Comment 114023

By RobF (registered) | Posted October 01, 2015 at 06:42:39

I think it's too easy to focus on the abstract sustainability rationale for "intensification" as crutch to justify development projects. Why stop with one project on the escarpment? Or why bother protecting any natural feature? In dense, compact, transit-supportive cities we just filled in creeks and ravines at will during the late-19 and early 20th centuries. Back then we just took what we wanted and remade the natural landscape at will to suit urban needs. McQueston selectively addressed that legacy in the 1920s.

I imagine that today the shack-dwellers that were forcibly evicted to make way for McQueston's plans in Cootes Paradise would raise the hackles of social justice activists, meanwhile his tenure as Minister of Highways in the 1930s would make him a lightning rod with transit activists. He was operating in different times, with a different view of past and emergent problems, and when urban pastoralism and technological modernism were in vogue.

The so-called industrial land that the apartment complex is proposed to be built on could be allowed to revert to back nature via a land-swap, perhaps for some city-owned parking lot in the lower-city ... that would yield some transit and urbanism supportive intensification.

Comment edited by RobF on 2015-10-01 06:55:17

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