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Old Posted Apr 16, 2012, 1:38 AM
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Mr Downtown Mr Downtown is offline
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Take a look at Canadian cities other than Vancouver—and at some US cities besides Albuquerque and Phoenix. Here's Calgary, for instance:



The differences in cities that developed at the same time, with similar geographic circumstances, are not enormous. Boston and Montréal are more alike than they are different. The same for Toronto and Chicago, Winnipeg and Minneapolis, Edmonton and Tulsa, Vancouver and San Francisco. There are, however, a few important differences between Canadian and US cities that have certainly affected planning and land use:
  • Canadians have historically been more accepting of government land-use controls. Canadian cities have not had generations of leapfrog development. Development is a little higher density overall, but more important, Canadian cities grow outward incrementally rather than in jumps that leave undeveloped areas in between.
  • Canada's immigration policies have brought many families willing to work long hours as shopkeepers, and who have cultural traditions of urban retailing. This has kept strong retail streets going in Toronto and helped build new malls in Richmond.
  • Canada has only 60 percent as much retail space per capita as the US. For various reasons, it has been easy for Americans to build new retail areas and abandon the old ones. In part, this is related to the abandonment of parts of American cities for racial and cultural reasons that Canadians do not share.
You might be interested in looking at Michael Goldberg's 1986 book The Myth of the North American City: Continentalism Challenged. Similar ground was covered in a 1996 journal article by Judith Garber and David Imbroscio called "'The Myth of the North American City' Reconsidered: Local Constitutional Regimes in Canada and the United States" in Urban Affairs Review, Vol. 31, No. 5, 595-624 (1996).