Showing posts with label densification and infill. Show all posts
Showing posts with label densification and infill. Show all posts

Friday, August 19, 2022

Giving Back, or Taking Away?

 


"There is more life in dead trees than there is in living trees."

So says George Monbiot in his book Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life (Allen Lane, 2013).

A tree left to live its normal lifespan keeps on giving even as it disintegrates, feeding soil with nutrients, providing habitat for insects, arachnids, wildflowers and the fungi which feed the next generation of tree roots. 

The remnant urban forest keeps on giving, but what does the expanding human population give? Once we log, pave and build, the landscape is dead. We've killed it, unless strong conservation laws protect both parks and private gardens spacious enough to host large shade-giving evergreen and deciduous trees.

The more dense a downtown core and its fringe become, the more we need large shade trees for oxygen, climate stability and aesthetics. The claim that densifying a downtown core will reduce housing sprawl in the countryside has been disproven by statistics:

According to statcan.gc.ca (2021) "downtown populations of the large urban centres ... grew at over twice the pace compared with the previous census cycle (+4.6%). At the same time, urban spread continued, and was accelerating in many CMAs (Metropolitan Areas)."

It seems that humans, pursuing economic gain, are loathe to give back to nature the spaces which their activities have taken away. The result is declining biodiversity. Overall, 59% of Canadian species have become "imperiled", "threatened" or extinct, and one major cause is urbanization (WWF). Invertebrates alone have declined 45%, including the pollinators on which plant growth, birds and wild browsers -- and human growers -- depend (davidsuzuki.org). We need to slow down landscape-conversion, lessen urban densification, and preserve green-space by law. 

Wildlife corridors and continuous canopy between green spaces are essential for urban wildlife survival, but interestingly, once preserved they are used even more by people than wildlife. Wildlife corridors near Canmore mainly used by humans — and, often, their dogs | CBC News What does that tell us, about our need for natural surroundings for physical and mental health?



Monday, August 2, 2021

How Much Tree Canopy Is Enough -- cont'd. (Part 2)

An affordable housing project completed in Saanich two years ago is an example of how a neighbourhood can succeed in keeping green-space and tree canopy even as the landscape is burdened with new infill housing. Mt Douglas Housing Society, which provides quality apartments for low-income people age 55+, included gardens, paths and benches for residents as part of its new development, a building which was added to their meadow-like property beside an existing apartment building. Adjoining neighbourhood home-owners had succeeded in getting the  proposed construction pushed back from the property line, and its height reduced. Trees and hedging are now flourishing around the two apartment buildings and providing the privacy and noise buffer which makes urban living tolerable.






In this case the municipality listened to the neighbourhood (a quiet well-treed residential area with a lot of dedicated gardeners) before giving the building project the go-ahead. One can only wonder why other municipal councils in the CRD can't do the same: be responsive to existing residents as well as the newcomers awaiting provision of either "affordable" or high-end housing.

The neighbourhood succeeded in transmitting the message "not in my face", and renters who enjoy the ambience of the new development were blessed with their own "back yard", which includes space for wildlife, private vegetable plots and musical gatherings held under a willow tree. A green margin surrounds the clean quiet well-managed buildings, and a high standard of life was secured for all stakeholders -- even the neighbourhood deer.





Saturday, June 14, 2014

Call It Super-ruralia, not Suburbia


Oak Bay Councillor Tara Ney has called for more community gardens for Oak Bay, saying that there need to be places for food production. Community gardens beat paved space any day, but attributing more public space to them would only take away from the little park space and wildlife habitat still remaining in Oak Bay.

The place for growing food is the back yard, but these are exactly what the current Council's rush to residential densification are going to destroy. Council's program of paving, lot subdivision and residential densification sacrifices the private garden. Even if space were to be found for community gardens, most people would not trek off to an allotment at a distance. Gardening is an individual and private occupation and the backyard a canvas for personal creativity -- or so it was in the original conception of sub-urban living. That vision valued privacy, but the innate human need for private space and time is being devalued in current eco-communitarian thinking.

People long for personal access to the earth, to flowers and birds and privacy behind serviceable hedges. That is why, at the recent Official Community Plan Open House at the Oak Bay Recreation Centre, most notes posted on the information sheets provided asked for more green space and less density. Most comments ran counter to the developer-driven agenda for densification and commercial/residential crowding that the current mayor and council seem determine to push through.


Villages and towns historically grew out from the centres of trade for a district. People came to a weekly or daily market to buy and sell. The spread of living spaces around these urban cores we call "sub-urbia", but maybe what we actually want is "super-ruralia". If we labelled residential family-raising neighbourhoods differently, we might value them differently.

There is a gradation in land use from wilderness to rural to urban, sub-urban being somewhere in the middle. What people miss as spreading cities engulf them with noise, pollution and brutal architecture, is the natural, spacious and less commercialized environment. Houses (ideally of a measured, not monstrous size) originally dotted landscapes among fields and woods, which children in past generations could access for healthy outdoor play. This is super-ruralia, not sub-urbia. The latter implies some sort of demotion from the hectic excitements of deep urbanism ... but the environment most healthy for the human animal is a modification of the wild, rather than a fringe of commercialism.

Too many people on Planet Earth suffer a life in crowded housing from which they travel to a crowded workplace in a crowded crush of public transport. Never alone, never quiet ... no wonder crime rates and mental disorders increase as cities grow.

Thursday, August 16, 2012

Two buildings added, two gardens lost - is this a good land use outcome?

People passing by the property at the corner of Richmond Road and Oak Bay Avenue wonder what's going on. An interview on the CBC with a house-removal company told the story: the house will be moved (in two halves) to a nearby property which was rezoned to allow it to be squeezed between two other houses, obliterating the garden between them. That preserves the house, but what about the deeper issue: two parcels of green space are being lost. The one at the corner of Oak Bay Avenue and Richmond includes a beautiful mature shade-spreading tree and other mature plantings in a traditiional garden (you can see a photo of them here: http://treewatchvictoria.blogspot.ca/search?q=why+do+victoria+city+councillors+hate+gardens?)  This property will be built over by Abstract Development.
The other sacrificed green space is on Pemberton, where the old house will be transferred, creating more infill and pavement-creep. From the cost involved in this we can guess that when this house is eventually rented out it will not be among Victoria's "affordable" housing options.
There is more to heritage than buildings; gardens too reveal history in Victoria (quite apart from their part in keeping the ecological world alive and climate-controlled). It would be interesting to hear an interview on the CBC with somebody who also cared about that aspect of land use and heritage.