![]() ![]() ![]() Others rebutted that Toronto desperately needs more housing - lest people be forced to leave the city where they’ve grown up - and that multiplexes were a good option for multi-generational families. The hours-long debate in the council chambers saw some elected officials argue the overhauls were a step too far, could inflate land prices if builders saw an opportunity to buy and demolish single houses to build multiplexes, or would upset residents of suburban areas. The idea, he said, was to have more range in housing citywide, “so that people aren’t feeling that they don’t have a choice to live everywhere.” “It’s not a panacea to all of our housing issues and challenges, but I think we have to pull as many levers as we can as a city,” Lintern told council, fielding questions from impacts on the city’s tree canopy to parking availability. Their final proposal was approved by council in an 18-7 vote. That rule system has led to concentrated growth - leaving the city skyline sharp and jagged, with neighbourhoods dominated by either low-slung houses or sky-high apartment towers.įor several years, city planners had been mulling a rethink of Toronto’s planning regime to add more “gentle density” - housing options such as triplexes and fourplexes - where single homes dominate. The decision is an upheaval of Toronto’s long-standing “yellowbelt” - the roughly 70 per cent of Toronto’s zoned residential land that has been restricted to single-family homes only. Toronto councillors, on Wednesday afternoon, voted to heed the recommendations of chief planner Gregg Lintern and allow multiplex housing citywide - meaning duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes can be built, without special permissions, in neighbourhoods from Rosedale to Westmount that are currently dominated by detached and semi-detached houses. The integrated discipline Planning is included in this course.Say goodbye to the Toronto rules that have preserved huge cuts of the map for single-family houses. We encourage our students to inscribe onto this course. This semester we will be offering a design-integrated elective ‘Urban Research and Architectural Design’ (Wahlfach) together with Markus Tubbesing of the gta, who will also be involved in the studio teaching. We will then take these visions of the city into the environs of Zurich, applying their ideas as directly as possible, but also adapting and distorting these visions to the demands and realities of 21st century urban life. We will get into the heads of Francesco di Giorgio, Ebenezer Howard, Arturo Soria y Mata, Leonidov, Le Corbusier, Rob Krier, and others, to understand what they were thinking and to describe their kinds of cities. This semester we will look directly at these abstract statements of urban vision and intent, to understand what they are saying and to see if there are hidden qualities in their plans that have previously been overlooked. Nonetheless their stories are significant, and are an important part of urban history that has informed the development of many real cities. ![]() Not so many of these imaginary cities have been built, which is probably a good thing. These ideal cities, while often powerful at a conceptual and rhetoric level, inevitably lack the complexity and diversity of real cities. These plans, emerging from ideologies and from their authors’ imaginations, are insulated from the compromise and accommodation that reality demands. Any limits or inconveniences imposed by the peculiarities of great cities is more than compensated for by their ongoing potential and abundance of positive qualities.įor almost as long as there have been cities, there has been speculation about how to make them better and more beautiful. The cities that we most value, like the Florence of the Medici, Hausmann’s Paris, and metropolitan Manhattan, originally came about through the imposition of concentrated power, and yet, their physical form remains and continue to support a fruitful society, evidence that successful urban morphologies are also, always an expression of shared consensus amongst a city’s inhabitants. The city is the consequence of often brutal political and economic forces, and yet, can express society’s loftiest ideals. In equal measure social and artistic, it can be experienced, at the same time as embodying powerful ideas. I think the city is humankind’s great achievement. ![]()
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