Quote:
Originally Posted by lrt's friend
Easy pedestrian access to the neighbourhood is key. I know you are talking about the crescents and cul de sacs. Hopefully we are building enough of those pedestrian connections to work around that. Certainly, house density is a concern only because of the sharp decline in household sizes in the last few generations. The Bank and Wellington retail strips were all originally built around mostly single family homes on side streets.
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But those side streets all intersect with the main street, and the street morphology of the side streets is a grid, not a spaghetti-string lollipop-swirl welcome-to-my-garage suburb.
As long as you have a main drag (not a main street), and as long as the side streets retain the deliberate post-war design intended to keep non-residents out, the inner circle of post-war suburbs are not going to become trendy or urban. At most, you'll see some of housing type change (as has already been happening in places like Alta Vista or the older parts of Nepean), but not much more.
And in Ottawa, there is absolutely zero public will or institutional push to even allow these suburbs to evolve, let alone be actively changed, anyway. And our new-built suburbs, despite all the precatory and empty crap in our planning goals going back to the 80s, are still essentially Don Mills. The cladding and style of houses and commercial buildings changes with each passing architectural fad of the decade, but the underlying morphology is still the same: suburban, immutable, and frozen in the year it was built. It's a stupid way to manage billions of dollars worth of real estate assets.
Ottawa's openings for "next Hintonburgs" are basically Vanier and Overbrook, maybe a few of the less-desirable neighbourhoods near Centretown, if the city doesn't frig it up, Cyrville, and that's it.
Otherwise, it's trash suburbs as far as the eye can see, the city planners can map, and the futurists can foretell.