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  #21  
Old Posted Nov 18, 2014, 1:56 AM
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Originally Posted by Calgarian View Post
I'd have to go with Langley Township, just west of Surrey in Greater Vancouver. Every time I'm there I find it to be a boring, dreary place, and the usual rainy weather doesn't help.
Well that didnt take long.

The point if the thread is not what exact entire community / town you dont like, but what type of urban landscape you dont like. Many of the other examples shown above are more specific locations, yet they can be found in nearly any city.

What you said is very city vs. city and just asking to start problems.

For the record, while Langley is far from an urban dream it does have some nice character in the oldest portion of the core. Its surrounding farm country side is beautiful and the summers are amazing there.
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  #22  
Old Posted Nov 18, 2014, 2:44 AM
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Originally Posted by rousseau View Post
1. Migrant workers don't work in areas where only corn, wheat and soy are grown. They're picking fruit in Niagara and down in the banana belt near Leamington.
2. Migrant workers are housed in dormitories on the farms themselves. No fruit or vegetable farmer would ever put up a building like that and have it sit empty for half a year.
3. Migrant workers don't drive cars, so housing for them doesn't feature parking lots with cars parked on them.

There are barely any agricultural workers around here, save maybe for some picking mushrooms closer to Kitchener-Waterloo.
Those sorts of multistory apt. buildings pop up often in small town Ontario. They always seem so weirdly out of place. But there they are.
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  #23  
Old Posted Nov 18, 2014, 2:54 AM
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Those sorts of multistory apt. buildings pop up often in small town Ontario. They always seem so weirdly out of place. But there they are.
How far away was that place from some sort of manufacturing plant (auto, farm equipment, etc)? If it is not that far of a commute, it would be a win win for landlord and tenant. Cheap place to live for the tenant (especailly a young guy out of high school) and I can imagine the property taxes for the landlord is pretty favourable as well.
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  #24  
Old Posted Nov 18, 2014, 3:15 AM
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It wasn't my photo and it does seem a bit out of the way. But it's really not uncommon to drive through some middle of nowhere town in Ontario and see apartment blocks. And you think, why in the hell would anyone ever move to the "country" to live in an apartment building? And I'm talking towns with populations well below 5000.

I guess it happens, and rural poverty is a reality but they always seem incongruous to the surroundings.

Some of them are just retiree housing.
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  #25  
Old Posted Nov 18, 2014, 3:44 AM
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I've seen those across much of souther Ontario and Quebec. Pretty much anywhere large industrial farms can be found.
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  #26  
Old Posted Nov 18, 2014, 4:11 AM
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Originally Posted by Gerrard View Post
Those sorts of multistory apt. buildings pop up often in small town Ontario. They always seem so weirdly out of place. But there they are.
Yeah, but the thing about this one is that it's out in the country. It's well outside of Atwood, pop. 47, and 10 km away from Listowel, which has three Tim Horton's. It's literally in the middle of nowhere.

You don't see that too often. If ever.

But yeah, there are manufacturing plants here and there throughout the southern Ontario countryside. Thing is, that's not really the reason for that apartment block, as people in southwestern Ontario regularly travel up to an hour or more to get to whatever job they can find at whatever plant it's at, wherever it is. Things aren't all that local when it comes to manufacturing jobs.

The new Toyota plant in Woodstock, for example, has employees coming from all over the place. I wouldn't be surprised to hear of people driving an hour and a half down the 401 to work there.
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  #27  
Old Posted Nov 18, 2014, 4:14 AM
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Originally Posted by TorontoDrew View Post
I've seen those across much of souther Ontario and Quebec. Pretty much anywhere large industrial farms can be found.
In the countryside? Not close to any town or village at all? Just farm fields? I've lived here for decades and this is the only one I've ever seen.

Large industrial farms don't hire lots of workers. They have crews that plough, plant and harvest. You're thinking of fruit and vegetable operations using migrant workers, where the dormitories are on the farms themselves. That's not what this place in the photo is.
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  #28  
Old Posted Nov 18, 2014, 4:26 AM
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Originally Posted by rousseau View Post
In the countryside? Not close to any town or village at all? Just farm fields? I've lived here for decades and this is the only one I've ever seen.

Large industrial farms don't hire lots of workers. They have crews that plough, plant and harvest. You're thinking of fruit and vegetable operations using migrant workers, where the dormitories are on the farms themselves. That's not what this place in the photo is.
It's right across the street from an "Arla Foods" plant. I have a feeling it has something to do with that.

Have to say, though, that area does look a lot like Langley Township.
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  #29  
Old Posted Nov 18, 2014, 4:45 AM
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Originally Posted by The_Architect View Post
Basically this:



Still some urbanism but man, all those surface parking lots.
What year would that have been?

Looks a lot better now


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  #30  
Old Posted Nov 18, 2014, 5:00 AM
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Originally Posted by rousseau View Post
Yeah, but the thing about this one is that it's out in the country. It's well outside of Atwood, pop. 47, and 10 km away from Listowel, which has three Tim Horton's. It's literally in the middle of nowhere.

You don't see that too often. If ever.
Here's another one, about 5 km north of Port Hope. Surrounded by nothing but farms and golf courses. I've always wondered what kind of people lived in an apartment building in farm country, and more to the point, who would build one. It's like a little piece of a 1960s neighbourhood appeared there by accident. Who knows what kind of misguided planning and shady land deals went on back then.
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  #31  
Old Posted Nov 18, 2014, 5:15 AM
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Originally Posted by Mister F View Post
Here's another one, about 5 km north of Port Hope. Surrounded by nothing but farms and golf courses. I've always wondered what kind of people lived in an apartment building in farm country, and more to the point, who would build one. It's like a little piece of a 1960s neighbourhood appeared there by accident. Who knows what kind of misguided planning and shady land deals went on back then.
Nice find. Yeah, the idea of an apartment-in-the-country doesn't seem all that appealing to me. I would find it awkward and embarrassing, like forced intimacy.
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  #32  
Old Posted Nov 18, 2014, 10:38 AM
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Nice find. Yeah, the idea of an apartment-in-the-country doesn't seem all that appealing to me. I would find it awkward and embarrassing, like forced intimacy.
It's called low income housing


Seriously some of yall are sounding ultra out of touch.

Granted I know absolutely nothing about farm country.

In my rural backwater, the growing season is too short for farming.
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  #33  
Old Posted Nov 18, 2014, 12:53 PM
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if there is anything i can't stand, it's "the thing without the thing". diet soda, non-alcoholic beer, this sort of urbanism.

sure, it's not as bleak as that weird farm tenement rousseau posted. but this is downtown montreal. we are trying to have a city here. what are those little patches of grass... do you water them? do your kids sleep out there in dome tents and tell scary stories in the shadow of flashlights? do you sometimes hitch up a hammock and take a snooze after a summer day's mowing of the lawn?

or is it a mere signifier, a little footnote implying this place's divided soul and loyalties, its misguided attempt to "have it all" that left it with no significant amount of any qualities whatsoever?

i dislike places like this because of where they are. they take spaces that are central to the city, that are in the shadow of landmarks, that could add to the character of the city and be places that people sought out, places to walk and dine and drink, or at least pass through with a pleasant sense of connectedness to the big urban machine that is montreal.

instead, they're nothing.

they are little non-spaces that attempted to turn the spatial truths of these neighborhoods:



into something they could never be.

philosophically, and on the level of the ideas contained, these buildings are truly bleak. and before you say "well, they are low-income properties", know that i was low-income in montreal for many years.

those places were expensive compared to the apartments i would find on streets like this:



believe me, i looked. i have plodded about that city seeking sub-$500 (in the '90s) or sub-$800 (in the 2000s) one-bedrooms more than says anything great about my youthful economic prowess.
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  #34  
Old Posted Nov 18, 2014, 1:14 PM
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I hate little front lawns as well - lots of them in the older neighbourhoods ringing the rowhouse districts here. And even within the old parts of the city, many non-residential buildings have these sorts of setbacks - schools and like. Thankfully, most are heavily landscaped with retaining walls, staircases, etc. Minimizes the effect a little.

There's something about opening your front door and stepping out onto the sidewalk that just feels right to me. The dinky little front lawns separate me from any sense of being in a city.

However, I don't mind a good box garden. I'll be adding one to my house next summer. This is fine to me, still within the limits of what I need:



But this:



It may not be truly bleak and desolate - but it's certainly not an urban lifestyle as I appreciate one. A driveway? Seriously? A scrap of lawn out front?

And you can't build infill in central St. John's that doesn't look like this today. They all have front drivelawns.

But it's not the act of pretending to be something it's not, or trying to be urban and getting it wrong that bothers me so much. If someone wants to build single-family, detached homes right up the sidewalk (there are quite a few neighbourhoods like that here), that still works for me - even though it's suburban masquerading as semi-urban.

It could just be a preference for narrow streets, I suppose. But front-door-to-sidewalk is critical to me.

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One other one that I found bleak and desolate. The view from my former cubicle in Winnipeg.

Not trying to be a c**t, so: the skyline behind was a great treat, of course. And there were lots of dense, lively neighbourhoods beyond this view (especially on the opposite side of my building, down toward Broadway). The Exchange, a well-preserved warehouse district, is just on the opposite side of the skyline. I loved that neighbourhood.

But this was what I looked at most of every day for years. It's given me a disproportionate hatred of surface parking lots, buildings without windows, and stale colours.



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  #35  
Old Posted Nov 18, 2014, 1:24 PM
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i don't mind setbacks or greenery, but there's urban and then there's not. more importantly, there's substance (plants growing around the railings, soil, a garden) versus symbol (a blank green stripe indicating the idea of a garden without its function).

that's the failing of that place: that it's a cartoon. that it is an empty visual gesture.

gardens in front of little houses:

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  #36  
Old Posted Nov 18, 2014, 1:30 PM
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Ahh, O.K. Not sure how attuned I am to recognizing that, but I think I understand. Would you say that part of it is having a place that looks lived-in and well-used? Something that's been around for awhile and has all the haphazard remnants of lives lived there?
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  #37  
Old Posted Nov 18, 2014, 1:33 PM
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I give you the Honeydale Mall. Smack dab in the heart o' Ford Nayshun.





Pièce de résistance:


Images c/o Wikipedia, deadmalls.com
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  #38  
Old Posted Nov 18, 2014, 1:35 PM
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well, it's more something that simply is what it it is. the above are a row of small urban houses with front gardens.

the bleak place of my initial post was a row of small urban homes that somehow attempted to look like a larger suburban home, and that features a non-functional, impossible-to-really-enjoy strip of sod that was doubtlessly intended to raise the idea of a "yard" in the owner's head while not actually providing such.

that's why it's dishonest and therefore why it's ugly.
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  #39  
Old Posted Nov 18, 2014, 1:40 PM
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Got it. Thanks.
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  #40  
Old Posted Nov 18, 2014, 4:09 PM
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Interesting. Signal you probably wouldn't like inner city Ontario. Prewar neighbourhoods in Ontario are full of front lawns although they're not very deep compared to suburban front lawns.
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