Comment 114652

By RobF (registered) | Posted November 05, 2015 at 13:11:56 in reply to Comment 114647

Exactly right ... 50-70s is old, tired, and relatively ubiquitous, 100 years is old, historic, and increasingly rare.

I remember the section in Pardon My Lunch Bucket that you're referring to. Eric Arthur's otherwise fine book No Mean City (1965), which really did a lot to get a new generation of urbanists to appreciate Toronto's historic buildings and urban fabric, does the same thing in its epilogue. Arthur complains about the awfulness of Toronto's Victorian thoroughfares like Queen St and Danforth, etc., and praises urban renewal projects like Regent Park as visionary. We perceive or value things differently now.

I try to approach the need/desire for change with a certain humility as a result. We have to make decisions and we have to accept that we don't know what the end result will be. But we still need to be able to change things and adapt cities to new needs and desires (never underplay the latter as a motivation for change).

If we learn anything from the modernist period it would be to avoid benevolent authoritarianism in environmental design (see Edward Relph's 1981 Rational Landscapes for more on that ... but the rigidness of our old zoning bylaws and building regulations get at part of his argument) ... and to be skeptical of architects, designers, and planners when they take the form of "the great practitioner" or the technocrat as "master builder".

I'm heartened by the rise of tactical urbanism, the proliferation of the so-called amateur urbanologist, and the continual broadening of who participates in urbanism/urbanistic discussions. That is a real difference between now and then, IMHO.

Comment edited by RobF on 2015-11-05 14:15:03

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