Urbanism

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said Guilbeault's a "radical" who seems intent on banning federal funds from road projects. 

Conservative MP Mark Strahl, the party's transport critic, said Guilbeault's talk about no more new funding for "large" roads is "outrageous" and an affront to the people who rely on cars to get to and from work.

"This isn't something many Canadians do without. To simply say we're not going to allow any federal money to go into that is extreme, it's divisive and it's right in line with what this government does," Strahl said.

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Guilbeault's comments put into question the future of Ford's promised Highway 413 project, a new highway in the northwest part of the Greater Toronto Area that will connect two major arteries in the area and ease travel between booming areas like Vaughan and Brampton.

Ontario has argued that the project should be fast-tracked because the population growth in these Toronto suburbs demands more infrastructure to ease congestion.

Environmentalists and some local groups have vigorously opposed the 60-kilometre highway because it will cut through farmland and waterways and pave over parts of the province's protected greenbelt.

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As for the government's push to ban single-use plastics by deeming them "toxic," the Federal Court ruled last year that the policy is "unreasonable and unconstitutional."

Predictably, not everyone has been happy about it. Critics have included local planners, politicians and, especially, residents of Kitsilano Point, a rarified beachfront neighbourhood bordering the reserve. And there’s been an extra edge to their critiques that’s gone beyond standard-issue NIMBYism about too-tall buildings and preserving neighbourhood character. There’s also been a persistent sense of disbelief that Indigenous people could be responsible for this futuristic version of urban living. In 2022, Gordon Price, a prominent Vancouver urban planner and a former city councillor, told Gitxsan reporter Angela Sterritt, “When you’re building 30, 40-storey high rises out of concrete, there’s a big gap between that and an Indigenous way of building.” 

The subtext is as unmissable as a skyscraper: Indigenous culture and urban life—let alone urban development—don’t mix. That response isn’t confined to Sen̓áḵw, either. On Vancouver’s west side, the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations—through a joint partnership called MST Development Corp.—are planning a 12-tower development called the Heather Lands. In 2022, city councillor Colleen Hardwick said of that project, “How do you reconcile Indigenous ways of being with 18-storey high-rises?” (Hardwick, it goes without saying, is not Indigenous.) MST is also planning an even bigger development, called Iy̓álmexw in the Squamish language and ʔəy̓alməxʷ in Halkomelem. Better known as Jericho Lands, it will include 13,000 new homes on a 90-acre site. At a city council meeting this January, a stream of non-Indigenous residents turned up to oppose it. One woman speculated that the late Tsleil-Waututh Chief Dan George would be outraged at the “monstrous development on sacred land.”

To Indigenous people themselves, though, these developments mark a decisive moment in the evolution of our sovereignty in this country. The fact is, Canadians aren’t used to seeing Indigenous people occupy places that are socially, economically or geographically valuable, like Sen̓áḵw. After decades of marginalization, our absence seems natural, our presence somehow unnatural. Something like Sen̓áḵw is remarkable not just in terms of its scale and economic value (expected to generate billions in revenue for the Squamish Nation). It’s remarkable because it’s a restoration of our authority and presence in the heart of a Canadian city.

Today I’m launching CityDensity.com to compare the world’s big cities.

The website works by breaking the world up into tiny squares, with each square having 1km sides. Because the squares are essentially random they’re also fair - no political borders can make a city seem bigger or smaller than it is. 

The Japanese parking model essentially prohibits all on-street parking with some exceptions for daytime and evening parking, where permitted. There is also a rule that forbids overnight street parking after 3am in the whole country. The larger and more important part of the law requires everyone to demonstrate that they have a legal off-street parking spot before they can purchase a car, those spots can be owned or rented, but they will not register your vehicle without this proof. This requirement means that if you don’t have access to an off-street parking spot for your car, you cannot get a car.

A master class in framing:

The project needs enough density (which, remember, are homes we badly need) to make financially viable all the expensive public costs and aspirations, including heritage restoration. It also needs the kind of population that will attract retailers to give a vibrant second life to those heritage buildings. And let’s be clear — retailers won’t provide those local, walkable shops and services without that population density.

Preserving community heritage and character isn’t about preventing badly needed and responsible change, or claiming to be OK with a different proposal that actually isn’t viable at all. It’s about doing change well, with smart design, while understanding the real-life requirements and balancing acts that achieve many important public goals.

The heritage buildings aren’t threatened by the proposal. The proposal is how they will be preserved and rehabilitated, remaining the defining features in this new urban place, with exciting new purposes.

There’s a reason why the site has seen little activity since the previous 2008 zoning was put in place — that zoning wasn’t viable or buildable.

Public works departments know how to fix a dangerous stroad. We put it in a five-year capital improvement budget. We do a big study of the conditions. We mock up several design alternatives, and we hold public workshops where we ask constituents for their feedback and preferences. We send out (typically useless) surveys. A design is selected by the city council, and over the next couple years, it’s built.

The end result of this approach is typically very pretty. There are curb bulb-outs planted with flowers. There are flashing beacons and refuge islands at newly painted crosswalks. The street is calmer, it’s safer, and it actually feels better to drive on, as well as walk along. It’s hailed as a big step forward, a boon to the neighborhood’s quality of life. Everybody is happy. This example from South Minneapolis, of a nasty stroad rebuilt after a deadly crash and public outcry, is typical of my experience.

Okay. So, we know how to do that. Now do it 1,000 times.

The “1,000 times” problem may actually be the primary reason why we can expect local governments to be resistant to adopting an approach like the Crash Analysis Studio as policy. If you truly acknowledge that a deadly crash is not a fact of life, but an anomaly that shouldn’t have happened, and a condition that should be corrected, then you suddenly have a to-do list a thousand miles long.

Nobody is going to say out loud, “We can’t come close to fixing all of them, so it doesn’t make sense to acknowledge that there’s an urgent imperative to fix any of them.” But I’ll bet a lot of traffic engineers have thought it.

Somerville, Massachusetts, is a thriving city. It has, in spades, the attributes that the median city planner and real estate professional alike will tell you are in great demand and short supply in 2020s America: walkability, vibrancy, sense of place. Adjacent to central Boston, Somerville is known for top-tier educational institutions, a robust arts and culture scene, and lively civic squares surrounded by locally owned shops and restaurants.

Unsurprisingly, the city’s attractive lifestyle comes at a price. As of this writing, there are dozens of homes for sale in Somerville listed for over one million dollars.

Such a price ought to be a clear signal that there is ample market demand for a place like Somerville. According to economic theory, developers should respond by building more housing in Somerville, and by creating more blocks and neighborhoods that resemble the most in-demand parts of Somerville.

There is only one problem: they largely can’t. In 2015, Somerville’s city planners undertook a study to find out which of the city’s existing residential properties conformed to Somerville’s own zoning code. The number of fully zoning-compliant lots in the city of 80,000 people was a surprise to everyone: there were only 22.

The city of Somerville, it turned out, had declared itself illegal.

The success of the program has other Canadian cities looking to emulate it and generated international attention for its boldness.

But without taking anything away from the grand ambitions of the Calgary plan, or the initial success it's seen (it isn't easy to convert one empty office block into apartments, let alone six million square feet worth), there are a few questions that need to be asked on behalf of the future residents of the 2,300-plus new homes about to be built. For example: What are they going to do there?

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Paul Fairie, the principal co-ordinator of the Downtown Core Neighbourhood Association, also thinks something needs to be done about the big, empty east-west avenues, particularly on the weekends.

"You wind up walking one or two blocks in a row with literally nothing. You're just walking in this ambiguous, empty space," Fairie said.

But as a downtown resident for 14 years, he says the items at the top of his wish list are what he calls "the boring things."

Things like grocery stores, inexpensive restaurants and coffee shops that stay open after 6 p.m.

"A big misconception is, they think, you live downtown, you're living this sort of glamorous, exotic, party-oriented lifestyle. No. I'm just living in an apartment. It's a relatively normal life and the more we can do to facilitate that, I think, the better," he said.