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Originally Posted by Truenorth00
Agreed. You can have a fantastic, vibrant city with 100k. But we never seem to aim towards that with smaller centres in this country What's Canada's equivalent of Portland, Maine? Everyone of our smaller metros grows with ugly assed subdivisions. I've held out hope for a few cities like Kingston and Halifax. But McSubdivision is starting to hitting them hard too.
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You mustn't follow the development threads very closely if you think that - Halifax and Victoria in particular have been building a ton of great-looking, high-density infill in their inner cities. They're comparatively much
less sprawly - and moving urbanizing much faster - than Portland, ME. Saint John and St. John's also have fairly extensive legacy cores, though most of their newer development is more suburban in nature (Portland probably has more in common with these).
There's a lot of this kind of stuff being built in Halifax that just doesn't have an analogue in Portland:
Southern Ontario's small cities are pretty dreary and now mostly function as far-flung exurbs (Kingston and maybe Peterborough excepted), but that's not the case everywhere in the country, where cities of this size function as important regional centres.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Truenorth00
Old Toronto is at 800k and growing. East York is at 120k, if you count that as walkable. But there's also pockets outside the downtown core, especially along the Eglinton and Yonge corridors. And Toronto does seem to be growing more walkable neighbourhoods as time goes by.
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The old city is probably closer to 900,000 today, given the growth downtown (+50,000 since 2016 just in the core). Pre-war Toronto also includes East York (~120,000), York (~150,000), Southern Etobicoke (~100,000), and small parts of North York and Scarborough. Add in early post-war stuff that's urbanized more recently like North York Centre and it might be around 1,400,000.