Urbanism

Moreno introduced the idea at the 2015 Paris climate conference and soon started advising Mayor Anne Hidalgo, who made the 15-minute city concept a pillar of her campaign for a second term. Hidalgo has pushed for fewer cars to reduce both the city’s carbon footprint and unhealthy air pollution. But the changes aren’t just about making it easier to bike or walk—it’s equally important that people have more options nearby, Moreno says. Proximity is a key part of sustainable transportation. And it’s also just a better way to live.

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The city is encouraging the redevelopment of buildings that were used only part of the time, like offices, into multiuse spaces. One former administrative building now contains a covered market, housing, offices, a community preschool, a hotel and youth hostel, restaurants, bars, an art gallery, a gym, and urban farming on the rooftop. Little-used parking garages and former industrial sites are becoming housing. A former maternity hospital is now a school with a library and playground that the public can access outside of school hours for open-air film screenings, shows, and book fairs. The city is also pushing to make sure that each neighborhood has access to more significant services, such as healthcare and coworking spaces.

This is so great.

Welcome to City Smart Toys, where we're on a mission to reframe playtime with urban toys, books and vehicles! It all started with a simple realization – after our 3 year old received his 3rd(!) plastic parking garage set, we knew there had to be more to playtime than endless loops of car-centric toys. As parents, we were determined to provide a different kind of play experience, one that celebrates the richness and diversity of urban life.

At City Smart Toys, we believe that playtime should reflect the vibrancy of urban places around us. That's why we've curated a thoughtful collection of toys and books that embrace the urban experience in all its glory. From bustling cityscapes to boundless imaginations, our selection is designed to inspire creativity, exploration, and a sense of wonder.

This mission is not anti-car. Many families depend on cars to get around because their neighbourhoods and towns are designed a certain way. For certain trips, cars are indeed the best option. But there is a clear imbalance that is apparent when you step into any toy-store. Our goal is to fix this. Yes, car toys are great fun but there need to be options for more urban-positive alternatives.

Join us in embracing the urban-positive movement and discover a world of play that goes beyond the car, the parking lot and the traffic jam. Whether it's through imaginative city adventures or captivating stories, let's redefine playtime together – one toy at a time.

I love that "Tetrise" is now a verb:

Vancouver has long been nicknamed the “city of glass” for its shimmering high-rise skyline. Over the next few years, that skyline will get a very large new addition: Sen̓áḵw, an 11-tower development that will Tetrize 6,000 apartments onto just over 10 acres of land in the heart of the city. Once complete, this will be the densest neighbourhood in Canada, providing thousands of homes for Vancouverites who have long been squeezed between the country’s priciest real estate and some of its lowest vacancy rates.

Sen̓áḵw is big, ambitious and undeniably urban—and undeniably Indigenous. It’s being built on reserve land owned by the Squamish First Nation, and it’s spearheaded by the Squamish Nation itself, in partnership with the private real estate developer Westbank.

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What chafes critics, even those who might consider themselves progressive, is that they expect reconciliation to instead look like a kind of reversal, rewinding the tape of history to some museum-diorama past. Coalitions of neighbours near Iy̓álmexw and Sen̓áḵw have offered their own counter-proposals for developing the sites, featuring smaller, shorter buildings and other changes. At the January hearing for Iy̓álmexw, one resident called on the First Nations to build entirely with selectively logged B.C. timber, in accord with what she claimed were their cultural values. These types of requests reveal that many Canadians believe the purpose of reconciliation is not to uphold Indigenous rights and sovereignty, but to quietly scrub centuries of colonial residue from the landscape, ultimately in service of their own aesthetic preferences and personal interests.

This looks good. I'm not mad about the enormous elevated stroad cutting the development in half, but it does promise:

There will be over 6,000 rental units at Sen̓áḵw. Included in these 6,000 are approximately 1,200 affordable rental units as defined by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC). The balance will be market rental. Of the 1,200 affordable rental units, 250 will be set aside for Squamish Nation members, with the remainder serving residents of the City of Vancouver.

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Sen̓áḵw is designed to be a transit-oriented, car-light community. With this car-light emphasis, combined with the already highly restricted parking regulations for the surrounding Kits Point neighbourhood, the impact on the surrounding streets will be insignificant. It is anticipated that the development will add 7 to 8 cars per minute on average, spread across the two site access points during peak hours.

As a result, the upgrades negotiated through the Services Agreement are focused on accommodating the mobility needs for all travel modes including upgrades to cycling, pedestrian facilities and improved access to transit.

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Sen̓áḵw will be one of Canada's first large-scale net zero operational carbon housing developments. There will be a district energy system on site developed in partnership with Creative Energy, that will utilize excess heat from adjacent Metro Vancouver infrastructure to provide a source of carbon free energy for the project. The buildings will also meet Step 3 of the BC Energy code and will feature highly efficient triple-glazed envelopes to minimize both thermal and noise transmission. The units will feature energy efficient appliances and fixtures to minimize water use and the entire development is designed to encourage alternative forms of transportation while reducing resident dependence on the automobile.

The commercial building in Phase 2 will leverage 45,000 square feet of mass timber construction, a material with 50% less embodied carbon than typical concrete construction.

Other sustainable features of the project include: the use of green roofs, permeable paving materials, native plantings, and rainwater capture and collection for irrigation.

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A new transit hub at the south end of the Burrard bridge will be created as part of the Sen̓áḵw project to support increased transit connectivity to the site. While current transportation infrastructure in the area prioritizes north-south connections, the new density from Sen̓áḵw offers the opportunity to improve east-west connectivity through the potential revitalization of the False Creek streetcar line, upgraded aqua bus and ferry services, and enhanced cycling options. Further, the project is located within walking distance of the new Broadway Subway extension.

But social values were very much on the mind of Victor Gruen, the Austrian-born designer who created the first enclosed mall in the United States, Southdale Center in suburban Minneapolis, in 1956. Gruen wanted to give patrons a version of the lively and intensely social shopping districts he remembered from the Vienna where he grew up. It wouldn’t just be a collection of stores — it would include schools, post offices, medical centers and museums. A modern mall, especially in a cold-climate place like Minnesota, would be a sort of urban market town, a Main Street under glass.

In the years before his death in 1980, Gruen realized and regretted the failure of his creations to meet his original vision. They may have been pedestrian-friendly in their way, but they were nevertheless islands in a sea of parking. And the idea of a shopping mall as a key element in modern social life was rarely mentioned. 

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When you look at what has happened to many of the dead malls of the last century, you find a whole variety of retrofits. Some of them have simply been torn down, of course, but others have been repurposed to contain housing, hotels, museums, gyms, churches, senior centers, libraries and a whole variety of other features. Many of these are public enterprises, successors to the strictly private mall operations that have dominated shopping-center history.

In perhaps the most startling transformation, Gruen’s Southdale Center in Minnesota, the first of the fully enclosed malls of the 1950s, is being re-created as a multipurpose development that includes luxury hotel rooms and apartment complexes, a fitness center in place of a defunct J.C. Penney store, medical clinics and day care for children, and a variety of other public and private properties.

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Ironic as it may seem, malls such as Southdale are moving closer to being the entity that Victor Gruen envisioned — places where different segments of the community can gather and find their basic needs as well as their consumer desires met, and also satisfy their desire for sociability.

Imagine designing one of our great cities from scratch. You would quickly discover that there is enough physical space for magnificent parks, playing fields, public swimming pools, urban nature reserves and allotments sufficient to meet the needs of everyone. Alternatively, you could designate the same space to a small proportion of its people – the richest citizens – who can afford large gardens, perhaps with their own swimming pools. The only way of securing space for both is to allow the suburbs to sprawl until the city becomes dysfunctional: impossible to supply with efficient services, lacking a sense of civic cohesion, and permanently snarled in traffic: Los Angeles for all.

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It is impossible to deliver a magnificent life for everyone by securing private space through private spending. Attempts to do so are highly inefficient, producing ridiculous levels of redundancy and replication. Look at roads, in which individual people, each encased in a tonne of metal, each taking up (at 70mph) 90 metres of lane, travel in parallel to the same destination. The expansion of public wealth creates more space for everyone; the expansion of private wealth reduces it, eventually damaging most people’s quality of life.

Jeff Speck is a city planner and urban designer who, through writing, public service, and built work, advocates internationally for smart growth and sustainable design. The Christian Science Monitor called his recent book, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time, "timely and important, a delightful, insightful, irreverent work."

By popular demand -- a comprehensive review of all the ways car dependency destroys our communities, our health, and our planet. With gratuitous commentary by your host!

A bracing editorial.

In the 1970s a nation confronted a crisis of traffic deaths, many of them deaths of children. Protesters took to the streets to fight an entrenched culture of drivers who considered roads their domain alone. But this wasn’t the U.S.—it was the Netherlands. In 1975 the rate of traffic deaths there was 20 percent higher than in the U.S., but by the mid-2000s it had fallen to 60 percent lower than in the U.S. How did this happen?

Thanks to Stop de Kindermoord (“Stop Child Murder”), a Dutch grassroots movement, traffic deaths fell and streets were restored for people, not cars. Today the country is a haven for cyclists and pedestrians, with people of all ages commuting via protected bike lanes and walking with little fear of being run over. It’s time the U.S. and other countries followed that example.

As you read this, the Victorian Government is rewriting the laws and legislation that govern how the city we live within looks and feels. In 2024, we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reform Melbourne's design regulations, and to empower our city to become world-leading in terms of both liveability and design. Join Kerstin Thompson (Kerstin Thompson Architects), Andrew Maynard (Austin Maynard Architects), and Colleen Peterson (Ratio Consultants) to hear about the challenges of our current dysfunctional system, and the opportunities we have right now to reform these laws and create the best possible Melbourne. Hosted by YIMBY Melbourne and featuring three leaders from Melbourne's urban planning, architecture, and design industries, this night is one for enthusiasts and experts alike.

Melbourne’s Missing Middle’s signature recommendation—a new Missing Middle Zone—would enable six-storey, mixed-use development on all residential land within 1 kilometre of a train station and 500 metres of a tram stop—building an interconnected network of 1,992 high-amenity, walkable neighbourhoods.
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Melbourne’s Missing Middle envisions Parisian streetscapes across all of inner urban Melbourne, along our train and tram lines and near our town centres. Gentle, walk-up apartments, abundant shopfronts, sidewalk cafes and sprawling parks replacing unaffordable and unsustainable cottages. 
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The Missing Middle is the most desirable, walkable urban form, typified by inner Paris, and it should be legal to build in our most desirable, economically productive areas.