Showing posts with label "Uplands". Show all posts
Showing posts with label "Uplands". Show all posts

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Urban Density Encourages Rural Sprawl: Both Bad News for Trees

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry at a double interview on CFAX Radio the other day. Two men from the development community (one promoting condos in the new downtown highrise, the "Juliet"), were talking about the joys of urban living, such as non-stop "activity and intensity" (read: noise and crowds). If you were to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on one of these 500 square foot boxes in the sky, it seems you would get the bonus of living across from another new highrise in which will be housed the B.C. Ferry offices.

Now there's a new selling point -- not a quiet street, a nice garden or a park nearby, but a cold, brutal-looking corporate office block for a neighbour!

The other fellow being interviewed enthused about being surrounded 24/7 by shops, business, advertizing, sirens, panhandlers, late-night revellers, street litter..... Well, he didn't add the last four, but those are what you get when you leave your downtown workplace and go to ..... your downtown home.

"Well, people lived downtown a hundred years ago, didn't they?" asked one interviewee. Yes, and here is what the daily paper the Victoria Colonist said about it: "We don't like the idea of our citizens surrounding themselves eternally with the smell of the shop or seeing them choking in the dusty and smoky atmosphere of the town." (The writer was arguing for the extension of Beacon Hill Park.)

Today we still call for parks extension and need trees and greenspace more than ever, the paved and built-up areas being ever more congested. There is an idea that increasing urban density by encouraging people to live in urban highrises will slow the spreading of residential sprawl into rural areas. In fact it has the opposite effect. People don't give up cars and contentedly live and work in one small area, gasping with joy at the constant parade of consumer goods in windows all around them, day and night. To save their sanity they commute out of the urban core to grab for dear life onto the healthy effects of nature, of peace and quiet, streams and birdsong, the smell of pine and the springy feel of grass beneath the feet. Cars are essential, for escape.

How appropriate is it for kids to grow up in a sky-box? Where do they go out to play? What about the poor cats and dogs stranded up there? Soon young people, although they might enter the real estate market with a cupboard in a highrise, want to get the picket fence and the rose bed, not to mention a little detach-ment from neighbours on the other side of the wall. Enter the realtors with the developments outside town, such as those that will soon deface the once-forested land around Shirley and Jordan River now being sold off by Western Forest Products. The sprawl into wilderness is a desecration, but one can see the allure of buying into those subdivisions, in comparison to a downtown condo. Suburbia is the ideal; it strikes the perfect balance for the human animal between privacy and community, withdrawal and access to services. Suburbia will grow as long as population does. The only way to control it would be to limit population growth, and nobody is even talking about that. Although we have no trouble declaring a bus, a restaurant, a hospital or a theatre "full", we seem unable to discern when an island is full.

When people moved from early downtown Victoria to more salubrious locations one choice available was the Uplands Estates, created on the "Garden City" plan with strict rules about lot size, garden protection and above all, a ban on commercialization. From there people took the streetcar back and forth to the downtown core. Now we talk about streetcar/omnibus services as if this was a new idea, but it was for them that the graceful roundabouts of Uplands, now filled with mature oaks, were laid out along with the "disappearing curve" which was so aesthetically emphasized in the spacious, well-treed streetscape.

There are no attractively "disappearing curves" downtown, just hard lines, phallic towers, teaming intersections, frenetic shoppers, noisy coffee bars, and ever less room for trees, shade, oxygen, birdsong. No wonder people want to escape and are drawn to surrounding green space. The developers who can promise nine bean rows in a bee-loud glade have a much better product to sell than do the sky-box hucksters.

S.B. Julian