Sustainable Cities

Kitchener, Waterloo, Ont.

One of the biggest problems with maintaining a sustainable city is the issue of urban sprawl. With a growing population, we are going to run out of space if we keep building communities and neighbourhoods the same way. As of now, we have dug ourselves into a hole, where we are consuming large amounts of land to house a minimal number of people. Urban sprawl has many disadvantages, such as a loss in a sense of ‘place’, high dependency on automobiles, less interaction among communities and loss of natural ecosystems and farmland due to large land consumption. Urban sprawl doesn’t allow people to commute by walking or biking and decreases interactions among neighbours, increases social and health impacts, not to mention it is very expensive and inefficient.

By completely changing our cities, making them more compact and walkable, we will greatly increase our quality of life. Having more compacts communities will bring people and services closer together, creating greater interaction and simpler, cheaper ways of getting around. Having more walkable cities encourages attractive design and makes the best use of the land.

New urbanism is a concept that is trying to do just this; create more walkable communities. New urbanism is very similar to old urbanisms, before everyone had a car to get around in and lived in closer proximities to school, work and services. New urbanism actually strives to have all services within a 10 minute walking distance. You can check how walkable your house is in proximity to services in your area at www.walkscore.com. All you have to do is type in your address or postal code and it will give you a score out of 100 on how walkable your home is. When I typed in my home here is Victoria, I got an 83/100, very walkable! I already knew it would be better than my home in Ontario, as here I live within 10 minutes of the uptown Wal-mart centre and next door to the Mayfair mall. I also live very close to a grocery store, and many services on Douglas. However, my home in Ontario got a 27/100, Car-dependant. I did expect a low score, since my home is in a subdivision with one Mac’s milk, and it takes 10 minutes just to get there.

New urbanism encourages a walkable community but also offers better transit system for people who need to commute farther to work. An example this is seen in the use of mobility hubs in Toronto. They have integrating of travel and services. Some advantages of mobility hubs are that they offer a place for regional and inner city transit, connections for bike and car share programs, ferries and taxis.

Downtown Montreal

I love to visit my sister in Montreal, and the more I think about it, they have done a good job of minataining a sustainable city, well, if you live downtown. My sister has lived there for almost 15 years and she has never had a car. She lives close to downtown, and can get anywhere by taking the bus or metro, but she mostly walks.Montreal was named the 15th most sustainable city in Canada in the magazine for clean capitalism, Corporate Knights. The 2010 Most sustainable cities in Canada can be found in the link.

New city infrastructure is being developed all the time, it should be an initiative, or even a law, for architects to start building all buildings with the objective of creating a sustainable city.

Information from this blog was taken from a Sustainable Development Series class, taught my Dr. Ling.