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Posted: Aug 7, 2012, 8:37 PM
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Registered User
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Join Date: Apr 2010
Posts: 1,357
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Nepean
I also agree with waterloowarrior that KG limits his analysis to height-related issues, and that his blog is silent on many other forms of developments. For instance, on Merivale Road in Nepean, more strip-mall like stores are being built. These buildings are not tall, but they are (in my view) another step in the destruction of this part of Ottawa. The Bulldog, however, does not criticize this form of development, even though in my opinion a strip mall causes a lot more damage to a city than rezoning a lot so a condo building can be taller.
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FWIW, Rhys Phillips did decide to talk about this kind of thing in a Citizen column. I'm not usually a fan of his, but I find he is usually worth reading nonetheless.
Quote:
Ottawa’s both too tall and too short
Intensification has seen looming condo towers sprout, but malls and parking lots still sprawl, Rhys Phillips writes. When will the city get it just right?
By Rhys Phillips August 5, 2012
Most Ottawans are aware of the increasing number of contentious “spot zonings” resulting in condominium tower heights far exceeding what was envisaged in approved community design plans. Spot zoning is the process of changing building and using restrictions on individual sites rather than as part of broad planning exercises.
Good planning regimes use this tool sparingly to deal with unique anomalies affecting the overall interests of the community. Instead, with the endorsement of council backed by enthusiastic support from the city’s planning officials, there has been a steady stream of such approvals for residential towers dramatically exceeding current permitted heights. Although usually opposed by the surrounding neighbourhoods, these approvals are wrapped in the sacred cloth of urban intensification and environmental responsibility. Those who oppose upsizing are branded as supporters of urban sprawl, as being environmentally irresponsible and — that most abused put-down — guilty of being “not in my backyarders.”
On the other side, however, few observers have paid much attention to council’s frequent approval of one-storey commercial projects that grossly underutilize scarce urban land. Not infrequently these decisions also result in environmentally harmful acres of parking capable of literally raising the temperature of the city. Frankly, it is hard not to experience the bitter taste of hypocrisy when examining how our professional planners and politicians cynically manipulate both ends of the height issue.
Height is not synonymous with density. Countless studies have debunked the myth that height means density yet this thesis continues to be the accepted mantra of city planners. Unless one envisages a city packed with cheek-by-jowl towers or slabs, the need to protect sunlight, views and provide amenities can and often does result in lower densities than low and mid-rise housing. For example, the point-towers of Vancouver’s core are frequently separated by rows of single family townhouses.
Well over a decade ago, Guedi Capeluto and Edna Shaviv reported that multiple studies had already demonstrated “that a reasonable density may be achieved with six (storey) high buildings while preserving the solar rights of neighbouring buildings, as well as open spaces among them.” At about the same time, the authors of Tall Buildings, a report of a U.K. Commons committee, wrote “The proposition that tall buildings are necessary to prevent suburban sprawl is impossible to sustain. They do not necessarily achieve higher densities than mid- or low-rise development and in some cases are a less-efficient use of space than alternatives.”
Even Vancouver, internationally renowned for its shimmering glass towers, is eschewing height for denser “village-like” development to reclaim the massive brownfields on the southeast shores of False Creek. The Olympic Village (now called Millennium Village) is the model. With architecturally strong and environmentally solid mid-rise buildings surrounding artful public squares and a striking community centre, it provides the preferable alternative option to highrise development.
Brent Toderian, Vancouver’s director of planning, recently told The Tyee, “the majority of the transformation of the city in the future, outside of the central area, will be in low- to mid-rise forms.” Significantly, he continues, most neighbourhood revolts are over height and not density. In other words, council’s obsession with height might be counterproductive, creating an unnecessary backlash to the otherwise admirable objective of intensification.
And there are costs to height. In the February 2011 issue of Better Cities and Towns, Michael Mehaffy reported that considerable “research shows that the benefits of density are not linear, but taper off as density increases. In other words, there is an optimum density, above which the negative effects of density start to increase over the positive ones. That ‘sweet spot’ seems to be in the neighbourhood of about 50 people per acre.” Many cities, he continues, achieve this desired density without over-scaled towers, “while creating a very appealing, livable environment.” (Montreal achieves this optimum with mostly low-rise residential buildings.) He also summarizes the mounting research demonstrating how tall buildings are environmentally inferior to lower buildings. This conclusion is supported by Vancouver’s development guidelines that make it clear that towers are the least “green” of all intensification forms.
There is much research to demonstrate the multiple shortcomings of tall residential towers. Research literature, states University of Victoria professor Robert Gifford in his The Consequences of Living in High-Rise Buildings, “suggests that high-rises are less satisfactory than other housing forms for most people, that they are not optimal for children, that social relations are more impersonal and helping behaviour is less than in other housing forms, that crime and fear of crime are greater, and that they may independently account for some suicides.” Other studies, led by the work of internationally renowned Danish architect and urbanist Jan Gehl, have demonstrated that above six storeys, residents lose their connection with the street.
Half the problem. Within the Greenbelt, the city’s propensity to breach height barriers is only half the problem. The other half is how the city accedes equally quickly to demands for very low-density, single-use developments frequently limited to a single storey. The proliferation of big box retail complexes, perhaps the very nadir of livable urban environments, is moving ever closer to downtown while eating up valuable urban land.
In the early 1990s, I constructed and presented to city council a scale model for the development of South Keys (I called it Sawmill Creek Village) that, if realized, would have resulted in 5,000 residents and 3,000 jobs. Existing rail lines would have linked the new urban village of townhouses and mid-rises, shops, squares, parks, a school and office buildings to the core and the east-west Transitway. Despite an enthusiastic reception — including from planning officials — we know the result.
Perhaps the most egregious recent example of a failed opportunity is the development of the Train Yards south of the Ottawa Train Station. Here is a horrendous lost opportunity to have thousands of residents — yes even families — living, working, shopping and playing in a strikingly designed, mixed-use transit-based community. This is not just about dreaming about cities like Helsinki and Copenhagen or even Vancouver, who do this so well, but about matching other Canadian cities such as Edmonton’s City Centre Airport development and Toronto’s West Don Lands.
Simply put, how do our professional planners and our politicians vigorously defend a 42-storey tower at Preston and Carling while approving such wasteful developments that fly in the face of the intensification objective? And this is but one example; there are others from the massive mis-development of the Merivale/Hunt Club junction, to many smaller, one-storey buildings and strips recently built along major urban streets. Why, for example, have the planners permitted a single-storey commercial strip at the old Laurention High School site, a sort of Potemkin village hiding the Wal-Mart and its parking lot?
A recent welcome, if out of character, OMB decision squashed the rezoning of the Roosevelt site in Westboro, which had been approved despite a zero increase in density and against community opposition. But since then, spot zoning has continued without pause.
Ottawa appears trapped in the kind of laissez faire development that characterized Toronto in the 1980s and saw that city lose its justifiable reputation as the new way to build livable cities. It is time for both the professionals and the politicians — if not the developers — to be held accountable for bringing Ottawa’s urban development thinking into the 21st century.
Rhys Phillips is an Ottawa architecture and urban design critic and a contributing editor of Building.
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen
Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/busines...#ixzz22tWlRJrs
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