11-01-2015, 01:33 PM
(This post was last modified: 11-01-2015, 01:36 PM by BuildingScout.)
(11-01-2015, 09:49 AM)eizenstriet Wrote: I watched those trains travel around Besançon for 6 minutes, and I conclude that the French have a lot to learn from us.
Everywhere they went, the trains were passing through mid-rise development. No highrises at all! How will they ever make the transit pay for itself?
And don’t get me started on those stodgy buildings. Pretty well the same old thing, kilometer after kilometer. They should pick the best five, say, of those and keep them. The rest – gone, so that a progressive city can be created, free from the fusty past. Then they might have an interesting liveable city which others might want to move to. Also, they might then actually attract some tourists!
When your entire downtown is four or five stories high you do not need highrises. This is in contrast to Uptown Waterloo where buildings higher than three stories are against zoning regulations. For example, population density is three times higher in Besançon than in Kitchener.
Also one of the reasons Besançon is so much nicer is because over the centuries they have never been afraid to take down their ugly buildings while defending the nicer ones. We fail on both counts: on the one hand we let the very nice old Kitchener city hall be taken down and then we have heart attacks over Barra Castle's demolition.
I've posted plenty of pictures here of new construction for example in Strasbourg, Paris and Prague with new daring buildings smack in the middle of historical downtown. Can you imagine this ever been allowed here? The heritage committee would have a mass heart attack.