11-01-2015, 05:37 PM
(11-01-2015, 02:11 PM)mpd618 Wrote: We could learn some things from places like Besançon. Like how to construct dense urban buildings with zero parking, and not care about NIMBYs concerned with spillover parking. Like how not to consider single-family detached houses to be a viable building style right next to the central part of the city.
It goes both ways, eizenstriet. Building medium-density buildings, and doing so in a broad area, requires the kind of community buy-in that the neighbourhoods adjacent to the downtowns would make extremely hard to obtain.
Perhaps we'll see you at council advocating for less parking and less setback in new developments, so that smaller-scale development can be viable here.
I agree with a lot of what you say. Out of curiosity, what entails "medium-density" to you, though? "Single-family detached housing" can be dense enough to support transit and other uses within walking distance. Actually, here in Kitchener-Waterloo, it did, and those neighbourhoods that now seem adjacent to the downtowns were streetcar suburbs with commercial mixed in, and where many people could walk to their jobs, most could take transit to their jobs, and most people did walk to do shopping and run errands. Before the car, there was no reason to set houses far back from loud, dangerous streets, and houses close to the street created the kinds of density that made these things possible. Again: it's possible to achieve a fair bit of density even with detached family homes.
Doubtless we can learn from cities of our size in Europe. It's probably not possible to emulate them, though. People have grown to want different things. In many European city centres of varying sizes, it's hard to convince someone to live in a ground floor apartment for security reasons, and the fact that they're less marketable means mixed-use (with all of its many many benefits) has come naturally. Here, most of us are still hung up on wanting a single-family-home, especially with kids. But we can make that work, too. If you're advocating for razes mass tracts of existing century homes near our downtowns to make way for miles of mid-rise development, I admit that that seems sustainable, but there might be an insufficient market for the new apartments, and a lot of the people living in those (relatively) sustainable and transit-oriented old neighbourhoods might be driven to far-flung suburbs because they feel they just have to have a (single-family detached) "home," and now none exist near the cores.
I agree 100% with your last paragraph. Less (or no) parking requirements; less setbacks. Doing that would go a long way.