Quote:
Originally Posted by Thundertubs
Moral of the story: Threads with leading or overly editorialized titles, especially when negative, will always cause a stir. We've seen this plenty of times here (a certain infamous Arkansas thread...). It never promotes the kind of meaningful discussion this site is capable of, but struggles to achieve sometimes.
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That might be true, but I don't know that I'd characterize it as the "moral of the story". I'd say the moral is that a lot of people are not interested in hearing anything negative about high-rise buildings or densely populated urban areas (perhaps it's just when they're in certain cities, like Toronto, that are sacred to the urbano-densist cause). I also think that there's a rationalist emphasis on quantification on the Forum that is somewhat suspicious of Miketoronto's qualitative and empiricist approach. In other words, if in order truly to understand and evaluate even one place (e.g. Toronto or Scarborough) we have to make the effort that Mike does to actually be out on the street watching what's going on and asking questions and thinking about the experiences of the real people who live there (people that he actually goes to the trouble of knowing) -- if we have to do all that before we can form a well-founded opinion of even one place, then what becomes of all the fun arguments about cities that seem so easy when they're reduced to lists of building heights and population figures and numbers of condos under construction etc.?
Anyway, it's too beautiful a day in my part of T.O. to stay indoors worrying about this. Interesting discussion.