Imperfect Progress is Still Progress
It's easy to be cynical about the progress happening in our cities, and sometimes the understanding of it is lacking. But, the change is tangible!
Whenever I return to a city after an absence, I am always surprised by how much has changed. I think it’s quite natural that when you become comfortable in a place (whether that be physical or metaphorical), you begin to pay less attention to the details and the margins.
In 2023, we have grown really accustomed to incredibly rapid change — be it the result of the shockingly fast progression of technology, or modern society’s love for just in time everything, or perhaps just the sense that this is a particularly noteworthy era, every single day feels more substantial than before. And in this context, the pace of change in our cities often feels like it is decelerating.
But I think this is an illusion cause by the breakneck rate at which everything else is changing. Changes in concrete and steel simply take longer, and changes in organization, bureaucracy, and politics feel glacial.
Because of this gap between our perceptions or communal sense of how things are and reality, I think it’s critical that we take more time to reflect on change — particularly in the positive direction.
We don’t feel velocity.
One thing that I find myself coming back to constantly is the above sentiment. Human beings rarely notice things that are constant, and this includes change — You can be moving and completely unaware of it.
A place where this keeps coming up for me is the extent to which it often feels that much of the English-speaking (and increasingly non-English-speaking) urbanist worlds like to marvel at the “absurdity” of development in Canadian cities, when compared to the much slower or incremental styles of development seen in other places — such as the US.
Perhaps no example is better than Vaughan Metropolitan Centre in Toronto: Vaughan Metropolitan Centre is a major new transit-oriented development district being built up in its namesake at the northernmost end of Toronto’s University subway extension, which happens to be an area currently filled with suburban offices, warehouses, industrial plots and big box stores.
Of course, I won’t deny that expecting a few high rises and a subway station in a fundamentally industrial-suburban landscape to create an attractive urban district is absurd, but what makes little sense to me — despite its frequency — is the attitude that this is something that should be actively mocked. It feels like some dark element of status quo bias that this site in transition gets more negative attention that it would ever have received in its previous state, much less the innumerable other sites like it across North America.
I see a lot of people making fun of Vaughan, but for better or for worse, this is what progress looks like! Perhaps not everywhere, because progress can obviously follow a different path for each different geography. I say this because I (and we as a North American society) have seen this before: various locations in Vancouver now heralded as urban success stories — such as Metrotown and False Creek — gave up suburban or industrial heritage to become something greater. There is no reason to question this model — its results have actually been quite promising in the past.
Perhaps this is because we’ve forgotten what progress looks like. The reality of desiring change and witnessing things moving in slow motion is certainly very frustrating for those who know that better is possible. But, it is rare that change happens all at once, at least initially. Of course, there is likely an element of doubt, that some “unique” element of the local circumstances will stop change — and perhaps of jealousy that in a place like this a wonderful new urban district will emerge. But these sentiments will not change the course of things.
However, the fact that changing for the better is so often met with pushback and skepticism is deeply concerning. The reality of change is that there are many intermediate phases, sometimes even worse or less sensible than the last, that need to be passed through to arrive at our destination.
The reality of brownfields urban change — the kind that needs to happen if you want to do more than just grow existing “urban” districts at their fringes is that progress is often slow, uneven and unpredictable. Short of such change that involves the levelling of existing built form or the creation of new land, existing uses will always put the brakes on change.
This change is also generally asynchronous. For example, imagine the development of a dense urban street grid in Burnaby’s Metrotown, something that is just now happening slowly.
Metrotown, like many new Canadian transit-oriented development districts, began with a suburban shopping mall surrounded by parking — There was no dense urban street grid here to speak of. Getting to that point (or at least starting to) required many things! The construction of SkyTrain will likely be seen as a first major change, but from there, increased service and extensions of the network to other destinations were necessary to make Metrotown a regional destination that creates significant value for its owners.
In parallel, new housing and office space was developed around the site thanks to its increasing amenities and transport access. Over time, these developments added to the mass of the site, increasing its gravity, each addition adding to those before it. Street changes and redevelopment had to contend with the legacy of auto-orientation, and thus required new people with new ideas and ways of doing things to move into the neighbourhood, only made possible by the now-growing urban mass. These changes further cemented the value and attractiveness of the neighbourhood, which led to more development and more population and demographic change, which morphed the Overton window that may have previously barred new urban design and a shift from auto mobility.
All of these changes also impacted real estate values, which are only now — over 30 years after SkyTrain went in — making the beginning of redevelopment of the mall site into a dense urban grid financially viable, with political viability requiring all the population and demographic change I’ve already mentioned.
You can see here that the wholesale change of an existing urban space would be extreme difficult, not only financially, but also socially. Change was and continues to be incremental: it builds off of previous change and enables more and more radical departures from the status quo. New travel and mobility patterns and habits along with the career changes that so often encourage them take years to emerge, and urban areas take further years to respond.
What is sometimes unclear is the impact that individual change agents, or projects which have particular radical components have. But, say in a place like Metrotown that developers hadn’t started developing high rise-housing in places that would at least initially seem somewhat unconventional (and perhaps to some even anti-urban), then the rest of the change process would be hampered, if not stopped outright. There needs to be a place for a new generation of car-free (or even car-lite) advocates and engaged citizens to actually live!
This is why the individual incremental changes need to be viewed differently: They are not just change in and of itself, but change accelerators and enablers. These systems are chaotic of course, but they are also self perpetuating.
A great example of the chaotic, unpredictable, and otherwise slow nature of this urban change can be seen in Toronto’s CityPlace neighbourhood, which, while appearing to be a rather complete highly vertical community and has for over a decade ,only just got a school in the last years or two. Why a school wouldn’t be planned as part of a major new urban neighbourhood would be a good question to ask, and the answer is that CityPlace ended up catering to families far more than expected. This unexpected change itself is likely in large part a result of the extremely high cost of housing in Toronto, and the limited expansion of transit squeezing those that want to live in an urban place. You can imagine how the time it took to fund and build a school in the neighbourhood would have other impacts on the area — some predictable, others much less so.
All of this is why I think it is so important to create the right conditions for urban change, but also to let things develop in a more natural and flexible way. We can’t predict the weather more than a week or two out, and the evolution of our cities is probably just as chaotic, which is why it’s key to remember that even when progress seems imperfect, its impacts down the road may be much brighter.
It's tremendous to see so much building going on in the city - my view is that it's much better to build places for people to live here, than having them buy houses on prime farm land cum sprawl then they have to drive everywhere. Plus increased density makes more & better transit possible, as well as car-free living. Like most, I have issues with some of the new transit being constructed and designed, but once shovels are digging, it's time to move on & critique newer plans & designs. The network effect will increase greatly once Eglinton Crosstown LRT opens, Finch West LRT too, improved GO all day service. And especially what Reece's has often identified, fare integration betwixt TTC & GO withini 416, which will be a real game changer for far flung 416 suburbs (like Long Branch, ahem).
I think that it is important to remember that after an important piece of legislation that allows better urbanism is passed. It takes time for it to produce change. I like the fact the Ontario recently abolished single-family zoning, but it will be several years before we can see it happen.