Quote:
Originally Posted by GlassCity
If you can't see Surrey's grid (or Mississauga's cul-de-sacs) then I'm not really sure what to say. Both of them have similar structures of a large grid with typical suburban swirly streets within them, but Surrey's grid utilizes narrower streets with more intersections, whereas Mississauga's is much more heavily reliant on wide boulevards and is more reflective of a typical suburban local-collector-arterial road system. Most of its major streets, which form the grid, have no buildings fronting them.
Street networks are what make places suburban or urban, not the height of their buildings. And while both places have swirly roads within larger grids, Mississauga's grid is clearly just a gridded-version of the large arterials that you find in typical suburbs: wide and without fronting buildings. Surrey may appear heavily suburban at the moment with its low density, but it has a much higher opportunity to urbanize in the future as the bones are already there. Replace the run-down SFHs fronting the main arterials with mid-rise developments and CRUs and all of a sudden its streets are indistinguishable from those in inner-city anywhere. Surrey has an urban skeleton—it is just underdeveloped at the moment. No matter how dense you build Mississauga, it will never be urban.
|
Is Mississauga requiring that new buildings front the street? A lot of Boulder CO traditionally did, but it's now required and slowly but surely, it's making a difference. But to your point, the street network is probably more favourable to redevelopment work.