Every contemporary city in North America suffers from things like 'poor architectural conditions', or 'gentrification', or 'sprawl'.
Cities such as Calgary, Toronto, and Vancouver share numerous urban and social characteristics (though some people think 'their' city is different).
These cities are all around 100 years old, defined by economic/population booms (and busts) in the last 50 years, and to satisfy needs for housing the influx have neglected smarter growth strategies (compared to places like the Netherlands).
The Mass Culture in these cities are pretty much the exact same, and that drives how the city is built and ultimately what it looks like.
After a little finger pointing going on in other threads, someone declared Calgary being more deprived of Architectural opportunity, more 'ugly', and less of a city than Toronto or Vancouver - and by logic, almost every other city in North America.
I believe that while each North American city is unique through it's (very brief)history and geography, that the fore-mentioned cities all share the same cultural characteristics.
Generalizing a city based on pre-conceived notions, or brief visits, does not give an accurate understanding of that city.
Agreeing with Lars Lerup's views on Houston in After The City - a city is not made of physical definitions, but of sets of experiences. In order to truely understand a city you must abandon the notion of the built city (aesthetics), and focus on what kind of experiences are generated from the city. This applies to every city, Barcelona, New York, etc....
I'll also side with Rem here and some of his Generic City stance.
I guess what I'm saying, is that these Cities are basically all the same in their cultural and social make-up, embracing conditions of sprawl, and their urban aesthetic.
It's really quite difficult when you get down it to separate one from another as being unique, and I don't understand how one can be preferred over another, other than personal circumstance. We all design in the same conditions in these places.
| Questions |
I'm curious how us as Architects, deal with living and practicing in a city which does not meet particularly 'Architecturally evocative' requirements, or lack of 'rational' urban planning and design.
Do you chose to stick it out and try to influence a kind of change? Do you leave because the grass seems greener somewhere else? Do you work within the mass culture and subvert where you can? Do you face mass culture head on?
How do YOU chose to shape our practice/view of Architecture within the urban and social conditions created within cities like these?
we were listening to NPR during the alito hearings and senator joe biden asked a question that was about five minutes long. at the end the question was rhetorical.
if a city is indeed a "set of experiences" then indeed many if not most cities in north america (add australia to that one) are probably much alike on a superficial, visual level.
do you really think those four cities (and all other cities in north america) are alike culturally? do your homework, dude. vancouver has one of the world's largest asian populations. calgary is fairly anglo-saxon but surely is attracting a diverse population because of the energy boom. toronto bills itself as the most diverse city in north america.
and houston. have you ever been to houston? surely you have, you can quote lars lerup. maybe you go to rice. i have been to houston numerous times and i live in austin.
so you then know that in one week you could have 21 meals all from different ethnicities. you know that houston has two chinatowns. you know that houston has hundreds of thousands of vietnamese and SE asians, indians, pakistanis, arabs, ethiopians, liberians, west indians, and just about every other ethnic group out there. ok, that's just recently. you also know that many of the people who have built houston over the past 150 years have been greek, lebanese, italian, jewish, irish, german, polish, czech, slovak...do i need to continue?
indeed, it's the free-form, laissez-faire model of development laid over a general grid or other expansion-friendly urban-planning physical framework that have allowed north america's cities to become the diverse, interesting places they are today.
do i choose to stick it out? do i choose to leave? do i subvert it?
hell no. it's messy, it's chaotic, and it's vibrant, vital and alive. i love it. you want to see some place that will kill your soul? visit the outskirts of paris. see your "rational" planning for yourself.
and oh yes. since we're applying the brush of generalization...where have you been in europe?
this is gonna sound like a johnny cash song, but i've been to moscow st petersburg helsinki turku stockholm helsingborg copenhagen berlin zurich basel bern lugano como paris lyon nimes nice marseilles bilbao barcelona madrid porto lisbon seville milan florence and rome.
i can tell you that, on first glance, THESE cities share many characteristics in terms of visual and spatial experience. would you paint them with the same brush that you do north american cities? does the fact that (some of) these cities are older than american ones justify them in some way?
what about, say, marseilles is superior to houston? indeed, what about marseilles is DIFFERENT than houston? i know, i know, yes...but hey. they're both humid and have lots of halal butchers.
cf - That's what I'm trying to get across - that there is no such place as the perfect city. That each is flawed, and that each has its potential to evolve, not simply become 'better'
ochona - I've lived in all these cities, except houston.
I was suggesting MASS culture was in the most part the same - our lifestyles.
Though, the ethnographic make-up should be a driver for culture shift, and despite the fact that there's something like 30% asian population in Vancouver; Ikea, the Strokes, pizzapops and Kawneer are just as a big a part of their lives as it is anywhere else.
I guess I was trying to get across a lifestyle similarity.
Rational planning would be great(I'm not proposing that, nor supporting it), but who gets to do the planning?
Your description of Houston sounds a lot like Toronto and Calgary, except Calgary has the whole 'gateway to the wild west' thing. ;)
Keep in mind this was a response to someone condoning one of these cities over another, and I'm merely pointing out there's too many similarities to start hucking rocks. i just thought I'd through it out to the masses.
it's all one big global village of mass consumption, mcd's and ikea.
perhaps.
however, by sweeping these four cities into the assumption that they have the same history and current cultural/ethnic makeup is just ridiculous. Perhaps global products, advertising and art reach us all, but the way that this information is recieved and put back into the urban environment is through a filter of landscape, politics, cultural beliefs, etc. etc. etc. These influences do change city to city. The result is cities unique to each other.
I'm sorry, but I really don't find Vancouver and Toronto that similar. And you won't want to hear this, but Calgary is also very different from both. Yes, they all have ikea and a chinatown, but that is just a envelope for the people that live there. And those people don't all come from the same factory of mass consumption. People are people, but people are also different in their beliefs and how they translate those beliefs into architecture says something about them.
SPIEGEL: Wait a minute, isn't the current trend moving away from suburbia and back to the city?
Koolhaas: Yes, for now. And do you know what's so ironic about that? The people from the suburbs are bringing along their suburban values: cleanliness, orderliness, safety -- dullness, in other words. As a result, urban areas are being hollowed out. Just look at Times Square in New York. No more sex shops, no drugs, no homeless people. The area is clinically clean and incredibly dull.
*****
But Manhattan ain't dull... Clean aint necessarily dull... All clean is dull, but Manhattan aint all clean... The fact that you can talk about Times Square in a certain way means its evolved as a certain kind of thing. Nobody wants everywhere to be like Times Square, nobody would want Times Square to begin canibalizing the rest of the city, but New York would not be the same without it.
I don't think these cities are all similar. I think you are generalizing too much, Alec. Not only did these cities develop very differently from one another, but the demographics are very different, industries and economic drivers are different, the "way people are' is different too... In fact no city is homogenous. Every city has deviant cultures, every city has diversity and differences that go against the "dominant global culture"... In Vancouver, people go outside, in Toronto people get in their cars and drive everywhere... Toronto has a patchwork of different ethnic communities that have their own cultural habits... Even if Ikea is everywhere, there are so many things that are *not everywhere*. Its the differences that make people and places unique and interesting don't you think? Isn't flaw also charm?
nope Calgary last I looked is not anything like Vancouver. Vancouver has a one square mile downtown with 80,000 residents, 64,000 registered voters.
500+ towers that help limit sprawl and permit the density to support the services and what not that make it fun to live here. We chose not to build freeways through neighbourhoods. Downtown Calgary is deserted even on a nice day in the summer, Vancouver you can hardly move for the humanity.
Hundreds of restaurants. Thousands of people on the streets all over the city. Walking.
2 blocks from my apartment is Denman St, there in the closest block is
1. Coffee shop run by japanese
2. Dairy Queen
3. Japanese restaurant that doesn't sell sushi
4. African place
5. Mexican
6. Chinese
7. oops missed the Ukrainian between the sandwhich shop and the dairy queen.
8.Malaysian
9. smoke shop run by Persians
10. Gelato shop with coffee.
I am not sure I havent missed somebody in there
across the street there is a french canadian chicken roast place been there 25 years
a couple Korean barbecues
this goes on for 10 blocks and continues around a big square, all around downtown. then there is west fourth, kerrisdale, nope nothing like it in Calgary.
Calgary is an island in the middle of the prairie, it can control sprawl and is comepletely responsible for what it has become. What most people think of as Vancouver is like Seattle, a patchwork of municipalities with thier own
agendas when it comes to growth. Some of it is controlled by the regional districts livable region plan, but the City of Vancouver is not responsible for what happens in Surrey or Langley or Pitt Meadows.
Baldwin - I agree with your notion that a measurment of a cities greatness is all in the eye of the beholder. I also see your argument that all major N. American cities have a overall culture that is somewhat homogonized. Granted these sweeping generalizations are just that - generalizations.
As I mentioned in the Canadian school post which started all this - trash talking Calgary for not looking like Toroto or Vancouver is like comparing apples to oranges. Look at the post above of one persons opinion as to why Vancouver is so much better than Calgary. As I said before, unique geography is why Vancouver looks as it does. That and population. Put those same people in a wide open landscape like Alberta and the density would decrease, regardless of ethnicity. That I have no doubt of.
If we are to compare cities we need to compare things like population, geography, business, etc. Otherwise it is just an opinion - and everyones hometown is the best. Compare Calgary to Denver. Compare Toronto to NYC. Compare Vacouver to San Francisco. Compare Houston to Atlanta, etc, etc.
AB:
Your "suggestion" is this?...
Live (by your choice) in the city that provides you with the best "quality" of life. If you can't, make the best of your life in the city in which you reside.
It is your right as an architect, desgner, artist to compare cities. My preference is not to use urban and regional planning comparison techniques... that's the way my brain works.
Calgary chose to allow sprawl because that is what is easy to do. There is an endless amount of space around Calgary, nothing limits its horizontal growth.
Much like Denver. You can still compare it to Vancouver, which consciously chose to limit sprawl and encourage high density. Calgary could have done a very effective job, as it is its own metropolitan area (if you can call it that).
So you have a city that until very recently rolled up its downtown sidewalks at night, even in the summer. No concentration of people, no concentration of street life. Is there anything but strip mall eateries? A few nice places downtown for the lunch/business crowd?
Calgary controls the whole widget as far as zoning/land use goes. It is not just geography or the weather that have shaped Calgary. It is choosing to be dependant on cars, freeways, and building endlessly expansion out into the prairie that shaped Calgary.
What is weird about this conversation is that when visiting Calgary I was amazed at its compactness, low sprawl, much larger downtown and skyline that one would expect for a city its size. Cross the border and you see sprawl-places like Denver--south of Castle Rock to Loveland is like Calgary to Red Deer-- except in the case of Denver, it is almost all urbanized or being urbanized.
timpdx - I concur completely about Calgary. For a city of it's size it's not nearly as sprawled as an Omaha, which has similar size. Remember, Calgary is a city just about 1 million people. They had a big growth time in the 1970's and since then it has been stagnant until recently. Now it's the fastest growing large city in Canada. Only recently has anyone paid any attention to that place. Only recently has there been a need to control growth.
Then I visit Toronto and see endless suburban sprawl one would see in any city its size. NYC has massive sprawl, but it's ok because Manhattan is dense? Chicago has the same population density as Vancouver, but are they sprawled because the city is 3x the size? One can argue over and over how great their downtown or city center is, but overall, Calgary is quite compact. Remember, in Calgary there are no suburbs.
Right now Calgary is growing into a city that both Toronto and Vancouver have long ago acheived. Just breaking into the big leagues of a 1 million + metro area. Personally I've debating moving up to Calgary just to participate in the growth and design of the city. They don't have highways there (Deerfoot trail is a joke by American standards and only runs along the east side). The transit system needs to be overhauled for a larger population with an airport rail link. The city center is booming with new businesses requiring some real urban planning. Foster is working on a planned twin 60 story tower downtown. Where else is something like that happening in N. America? Calgary probably has more corporate headquarters per capita than any other city in Canada.
There is something happening there that isn't happening in other cities. To only look at current figures, especially compared to more established cities, is shortsighted. Thinking like that would never have made cities like NYC, Toronto, Vancouver, San Francisco into the great cities they are today.
Baldwin is right, as architects we need to make the cities we call home the best they possibly can be. Right now Calgary just has more work to get there. Apparently there are many that scoff at that. Should I say some are perhaps lazy?
A: you and Baldwin really do sound like one and the same...
Anyway, while Calgary does have more corporate headquarters than other cities in Canada, who cares?! Corporate headquarters in Canada aren't generally know for their riveting architecture. This credit tends to go to private homes and public institutions. A lot of the shwag that we see across Canada is corporate headquarters. Maybe that is why Calgary feels so quiet and lifeless downtown.
And it is not known for its art scene. Nope, that would be Winnipeg, the smaller, crustier, colder, cousin.
And I'm sorry, A, could you remind me because I don't seem to 'remember, in Calgary there are no suburbs'. Are we talking about the same city? ! ?! ?! ? ! !
Remember - los angeles is the densest urbanized region in north america, averaging over 7000 peoples/square mile for the entire metropolitan area.
metropolitan nyc averages 5300/square mile demographia
toronto works out to be 1521/sq mi
greater vancouver has only 266/sq mile -
and the calgary region has 80/5/people (calgary by itself is 483/sq mile)
(thanks wikipedia)
so if you want to talk about density or sprawl- look at the numbers
With a population of about 545,671 (based on the 2001 census), Vancouver lies in a region of more than 2 million people. Vancouver is the largest city in the province of British Columbia and the third largest in Canada. It covers an area of 114 sq km."
that is 4786/sq km.
if you don't include the super high density downtown/westend, the rest of the city is about 4200/sq km.
Calgary has over four times the land area of the City of Vancouver. Nope, thats not sprawl.
and if you want to talk about the whole metropolitan area (the sprawl)
then we have to subtract the preserved greenspace from the GVRD, more than 1/3 of the land area.
that leaves 290 sq miles for 2,000,000 people, or 6896/ sq mile.
"Look at the post above of one persons opinion as to why Vancouver is so much better than Calgary. As I said before, unique geography is why Vancouver looks as it does. That and population. Put those same people in a wide open landscape like Alberta and the density would decrease, regardless of ethnicity. That I have no doubt of."
It seems like there are two things we're talking about here: environment and culture. Both of these forces on urban development impact one another, that's for sure, but how that happens is complex. I don't think we can say that environment shapes an urban culture, culture also shapes our environment... There are so many factors... Economic policies, city planning, infrastructure, historic circumstances, demographics... It's not just about space, its also about *design*... Not just like architecture, but how an entire community brings certain cultural values to the shaping of their environment... Environmental consciousness and activism are deeply embedded in the culture of Vancouver, its a big part of their economy (tourism and lumber...) Also, trade... which accounts for alot of their diversity, a port city... Years ago there were plans to build a large highway through to downtown Vancouver, roughly where Chinatown / Gastown are now... The community fought it and it was never built. And yet the economy has grown despite this resistance to the sprawl method of growth. In fact, the city has kept certain long term assets and qualities that alot of other cities are just now trying to get back.
For sure its location had alot of benefits, but cities are not just products of physical landscape. Design matters. The human landscape matters.
"Remember - los angeles is the densest urbanized region in north america, averaging over 7000 peoples/square mile for the entire metropolitan area.
metropolitan nyc averages 5300/square mile
demographia
toronto works out to be 1521/sq mi
greater vancouver has only 266/sq mile -
and the calgary region has 80/5/people (calgary by itself is 483/sq mile)
(thanks wikipedia)
so if you want to talk about density or sprawl- look at the numbers"Actually you can't look at numbers. You have to look at the urban structure. Los Angeles is dense, but its carved up by highways into fortified city states, you can't get around without a car, it has its own structure... Manhattan is dense, it's the center arond which other communities radiate.... Vancouver has a dense downtown core that is on a peninsula (the greater city is on a river delta, so you have bridges that connect different cities, richmond, etc.)...
In other words, those numbers don't really work because its all about distribution, flows, operation, how the city works, the experience of the city...
the point treekiller makes brink is that density is not a meaningful indicator of much. takes the air out of some of the calculations doesn't it?
this is old topic, but suburbs are not what many of you think they are and are significant in ways you don't suspect. the usual crap is true and untrue and should be reconsidered because we are definitely not learning the right lessons yet.
the unusual crap that makes suburbia and sprawl and big city life worth continuing is almost never talked about.
if interested in a quite nice and short summary i think this article is pretty nice place to start: by margaret pugh o'mara
ya, amazingly erudite spambot, but a classic Calgary comeback. Calgary swallows its suburbs every few years or so. Anytime some unincorporated area outside the city gets developed, it simply expands the city limits. Calgary's neighborhoods are its suburbs.
Go downtown Calagary on any weekend, even during stampede, you can fore a cannon and nobody would know. Suburbs? Nothing redeeming them whatsover. Tims, Wendy's, Future Shop, Milestones, and Earls and unrelenting "automobile related services" as the zoning bylaws spell it out. Maybe Jump can save me the time and expense and tell me a few things about why suburbs are not what I think they are, or maybe not eh?
in my experience, once you start working with the details of design, you start seeing the stark differences in North American cities instead of the similarities. Just because something "feels" generic subjecively does not mean that it is.
I'm working on a Canadian suburban project now, in Ontario, and I am struck by the differences with the US: floorplate typologies ate completely different, to the point that I'm convinced that suburban London new towns have more in common with the Toronto location than anything in the US. Cars per household and parking requrements are like they're cast on different planets. Zoning requrements (say for industrial and residential separation) are also completely alien (the town likes it's lumber yard right next to new highrise tower development).
I don't see much similarity at all when it comes down to it. After my consideration on types, etc, I basically decided my best precedents are in places like Almere and Vastra Hamnen rather than anything in the US.
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Calgary | Vancouver | Toronto | Houston | EveryOtherCity
Every contemporary city in North America suffers from things like 'poor architectural conditions', or 'gentrification', or 'sprawl'.
Cities such as Calgary, Toronto, and Vancouver share numerous urban and social characteristics (though some people think 'their' city is different).
These cities are all around 100 years old, defined by economic/population booms (and busts) in the last 50 years, and to satisfy needs for housing the influx have neglected smarter growth strategies (compared to places like the Netherlands).
The Mass Culture in these cities are pretty much the exact same, and that drives how the city is built and ultimately what it looks like.
After a little finger pointing going on in other threads, someone declared Calgary being more deprived of Architectural opportunity, more 'ugly', and less of a city than Toronto or Vancouver - and by logic, almost every other city in North America.
I believe that while each North American city is unique through it's (very brief)history and geography, that the fore-mentioned cities all share the same cultural characteristics.
Generalizing a city based on pre-conceived notions, or brief visits, does not give an accurate understanding of that city.
Agreeing with Lars Lerup's views on Houston in After The City - a city is not made of physical definitions, but of sets of experiences. In order to truely understand a city you must abandon the notion of the built city (aesthetics), and focus on what kind of experiences are generated from the city. This applies to every city, Barcelona, New York, etc....
I'll also side with Rem here and some of his Generic City stance.
I guess what I'm saying, is that these Cities are basically all the same in their cultural and social make-up, embracing conditions of sprawl, and their urban aesthetic.
It's really quite difficult when you get down it to separate one from another as being unique, and I don't understand how one can be preferred over another, other than personal circumstance. We all design in the same conditions in these places.
| Questions |
I'm curious how us as Architects, deal with living and practicing in a city which does not meet particularly 'Architecturally evocative' requirements, or lack of 'rational' urban planning and design.
Do you chose to stick it out and try to influence a kind of change? Do you leave because the grass seems greener somewhere else? Do you work within the mass culture and subvert where you can? Do you face mass culture head on?
How do YOU chose to shape our practice/view of Architecture within the urban and social conditions created within cities like these?
hoot. It's a little windy.
we were listening to NPR during the alito hearings and senator joe biden asked a question that was about five minutes long. at the end the question was rhetorical.
if a city is indeed a "set of experiences" then indeed many if not most cities in north america (add australia to that one) are probably much alike on a superficial, visual level.
do you really think those four cities (and all other cities in north america) are alike culturally? do your homework, dude. vancouver has one of the world's largest asian populations. calgary is fairly anglo-saxon but surely is attracting a diverse population because of the energy boom. toronto bills itself as the most diverse city in north america.
and houston. have you ever been to houston? surely you have, you can quote lars lerup. maybe you go to rice. i have been to houston numerous times and i live in austin.
so you then know that in one week you could have 21 meals all from different ethnicities. you know that houston has two chinatowns. you know that houston has hundreds of thousands of vietnamese and SE asians, indians, pakistanis, arabs, ethiopians, liberians, west indians, and just about every other ethnic group out there. ok, that's just recently. you also know that many of the people who have built houston over the past 150 years have been greek, lebanese, italian, jewish, irish, german, polish, czech, slovak...do i need to continue?
indeed, it's the free-form, laissez-faire model of development laid over a general grid or other expansion-friendly urban-planning physical framework that have allowed north america's cities to become the diverse, interesting places they are today.
do i choose to stick it out? do i choose to leave? do i subvert it?
hell no. it's messy, it's chaotic, and it's vibrant, vital and alive. i love it. you want to see some place that will kill your soul? visit the outskirts of paris. see your "rational" planning for yourself.
Are you saying that someone "here" has declared by logic a vertical city has better "city" qualities than a horizontal city?
Your questions hint at a perfect city or that many people do not like the city in which they reside.
and oh yes. since we're applying the brush of generalization...where have you been in europe?
this is gonna sound like a johnny cash song, but i've been to moscow st petersburg helsinki turku stockholm helsingborg copenhagen berlin zurich basel bern lugano como paris lyon nimes nice marseilles bilbao barcelona madrid porto lisbon seville milan florence and rome.
i can tell you that, on first glance, THESE cities share many characteristics in terms of visual and spatial experience. would you paint them with the same brush that you do north american cities? does the fact that (some of) these cities are older than american ones justify them in some way?
what about, say, marseilles is superior to houston? indeed, what about marseilles is DIFFERENT than houston? i know, i know, yes...but hey. they're both humid and have lots of halal butchers.
cf - That's what I'm trying to get across - that there is no such place as the perfect city. That each is flawed, and that each has its potential to evolve, not simply become 'better'
ochona - I've lived in all these cities, except houston.
I was suggesting MASS culture was in the most part the same - our lifestyles.
Though, the ethnographic make-up should be a driver for culture shift, and despite the fact that there's something like 30% asian population in Vancouver; Ikea, the Strokes, pizzapops and Kawneer are just as a big a part of their lives as it is anywhere else.
I guess I was trying to get across a lifestyle similarity.
Rational planning would be great(I'm not proposing that, nor supporting it), but who gets to do the planning?
Your description of Houston sounds a lot like Toronto and Calgary, except Calgary has the whole 'gateway to the wild west' thing. ;)
Keep in mind this was a response to someone condoning one of these cities over another, and I'm merely pointing out there's too many similarities to start hucking rocks. i just thought I'd through it out to the masses.
it's all one big global village of mass consumption, mcd's and ikea.
perhaps.
however, by sweeping these four cities into the assumption that they have the same history and current cultural/ethnic makeup is just ridiculous. Perhaps global products, advertising and art reach us all, but the way that this information is recieved and put back into the urban environment is through a filter of landscape, politics, cultural beliefs, etc. etc. etc. These influences do change city to city. The result is cities unique to each other.
I'm sorry, but I really don't find Vancouver and Toronto that similar. And you won't want to hear this, but Calgary is also very different from both. Yes, they all have ikea and a chinatown, but that is just a envelope for the people that live there. And those people don't all come from the same factory of mass consumption. People are people, but people are also different in their beliefs and how they translate those beliefs into architecture says something about them.
How many cities consider themselves "Gateway to the west"? Calgary makes that claim as well?
SPIEGEL: Wait a minute, isn't the current trend moving away from suburbia and back to the city?
Koolhaas: Yes, for now. And do you know what's so ironic about that? The people from the suburbs are bringing along their suburban values: cleanliness, orderliness, safety -- dullness, in other words. As a result, urban areas are being hollowed out. Just look at Times Square in New York. No more sex shops, no drugs, no homeless people. The area is clinically clean and incredibly dull.
*****
But Manhattan ain't dull... Clean aint necessarily dull... All clean is dull, but Manhattan aint all clean... The fact that you can talk about Times Square in a certain way means its evolved as a certain kind of thing. Nobody wants everywhere to be like Times Square, nobody would want Times Square to begin canibalizing the rest of the city, but New York would not be the same without it.
I don't think these cities are all similar. I think you are generalizing too much, Alec. Not only did these cities develop very differently from one another, but the demographics are very different, industries and economic drivers are different, the "way people are' is different too... In fact no city is homogenous. Every city has deviant cultures, every city has diversity and differences that go against the "dominant global culture"... In Vancouver, people go outside, in Toronto people get in their cars and drive everywhere... Toronto has a patchwork of different ethnic communities that have their own cultural habits... Even if Ikea is everywhere, there are so many things that are *not everywhere*. Its the differences that make people and places unique and interesting don't you think? Isn't flaw also charm?
nope Calgary last I looked is not anything like Vancouver. Vancouver has a one square mile downtown with 80,000 residents, 64,000 registered voters.
500+ towers that help limit sprawl and permit the density to support the services and what not that make it fun to live here. We chose not to build freeways through neighbourhoods. Downtown Calgary is deserted even on a nice day in the summer, Vancouver you can hardly move for the humanity.
Hundreds of restaurants. Thousands of people on the streets all over the city. Walking.
2 blocks from my apartment is Denman St, there in the closest block is
1. Coffee shop run by japanese
2. Dairy Queen
3. Japanese restaurant that doesn't sell sushi
4. African place
5. Mexican
6. Chinese
7. oops missed the Ukrainian between the sandwhich shop and the dairy queen.
8.Malaysian
9. smoke shop run by Persians
10. Gelato shop with coffee.
I am not sure I havent missed somebody in there
across the street there is a french canadian chicken roast place been there 25 years
a couple Korean barbecues
this goes on for 10 blocks and continues around a big square, all around downtown. then there is west fourth, kerrisdale, nope nothing like it in Calgary.
Calgary is an island in the middle of the prairie, it can control sprawl and is comepletely responsible for what it has become. What most people think of as Vancouver is like Seattle, a patchwork of municipalities with thier own
agendas when it comes to growth. Some of it is controlled by the regional districts livable region plan, but the City of Vancouver is not responsible for what happens in Surrey or Langley or Pitt Meadows.
Baldwin - I agree with your notion that a measurment of a cities greatness is all in the eye of the beholder. I also see your argument that all major N. American cities have a overall culture that is somewhat homogonized. Granted these sweeping generalizations are just that - generalizations.
As I mentioned in the Canadian school post which started all this - trash talking Calgary for not looking like Toroto or Vancouver is like comparing apples to oranges. Look at the post above of one persons opinion as to why Vancouver is so much better than Calgary. As I said before, unique geography is why Vancouver looks as it does. That and population. Put those same people in a wide open landscape like Alberta and the density would decrease, regardless of ethnicity. That I have no doubt of.
If we are to compare cities we need to compare things like population, geography, business, etc. Otherwise it is just an opinion - and everyones hometown is the best. Compare Calgary to Denver. Compare Toronto to NYC. Compare Vacouver to San Francisco. Compare Houston to Atlanta, etc, etc.
AB:
Your "suggestion" is this?...
Live (by your choice) in the city that provides you with the best "quality" of life. If you can't, make the best of your life in the city in which you reside.
It is your right as an architect, desgner, artist to compare cities. My preference is not to use urban and regional planning comparison techniques... that's the way my brain works.
Calgary chose to allow sprawl because that is what is easy to do. There is an endless amount of space around Calgary, nothing limits its horizontal growth.
Much like Denver. You can still compare it to Vancouver, which consciously chose to limit sprawl and encourage high density. Calgary could have done a very effective job, as it is its own metropolitan area (if you can call it that).
So you have a city that until very recently rolled up its downtown sidewalks at night, even in the summer. No concentration of people, no concentration of street life. Is there anything but strip mall eateries? A few nice places downtown for the lunch/business crowd?
Calgary controls the whole widget as far as zoning/land use goes. It is not just geography or the weather that have shaped Calgary. It is choosing to be dependant on cars, freeways, and building endlessly expansion out into the prairie that shaped Calgary.
What is weird about this conversation is that when visiting Calgary I was amazed at its compactness, low sprawl, much larger downtown and skyline that one would expect for a city its size. Cross the border and you see sprawl-places like Denver--south of Castle Rock to Loveland is like Calgary to Red Deer-- except in the case of Denver, it is almost all urbanized or being urbanized.
well I suppose everything is relative
timpdx - I concur completely about Calgary. For a city of it's size it's not nearly as sprawled as an Omaha, which has similar size. Remember, Calgary is a city just about 1 million people. They had a big growth time in the 1970's and since then it has been stagnant until recently. Now it's the fastest growing large city in Canada. Only recently has anyone paid any attention to that place. Only recently has there been a need to control growth.
Then I visit Toronto and see endless suburban sprawl one would see in any city its size. NYC has massive sprawl, but it's ok because Manhattan is dense? Chicago has the same population density as Vancouver, but are they sprawled because the city is 3x the size? One can argue over and over how great their downtown or city center is, but overall, Calgary is quite compact. Remember, in Calgary there are no suburbs.
Right now Calgary is growing into a city that both Toronto and Vancouver have long ago acheived. Just breaking into the big leagues of a 1 million + metro area. Personally I've debating moving up to Calgary just to participate in the growth and design of the city. They don't have highways there (Deerfoot trail is a joke by American standards and only runs along the east side). The transit system needs to be overhauled for a larger population with an airport rail link. The city center is booming with new businesses requiring some real urban planning. Foster is working on a planned twin 60 story tower downtown. Where else is something like that happening in N. America? Calgary probably has more corporate headquarters per capita than any other city in Canada.
There is something happening there that isn't happening in other cities. To only look at current figures, especially compared to more established cities, is shortsighted. Thinking like that would never have made cities like NYC, Toronto, Vancouver, San Francisco into the great cities they are today.
Baldwin is right, as architects we need to make the cities we call home the best they possibly can be. Right now Calgary just has more work to get there. Apparently there are many that scoff at that. Should I say some are perhaps lazy?
Maybe someone can post several up-and-coming architecture firms in Calgary.
What about the art scene?
A: you and Baldwin really do sound like one and the same...
Anyway, while Calgary does have more corporate headquarters than other cities in Canada, who cares?! Corporate headquarters in Canada aren't generally know for their riveting architecture. This credit tends to go to private homes and public institutions. A lot of the shwag that we see across Canada is corporate headquarters. Maybe that is why Calgary feels so quiet and lifeless downtown.
And it is not known for its art scene. Nope, that would be Winnipeg, the smaller, crustier, colder, cousin.
And I'm sorry, A, could you remind me because I don't seem to 'remember, in Calgary there are no suburbs'. Are we talking about the same city? ! ?! ?! ? ! !
Remember - los angeles is the densest urbanized region in north america, averaging over 7000 peoples/square mile for the entire metropolitan area.
metropolitan nyc averages 5300/square mile
demographia
toronto works out to be 1521/sq mi
greater vancouver has only 266/sq mile -
and the calgary region has 80/5/people (calgary by itself is 483/sq mile)
(thanks wikipedia)
so if you want to talk about density or sprawl- look at the numbers
from the City of Vancouver website,
"Population
With a population of about 545,671 (based on the 2001 census), Vancouver lies in a region of more than 2 million people. Vancouver is the largest city in the province of British Columbia and the third largest in Canada. It covers an area of 114 sq km."
that is 4786/sq km.
if you don't include the super high density downtown/westend, the rest of the city is about 4200/sq km.
Calgary has over four times the land area of the City of Vancouver. Nope, thats not sprawl.
and if you want to talk about the whole metropolitan area (the sprawl)
then we have to subtract the preserved greenspace from the GVRD, more than 1/3 of the land area.
that leaves 290 sq miles for 2,000,000 people, or 6896/ sq mile.
wkipedia has Calgary at 304 sq miles and 956,000 people
3144/sq mile
twice as spread out as greater vancouver. anyone find the greenspace statistic for Calgary and adjust this figure?
It seems like there are two things we're talking about here: environment and culture. Both of these forces on urban development impact one another, that's for sure, but how that happens is complex. I don't think we can say that environment shapes an urban culture, culture also shapes our environment... There are so many factors... Economic policies, city planning, infrastructure, historic circumstances, demographics... It's not just about space, its also about *design*... Not just like architecture, but how an entire community brings certain cultural values to the shaping of their environment... Environmental consciousness and activism are deeply embedded in the culture of Vancouver, its a big part of their economy (tourism and lumber...) Also, trade... which accounts for alot of their diversity, a port city... Years ago there were plans to build a large highway through to downtown Vancouver, roughly where Chinatown / Gastown are now... The community fought it and it was never built. And yet the economy has grown despite this resistance to the sprawl method of growth. In fact, the city has kept certain long term assets and qualities that alot of other cities are just now trying to get back.
For sure its location had alot of benefits, but cities are not just products of physical landscape. Design matters. The human landscape matters.
treekiller:
"Remember - los angeles is the densest urbanized region in north america, averaging over 7000 peoples/square mile for the entire metropolitan area.metropolitan nyc averages 5300/square mile
demographia
toronto works out to be 1521/sq mi
greater vancouver has only 266/sq mile -
and the calgary region has 80/5/people (calgary by itself is 483/sq mile)
(thanks wikipedia)
so if you want to talk about density or sprawl- look at the numbers"Actually you can't look at numbers. You have to look at the urban structure. Los Angeles is dense, but its carved up by highways into fortified city states, you can't get around without a car, it has its own structure... Manhattan is dense, it's the center arond which other communities radiate.... Vancouver has a dense downtown core that is on a peninsula (the greater city is on a river delta, so you have bridges that connect different cities, richmond, etc.)...
In other words, those numbers don't really work because its all about distribution, flows, operation, how the city works, the experience of the city...
the point treekiller makes brink is that density is not a meaningful indicator of much. takes the air out of some of the calculations doesn't it?
this is old topic, but suburbs are not what many of you think they are and are significant in ways you don't suspect. the usual crap is true and untrue and should be reconsidered because we are definitely not learning the right lessons yet.
the unusual crap that makes suburbia and sprawl and big city life worth continuing is almost never talked about.
if interested in a quite nice and short summary i think this article is pretty nice place to start: by margaret pugh o'mara
or this book by kevin kruse and thomas sugrue
it is interesting how little we have noticed life going on in suburbia all this time, not to mention the real importance of that life, too.
jump, i think that jamesonm (who revived this old thread) might bea spam bot.
Or just advertising.
ahahahahah!
i love it!
ya, amazingly erudite spambot, but a classic Calgary comeback. Calgary swallows its suburbs every few years or so. Anytime some unincorporated area outside the city gets developed, it simply expands the city limits. Calgary's neighborhoods are its suburbs.
Go downtown Calagary on any weekend, even during stampede, you can fore a cannon and nobody would know. Suburbs? Nothing redeeming them whatsover. Tims, Wendy's, Future Shop, Milestones, and Earls and unrelenting "automobile related services" as the zoning bylaws spell it out. Maybe Jump can save me the time and expense and tell me a few things about why suburbs are not what I think they are, or maybe not eh?
in my experience, once you start working with the details of design, you start seeing the stark differences in North American cities instead of the similarities. Just because something "feels" generic subjecively does not mean that it is.
I'm working on a Canadian suburban project now, in Ontario, and I am struck by the differences with the US: floorplate typologies ate completely different, to the point that I'm convinced that suburban London new towns have more in common with the Toronto location than anything in the US. Cars per household and parking requrements are like they're cast on different planets. Zoning requrements (say for industrial and residential separation) are also completely alien (the town likes it's lumber yard right next to new highrise tower development).
I don't see much similarity at all when it comes down to it. After my consideration on types, etc, I basically decided my best precedents are in places like Almere and Vastra Hamnen rather than anything in the US.
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