Quote:
Originally Posted by someone123
Pedestrian friendliness is not really something that is specific to big cities. If anything there's probably an inverse correlation. Overcrowding and giant buildings and streets are not pleasant for pedestrians. The only reason why Canadians tend not to see this is that they are used to newer and more suburban small cities.
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This post made me think. Without getting into the specifics of Halifax and Toronto that are better served by that thread's discussion, I have modified my views quite substantially on the issue of city size and wonder if anyone else feels similarly.
In Canada, and the US to a big degree as well, city size and urbanity are highly correlated to the point that enjoying urbanity as a living-environment makes you a "big-city person" by default. This I think is why we have this very hierarchical and population-centric view of cities; if one prefers Victoria to Montreal or even Providence to Houston, there is the assumption that there is a divergence of opnion on
cities themselves that is at root. It informs how we talk about these things to a big degree.
I notice this less here. Of course, if one moves to Paris from Copenhagen there will be some talk about improved cultural offerings, traffic and all the rest, but it is not quite the "city versus non-city" choice we often see discussed in the North American context. Conversationally, I hear people discuss city pairs like Gothenburg/Stockholm, Strasbourg/Paris, and even Lubeck/Hamburg at the extreme end without really getting into the whole "teeming metropolis" image, with one's affection for/avoidance of the type used as a personality marker.
Of course, all of those cities and towns are traditionally urban. Little Strasbourg, after all, offers streetscapes like this
which while they may give up some grandeur and busy-ness to those of Paris are still functionally urban in a fairly intense way. But even given that, Paris is a big city and Strasbourg is not, and living there you would feel that in a myriad of ways.
In Canada, I often used city size as a proxy for urbanity and preferred the country's very largest cities for this reason. I still have those preferences in Canada, but here I find I would be more interested in living in a place like Genoa, Trieste, or Strasbourg than Milan or Paris.
In the end it wasn't the sheer amount of people but the landscape and the infrastructure; yesterday I thought of this while on a commuter train into Copenhagen; passing through Charlottenlund station, I saw a patch of trees between a single-family home area and the traditionally Euro-urban little area surrounding the station and thought: in Paris there would be a tower there. And I was glad there wasn't. It was pretty and serene and still very functionally urban, little shops and big trains and pedestrians all around.
Bottom line: if Halifax, say, had a 65-station urban and commuter rail system with the TOD development that could bring, it might not matter that it has less than half a million people. If Winnipeg filled in all its parking lots, 600,000 is fine – just look at Strasbourg.
Growth will produce form eventually, but it does so inefficiently; in the extreme case of the sunbelt, the correlation breaks down entirely and you have cities of millions like Phoenix that are really not cities at all, but just settled land.
The focus should be on form and infrastructure.
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