Showing posts with label urban planning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label urban planning. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 31, 2022

A Setback For Privilege

 The words privilege and privacy have the same root, and they overlap in meaning. The "privileged" class within a town has historically meant those with homes set in garden space, under the shade of trees and behind discreet hedges. In other words, privilege means privacy. 

Naturally enough the folks who are crowded into dense housing crammed alongside public thoroughfares, subjected to prying eyes and other people's noise, resent those who have space and peace. Today, we talk about making things equitable. Regarding urban planning this sadly means densifying neighbourhoods and lowering quality of life -- but equally.

Quality of life is lowered when nature-space and green aesthetics are eliminated, gardens paved, the hedge replaced by the surveillance camera, the luxurious lawn criminalized. When this happens people's health suffers, physical and mental. They do less outdoor exercise and experience stress from overcrowding and noise.

Not only people but wildlife suffers: without gardens to forage in, pollinators (bees and other insects plus non-insect pollinators such as hummingbirds) decline -- over 30% of insect and bird species are now going extinct with the loss of plant diversity. And the big trees go; no room for them. Then drought and heat become extreme. The equitably-shared decline in quality of human life and health is also a setback for nature.

The current push for high-density multi-unit housing tightens this downward spiral. That other kind of "setback" -- property setback rules created by urban planners of the past which specified legal distance between houses, roads and other houses -- was meant to protect landscape and ecology. In our haste to undo the privilege of privacy we have taken away ambient ecological and aesthetic assets from everybody.  

To meet the need for housing we could either dampen demand (noting the "build it and they'll come" rule), or try to meet that demand (although we never will, given the above-noted rule) while retaining ecological and aesthetic values. In other words: privilege everybody. If we must endlessly build, we could at least maintain real estate setback rules around the multi-unit dwellings being proposed, leaving room for big trees, and not killing the pollinators. 







Wednesday, June 24, 2020

Street Trees and Green Courtyards Needed! Where's our Ada Salter?

Greater Victoria, British Columbia, compared to crowded many-boroughed London England in 19th-early 20th centuries, is still relatively small. Being hemmed in at the tip of an island however, it is becoming overpopulated. It needs an Ada Salter, "the driving force behind the transformation of Bermondsey from industrial slum to green oasis" according to Paul Wood in his 2019 book London Is a Forest.

A Quaker, Ada Salter became the mayor of the borough of Bermondsey in 1922, and like the earlier housing reformer Octavia Hill, created green space for the urban poor (the link between nature and physical and mental health was understood well before the Nature Deficit Disorder movement of today). 

Like Octavia, Ada connected health and ecology to beauty, and the Beautification Committee she launched turned Bermondsey into a garden city.

Ada's "transformative vision for the borough can still be seen. Estates dating from these interwar years often have central green courtyards ... Elsewhere the legacy of thousands of trees planted all those decades ago can still be seen … grand plane-lined thoroughfares, indeed virtually every street within the former borough is lined with trees."

Tall crowded apartments and condo-boxes are sprouting up all over Canadian urban cores, but we're not seeing much in the way of central green courtyards among them, nor thousands of trees being planted. Indeed, we see that what green space with trees we had is being paved over -- as in the Truth Centre property at Fort and Pentrelew in Victoria.
We need an army of new Ada Salters. Her "vision for ideal social housing to replace the slums (was) rows of neat garden-cottages …  Greenery was at the heart of the development, gardening was encouraged, and trees lined the new streets". The same vision as Octavia Hill's, who knew that dignified living meant having a private garden and your own front door.

A beautiful example of one favourite urban street tree, a gracious hardy old London plane, can be seen in Victoria's Oaklands Green. Go there: sit on the grass, enjoy the shade.

The ashes of Ada Salter and her husband were placed beneath a bright wide-canopied "tree of heaven" in London, a species originally from China which features "pollution tolerance, rapid growth and easy propagation – (they can) grow several metres in their first years". That is what we're going to need in future in Victoria, and we need to pay less attention to native species and more to trees that can survive the unfortunate onslaught of density and human overpopulation.

Like Bermondsey under Salter's Beautification Committee, Victoria used to be called the "city of gardens". It will take a change of direction in current urban planning and building to make it a city of gardens again.

London Plane Tree, Oaklands Green



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