage rates start to rise.  But it’s also possible that Toronto and Vancouver have become New York and San Francisco North.  These US cities are places where geographic constraint combined with strong desires by millions to live there have pushed housing prices well above the national average and outside “normal metrics” of affordability.

As a result people live in smaller homes, rent out rooms or suites in larger homes, and accept the fact that more salary goes into housing than it would elsewhere resulting in other “sacrifices” like foregoing car ownership (or 2nd car ownership), or certain material expectations.

Category: real estate, resident attitudes, urban families, urban history /