The GTA has been showing signs of the urban ills that are commonly associated with city life south the border.
Downtown infrastructure has been deteriorating, as have cleanliness and order, which were once the city’s strong suits.
In Ontario, growth has shifted to lower-cost places like Kitchener-Waterloo (110 kilometres from downtown Toronto), as well as Guelph (95 km), Peterborough (140 km) and London (195 km). Even long declining areas, like the Maritimes, have been gaining population in recent years.
Clearly a new approach is merited. Leaders in Toronto have to accept dispersion and find the city’s niche within a wider range of settlements. Downtowns themselves, as Calgary’s urban leadership now suggests, will have to morph from primarily business centres to places more oriented to housing, academic and cultural activities.
To be sure, swank high-rise projects may appeal to the wealthy and the childless. But the urban future lies in places that are walkable but not hyper-dense and can attract middle-income families.
I agree with a lot of what you’re saying here, but the author of the article doesn’t so much, I think. His thrust seems to be that we need to embrace urban sprawl, and in the course of doing that, rather than densifying urban residential areas, instead de-densify downtown cores and go all in on suburbs and exurbs.
You know, you’re right. I read the article once more over and there does seem to be more of a push into urban sprawl as a good thing.
Though as another commenter here has already stated urban sprawl is financially unsustainable in the long run and has had many studies done on the topic. Urban sprawl is also what feeds to an urban decline IMO specifically related to my point about families not being present in urban communities.