Is your city a strong neighbourhood or strong downtown city?

[Drybrain]

Originally Posted by ue

For what it's worth, I didn't find the brightly coloured wooden buildings as common in the Maritimes as I thought it would be. Yeah, it exists, but I found the towns tended to err towards brick or less-colourful wooden vernacular. I didn't spend much time on the South Shore, though, which, by street view, seems to have a bit more of that. The whole brightly coloured wooden buildings thing is something I associate more strongly with Newfoundland.

This was how I found the average Maritime town. Not colourful, but somewhat historic in a shabby sense. More hugging a single road rather than having a proper grid and neighbourhoods. This is more what I think of as a typical Ontario town. I mean, there are towns like that in the Maritimes (eg Pictou, New Glasgow, Amherst, Antigonish) but they're more the exception. Compared with the Prairies -- shabbier than Ontario, but more substantial than the Maritimes.

Hmm, I agree with a lot of what you said, but this in particular not so much. Maritime towns, I think, are pretty well-built. Not to the degree that Ontario's are, but certainly more than the average prairie town. Nova Scotia is chock full of main streets like this and this and this. Whereas when I think of the prairies (where I'm originally from) most of the towns seem to look like this or this--little clusters of pretty humble structures built adjacent to a river or rail line. (There are exceptions, like Medicine Hat, though even these towns tend to be a storey or two lower, and the residential areas surrounding the main streets are much less dense.)

I think you have to think of it adjusted for population as well. There are fewer than a million people in Nova Scotia, and for that population, a lot pretty robustly built-out town centres: Sydney, New Glasgow, Truro, Amherst, Yarmouth, Wolfville, Lunenburg/Mahone Bay, Windsor, Pictou, Antigonish, Bridgewater, etc.

PEI and southern New Brunswick are pretty strong too. I think some of the little little towns "hugging a single road" that you're thinking of are the really small villages. That's also something I associate more with Newfoundland and Cape Breton.

When I moved to Nova Scotia, the well-built towns actually struck me as one of the major strengths of the province. It's a more rural province than many, but much of that rural population is still centred in real towns with viable main streets (though certainly some of those towns, especially in the northern half of the province, are only in so-so shape).

[shappy]

Those towns in NS easily look like they can be in Ontario. There are visual similarities between the towns/cities in these 2 provinces, no? I think it's mostly the early UK influences.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by shappy

Those towns in NS easily look like they can be in Ontario. There are visual similarities between the towns/cities in these 2 provinces, no? I think it's mostly the early UK influences.

The province has two different areas, the northern Fundy/Northumberland half and the southern or Atlantic part. The Northern part has more farming and reminds me more of Ontario (plus it more similar to Southern NB and PEI). Kentville/Wolfville and Amherst are examples from that part. The Atlantic part is more rugged and was more fishing/shipbuilding oriented. Lunenburg, Liverpool, Shelburne, and Yarmouth are examples of towns in that part and that is where you find the more colourful wooden architecture. The Eastern half of the Atlantic coast in NS has almost no people living in it so a lot of seemingly major towns there are just some houses and shops along a road. That's where ue's streetview example was taken from; the modern town of Louisbourg which is a (pretty dreary and depressed) unincorporated community of 1,000 people that happens to be near a tourist site.

[rousseau]

Originally Posted by hipster duck

Back then, Toronto looked incredibly provincial - even as a kid I felt this way. There were hardly any downtown intersections that had a building on all 4 corners; the parking lots that occupied their place often were surfaced in gravel and had rusting or leaning signs. I was part of an exchange with a school in Germany, and I was blown away by how solid and well-kept everything was in [smaller] Hamburg. Thinking back, it was a bit of a time warp - except in the opposite direction: the solidity of their architecture notwisthstanding, their public realm had everything we are starting to have like separated bike lanes, sidewalks with artisanal pavers, eye-catching transit shelters with sleek buses, low-floor streetcars etc. When they came over here, we drove them around in our boxy Oldsmobiles, took them for a ride on TTC subway cars that still had the fake wood paneling and orange vinyl seats, and then led them over to Yonge street. Aside from the fun they had at the record stores they were like: "what the hell is this place?"

It's true, there was a grey blandness in the 1980s and 90s. Consider this indie video from 1986:

• Video Link

Thing is though, at that time in North America the suburbs were ascendant and "normative." European kids coming here on exchanges would have picked up on the shabby public realm in the cities, sure, but generally, at least in the US anyway, that would have been irrelevant in light of the American-style fun to be had cruising around in big cars on big streets, noshing on the biggest hot dogs and Mexican combo plates in the world, riding the biggest roller coasters in the world, getting the best blowjobs in the world from the horniest high school girls in the world, going to Friday football games at the biggest high school football stadiums in the world, swimming at the biggest quarries in the world, partying in the biggest backyard swimming pools in the world, etc.

I wonder if the counterpart to the kid in Toronto hosting an exchange and feeling a bit embarrassed about the comparatively paltry urban realm would have been the kid in (suburban) Philadelphia accepting the contrast philosophically and pushing the delights of the suburban lifestyle on his guests?

Originally Posted by hipster duck

It doesn't really surprise me that Europeans aren't really active on urban discussion boards (and I don't think it's English-fluency on SSP or the Internet, because the French-language urban discussion boards in Quebec like MTLUrb are very active) because, all things considered, their cities aren't improving that much.

Is this really true? There seem to be lots of forums out there for most of the countries in the world, from what I've seen. Consider just skyscrapercity.com: 30,090 threads for North America with a population of 380 million, and...<gets out calculator>...120,717 threads for Europe with a population of 750 million. So, twice the population, but four times as many threads.

Not that I'm trying to establish a conclusion from such a rudimentary observation, but still, it looks like there are enough people out there interested in what's happening in their cities even if they aren't being transformed as much as what we're experiencing here.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by rousseau

Thing is though, at that time in North America the suburbs were ascendant and "normative." European kids coming here on exchanges would have picked up on the shabby public realm in the cities, sure, but generally, at least in the US anyway, that would have been irrelevant in light of the American-style fun to be had cruising around in big cars on big streets, noshing on the biggest hot dogs and Mexican combo plates in the world, riding the biggest roller coasters in the world, getting the best blowjobs in the world from the horniest high school girls in the world, going to Friday football games at the biggest high school football stadiums in the world, swimming at the biggest quarries in the world, partying in the biggest backyard swimming pools in the world, etc.

It's true that there was cool new stuff back then that interested most people, and almost all of it was commercial and found out in the suburbs. What a dark time. There's a certain generation that tends to believe that the suburbs are strictly better than urban areas and that one day suburbs will be all we live in. I guess this was the generation that grew up reading sci-fi novels about how you'd be whisked around above the forests separating the mini-arcology type complexes in your flying robotic bubble car.

That future always struck me as disappointing and as far as I can tell it's not what many younger people want. The huge increase in interest in living in the city would have been hard to predict in 1991. And today there are still the old people, now usually in their 70's and up, who take it to be self-evident that everything should be suburban and built around cars.

There's also a layer beyond all of that too. Canadian cities have gotten larger and more economically successful in the past couple decades.

[niwell]

When my relatives from the UK visited us in Calgary when I was a teenager (probably 1996ish) they loved the big houses, cars everywhere, and good selection of stores in the malls. I'm not even sure we went downtown... Of course going to the mountains was the main part of the trip for them.

[ue]

Originally Posted by Drybrain

Hmm, I agree with a lot of what you said, but this in particular not so much. Maritime towns, I think, are pretty well-built. Not to the degree that Ontario's are, but certainly more than the average prairie town. Nova Scotia is chock full of main streets like this and this and this. Whereas when I think of the prairies (where I'm originally from) most of the towns seem to look like this or this--little clusters of pretty humble structures built adjacent to a river or rail line. (There are exceptions, like Medicine Hat, though even these towns tend to be a storey or two lower, and the residential areas surrounding the main streets are much less dense.)

I think you have to think of it adjusted for population as well. There are fewer than a million people in Nova Scotia, and for that population, a lot pretty robustly built-out town centres: Sydney, New Glasgow, Truro, Amherst, Yarmouth, Wolfville, Lunenburg/Mahone Bay, Windsor, Pictou, Antigonish, Bridgewater, etc.

PEI and southern New Brunswick are pretty strong too. I think some of the little little towns "hugging a single road" that you're thinking of are the really small villages. That's also something I associate more with Newfoundland and Cape Breton.

When I moved to Nova Scotia, the well-built towns actually struck me as one of the major strengths of the province. It's a more rural province than many, but much of that rural population is still centred in real towns with viable main streets (though certainly some of those towns, especially in the northern half of the province, are only in so-so shape).

So, to be clear, outside of the Lunenburg area, which admittedly has quite a bit of history, I haven't been to the South Shore or Annapolis Valley or Yarmouth areas, which do seem to have a bit more history. And I didn't mean to say that more robust towns didn't exist, and even used Amherst as an example previously. It is a great town. But I would caution against saying Nova Scotia is "chock full" of such towns.

But the South Shore/Annapolis Valley seems to be an exception, for the most part. For example, most of PEI looked more like this, with relatively few full-fledged towns. Again, not that there weren't any (eg Georgetown, Borden-Carleton, Victoria, etc), but it wasn't like the Prairies or Ontario where you can expect a full-fledged town every X kilometres.

The colourful architecture seems most concentrated to the Lunenburg-Shelburne corridor. The Annapolis Valley towns are more brick-ish, as are the ones around New Glasgow and Amherst. In Newfoundland, it seems more intermixed throughout.

And yes, the Prairie towns, with few exceptions, are more humble. But they're also usually more than an intersection.

[someone123]

To keep things in perspective, PEI is 5,600 square kilometers. A little bit bigger than the Calgary CMA, and much smaller than the Edmonton CMA. It has 2 towns of over 10,000 people. The farthest you can get from a town of 10,000 in the province is 60 or 70 km. The farthest you can get from Charlottetown is about 100 km.

If you scaled that up to the 140,000 square kilometers of Southern Ontario that would work out to 50 towns of 10,000. In the southern 1/3 of Alberta, around 80 towns. The 80th most populated place in Alberta is the town of Millet, which has around 2,000 people.

It seems a bit weird to me to argue that the South Shore or Annapolis Valley are the exception in NS but Cape Breton is representative of the province. Most of the people in NS live in the central part, which has around 12-15 significant towns in around 30,000 square kilometers. About the same density of towns as PEI or higher. Southern NB is the same.

[ue]

This is getting a bit pedantic. Look, I'm merely explaining my thoughts based upon my experiences. I gave a Cape Breton example randomly, and then PEI, and yet you still felt the need to nitpick it apart. Things can be twisted any which way. One could argue that New Brunswick, PEI, Cape Breton all have more people than the South Shore and Annapolis Valley, where towns like this, this, and this are more common than this. This argument is moot because we're merely just finding facts, all of which are valid, to back up our disparate viewpoints. You lived in Nova Scotia, so you're very hyper-aware of the idiosyncrasies that a lot of people won't pick up on, so I'm giving a more generalized view based on my experiences, and in my experience, Maritime cities are less substantial and historic than I expected on average. And it's not like you can't have more substantial villages.

[someone123]

Isn't it normal for small hamlets to be more numerous than towns, which are more numerous than cities? Most of the hamlets have a town 15-20 minutes away and a city within an hour or so. Maybe the main difference with the Prairies is that they don't have a lot of hamlets because they were settled more recently around rail lines. My point was that I don't think the distance between significant towns in the more populated parts of the Maritimes is that low compared to other parts of Canada like Southern Ontario and Southern Quebec (which are the more populated parts of those provinces). Remove the big cities from Ontario and Quebec and the remaining settlement patterns are very similar.

Originally Posted by ue

You lived in Nova Scotia, so you're very hyper-aware of the idiosyncrasies that a lot of people won't pick up on, so I'm giving a more generalized view based on my experiences, and in my experience, Maritime cities are less substantial and historic than I expected on average.

I don't know what your expectation was, and I don't want to flatter myself too much, but, well, is it possible that I'm just more knowledgeable about the province and sometimes introduce new information that might change the debate a little? So far the answer in this thread is, no, I must just be biased.

[manny_santos]

Originally Posted by Acajack

Canada's cultural landscape is not set up in a way that is conducive to people across the country being familiar with many neighbourhoods in its cities - even the largest ones. It's not like in the U.S. where cities and neighbourhoods are immortalized in TV shows, movies and songs.

And so generally speaking a city like Toronto will only have household name recognition for its neighbourhoods in the area where people receive the city's local news. (Which admittedly is a fairly large area in Ontario that goes way beyond the GTA.)

Unfortunately it tends to be crime that makes certain neighbourhoods well known. Jane & Finch is one well known outside of Toronto; likewise the Downtown East Side for Vancouver.

[manny_santos]

London is kind of a mix. While it is more centralized with its downtown than, say, Kitchener-Waterloo, there are neighbourhoods like Wortley Village or Old East Village that are distinct.

Even Kingston, with a population of 120,000 is like that, with Portsmouth Village.

[GreaterMontréal]

Originally Posted by someone123

Isn't it normal for small hamlets to be more numerous than towns, which are more numerous than cities? Most of the hamlets have a town 15-20 minutes away and a city within an hour or so. Maybe the main difference with the Prairies is that they don't have a lot of hamlets because they were settled more recently around rail lines. My point was that I don't think the distance between significant towns in the more populated parts of the Maritimes is that low compared to other parts of Canada like Southern Ontario and Southern Quebec (which are the more populated parts of those provinces). Remove the big cities from Ontario and Quebec and the remaining settlement patterns are very similar.



I don't know what your expectation was, and I don't want to flatter myself too much, but, well, is it possible that I'm just more knowledgeable about the province and sometimes introduce new information that might change the debate a little? So far the answer in this thread is, no, I must just be biased.

most of the towns and cities in Southern Quebec were built just beside a river.

Montréal, Québec, Laval, Gatineau, Sherbrooke, Trois-Rivières, Saguenay, Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Repentigny, Drummondville, Granby, Saint-Hyacinthe, Victoriaville, Joliette, Saint-Jérôme, Saint-Georges, etc....

[hipster duck]

Originally Posted by rousseau

It's true, there was a grey blandness in the 1980s and 90s. Consider this indie video from 1986:

• Video Link

Thing is though, at that time in North America the suburbs were ascendant and "normative." European kids coming here on exchanges would have picked up on the shabby public realm in the cities, sure, but generally, at least in the US anyway, that would have been irrelevant in light of the American-style fun to be had cruising around in big cars on big streets, noshing on the biggest hot dogs and Mexican combo plates in the world, riding the biggest roller coasters in the world, getting the best blowjobs in the world from the horniest high school girls in the world, going to Friday football games at the biggest high school football stadiums in the world, swimming at the biggest quarries in the world, partying in the biggest backyard swimming pools in the world, etc.

I wonder if the counterpart to the kid in Toronto hosting an exchange and feeling a bit embarrassed about the comparatively paltry urban realm would have been the kid in (suburban) Philadelphia accepting the contrast philosophically and pushing the delights of the suburban lifestyle on his guests?

Well, here's the thing: I lived in Peterborough, which was hardly ascendant and didn't have much of that affluent US suburban vibe from a John Hughes movie that some of the German kids might've really liked. Some of the Germans liked our big houses, but they were from a suburban part of Hamburg itself, which also had rather big houses and yards by German standards and - even better - was connected to the city centre by a frequent electric S-bahn.

No, we were just cruising around in our Oldsmobile 88s and Buick Regals between the Zellers and the mall with the Randy River. When things closed up at 9PM, we'd go to Taco Bell, which was open until midnight. But, man, eating the same chili cheese fries under fluorescent lamps while somebody tries to mop the floor around you gets old fast, even when you're 17. The whole drinking vodka in a friend's basement was also not something that really impressed kids who could legally go to a pub back home. We had fun with them, of course, but I felt embarrassed that most of our possibilities for fun or autonomy as teenagers were severely limited. I kept apologizing to them. I think that was when I first began to be a fierce urbanist.

Is this really true? There seem to be lots of forums out there for most of the countries in the world, from what I've seen. Consider just skyscrapercity.com: 30,090 threads for North America with a population of 380 million, and...<gets out calculator>...120,717 threads for Europe with a population of 750 million. So, twice the population, but four times as many threads.

Not that I'm trying to establish a conclusion from such a rudimentary observation, but still, it looks like there are enough people out there interested in what's happening in their cities even if they aren't being transformed as much as what we're experiencing here.

I'm aware of those other forums, but they're mostly about construction porn and keeping up with skyscraper stats, not urbanism per se. I don't think many Europeans would ask each other a question like "is your city a strong downtown or strong neighbourhood city?" and get 4 pages of posts within days. For one, the idea of "downtown" and "urban neighbourhoods" may sound very quotidian and mundane. I can't see people in Spain getting into fights about what mid-sized city has more walkable areas: Cadiz or Pamplona. But also, it is unlikely that there has been much perceptible change in how people in Cadiz or Pamplona live their daily lives, whereas the change in our Canadian cities has been very palpable.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by rousseau

Thing is though, at that time in North America the suburbs were ascendant and "normative." European kids coming here on exchanges would have picked up on the shabby public realm in the cities, sure, but generally, at least in the US anyway, that would have been irrelevant in light of the American-style fun to be had cruising around in big cars on big streets, noshing on the biggest hot dogs and Mexican combo plates in the world, riding the biggest roller coasters in the world, getting the best blowjobs in the world from the horniest high school girls in the world, going to Friday football games at the biggest high school football stadiums in the world, swimming at the biggest quarries in the world, partying in the biggest backyard swimming pools in the world, etc.

I wonder if the counterpart to the kid in Toronto hosting an exchange and feeling a bit embarrassed about the comparatively paltry urban realm would have been the kid in (suburban) Philadelphia accepting the contrast philosophically and pushing the delights of the suburban lifestyle on his guests?

.

Between my siblings and I we had several European exchange students pass through during my youth.

We weren't living in suburban Philadelphia but where we lived did have a John Hughes and E.T.-esque suburban style to it.

All of the European kids without exception seemed to have a blast and relished in the things that they didn't have back home. Which were, obviously, more often than not, typically (North) American as opposed to singularly Canadian. We've remained friends with most of them 20+ years later and have seen each other again, including trans-Atlantic trips for each other's weddings in some cases even.

I think that with only a few exceptions, most teens are really not too preoccupied with the quality of the "public realm". Even if you were to dumb it down to "this place is ugly"... Most probably don't even notice. There is a thrill associated with being away from your parents, and of course also the totally normal human trait that many people have of finding what's different more interesting than what they're used to, regardless of "quality".

I suppose that the level of satisfaction of the Euro kids with their Canadian exchanges was also related to the decent quality of the urban experience in the major cities that were striking distance from where we lived.

[Acajack]

I can't begin to tell you just how excited the Euros were about stuff like going to a drive-in theatre. It didn't matter that the road leading to it was through a bleak suburban landscape.

[mistercorporate]

When I first visited the US, what I loved best was seeing night flies in the forest while we were bbq'ing, jacuzzi's everywhere, dunkin' donuts, modern condo units, unique cars and cooler amusement parks.

[Acajack]

Both of my parents are from tiny villages compared to all of the places I grew up in. In fact, one of the villages I think had fewer people than the street we lived on.

And yet it was still cool to go there during the summer holidays as a kid.

I had more freedom, everything was more relaxed, people were more friendly.

Late-night bush parties in the woods or on the beach, girls in search of new blood for whom I was the "new guy" in town...

A change of scenery is always nice.

[Docere]

Do you live in a strong downtown hamlet or a strong neighborhood hamlet?

[Beedok]

Originally Posted by Acajack

Late-night bush parties in the woods or on the beach, girls in search of new blood for whom I was the "new guy" in town...

Vampires? Terrifying!