General Urban Kitchener Updates and Rumours

[dtkvictim]

While I'm all in favour of creating more parks, opening streets to people is something Toronto could do in about 10 minutes, rather than the 10 years it would take to build a new park.

Absolutely, I don't want to argue against that, pandemic or not.

As for urban growth, I think you're wrong, there are many cultural reasons for the mass exodus that happened from cities in late part of the last century. There are also substantial government policy reasons (building the highways, absolutely enormous subsidization of the suburbs), but at the end of the day humans have been moving to cities for literally thousands of years. Urban communities may not be for everyone, but they have been so aggressively attacked by different policies that they are in enormous deficit of supply. That's why prices are so high in downtowns. That's why at Christmas we put up scenes of quaint little main streets, the kinds of which are illegal to build almost everywhere today. This is in demand. And just to be clear, urban doesn't mean a big city downtown--at least to me--urban means not sprawling. There are many small towns in the Netherlands which are more urban than DTK.

Sorry, I missed this reply so I'm a bit late replying to it...

What sort of cultural reasons are you thinking of? As far as I was aware, a huge part of this was the mass adoption of the car. Subsidizing this was, no doubt, a bad idea, but I think it is pretty good proof that given the option, people are quick to leave. People have been moving to cities for thousands of years, but you'd have a really hard time convincing me that it's for any reason other than being desperate for work. Cities have been disgusting places up until very recently.

As for communities, humans just form communities, its what we do, lower density areas mean there are fewer opportunities to create communities, so the ones that exist are more defined by geography. In dense cities communities form between many different groups. Certainly if I lived in a rural area I would not have a community of people involved in cycling and transit, nor in technology, nor in my condo building, nor in the shops around my neighbourhood.

I hadn't really considered the more niche communities, which is a fair point, but my concern I guess was more with neighbourhood communities. I live about as downtown as is possible, and frankly I don't even feel like I have a neighbourhood. In fact, in many ways it's worse than not having a neighbourhood (a sort of neutral state); my downtown experiences have been mostly outright negative or hostile.

You mentioned Dutch cities, and I certainly agree there. It seems to me they have many areas that are a much better balance of density and community. Though I don't know how those living in the cores of their largest urban centers feel, at the very least the urban design there is much better for community (open streets being the biggest one). Societal problems are the other half of the problem, but I haven't been to the Netherlands so I can't really speak on how they are doing there...