Towards a New Urbanism for the Next London

We desperately need to develop a shared vision of how we are going to build and grow this city of ours over the next generation. This mustn’t be something left to the municipality itself to suss out, or the process will become the captive of entrenched interests, ensuring its failure.

London’s most advanced urbanism, absolutely necessary for moving the city forward, is, and has always been, located in its neighbourhoods. The practice of local urbanism, however, has become “defensive” – more concerned with limiting change than embracing it. And we shouldn’t be surprised by this. When community consultation on planning matters affecting neighbourhoods becomes perfunctory, held late in the planning process and merely to satisfy Municipal Act requirements for public participation, NIMBYism is the logical outcome. This isn’t a reflection on the motives of residents, most of whom understand that neighbourhoods must evolve to remain viable. We need residents to become active participants in the design of their city, and we can only do this by engaging them in the planning of their neighbourhoods from the very beginning – even if it does occasionally get messy.

Let me give a more concrete example. My neighbourhood, Old East Village, is a classic example of an older model of a sustainable neighbourhood termed the industrial city neighbourhood. These types of neighbourhoods are easily identified. There are a number of examples here in London, and hundreds in cities across Ontario. They begin with clusters of manufacturers, such as we had with the oil refineries and railroad car shops here in Old East at the west end of the neighbourhood and the manufacturers located around the McCormick’s factory at the eastern edge. Around these factories develop fairly uniform tracts of standardized houses built for the workers in these factories. And then a commercial avenue is introduced, mixing retail, services and light manufacturing, such as we have with Dundas Street East.

What is interesting in this model is that the patterns that emerged allowed the neighbourhood to evolve into one in which people shared work and private lives, building social and economic capital.

Of even more interest, perhaps, is that this type of neighbourhood is nearly identical to the intent of new planning perspectives favouring mixed-use, mixed-income development, such as the city is putting in place for the redevelopment of the London Psychiatric Hospital Lands.

Here, in my neighbourhood, many of us hope to recapture some of this through the careful and strategic redevelopment of the McCormick Lands, currently subject to an Area Planning Review, with the ongoing participation of several dozen local residents. We believe that we can address the legitimate concerns of nearby residents around noise and smells and views through thoughtful and effective buffering while targeting “clean” industry, with substantially lower immediate impacts – perhaps IT/media clusters, but also green technology clusters and, perhaps, small-scale artisanal food production facilities. Many of the buildings are eminently suited for adaptive re-use, as has been done so successfully in cities such as Toronto and Waterloo.

There are real opportunities with this to provide good jobs for local people.

Mr. Orser’s claims that he “believe[s] in bulldozing old buildings and building new ones” is not particularly helpful in this regard. Nor is his characterization of the McCormick Lands as “starting to look like a little Detroit. It is time to start demolishing these old run down fire traps...”. Both of these opinions betray a lack of understanding (which he might have addressed had he bothered to show up to any of the community meetings held on this issue) on how we can create prosperity in our city and good jobs for residents in an economy that is rapidly changing.

To create a new urbanism for London we need to recognize that our urbanist practices must contain within it clear and compelling economic propositions. It is the private sector that builds the vast majority of buildings in this city, and provides the clear majority of jobs. As we go forward with building a city that works for this generation, and for the ones that follow, we must create economic opportunities for the private sector that are so predictable that they encourage it to climb on board – fewer layers of regulations, streamlined development policies and procedures, incentive packages that are formalized early enough in the development pre-planning stage so as to provide cost-certainty to the developer as s/he goes forward, a lighter touch on the wheel. For any chance of success, we need a stable alliance of political, civic, and business interests, such as we can see in Toronto’s City Summit Alliance, to give just one example.

It also requires that we all become much more literate about the details of our city-building efforts. Doing away with the shifting ground upon which the private sector must operate, together with engaging citizens in the planning of their city at the very beginning of the process, would be a very good start. I’m looking forward to participating in the conversation.......