I will get back to my series of posts describing the Ontario/London Planning process soon. I've just been a little distracted by an ongoing search for meaning in my life, a sense of greater purpose and numerous setbacks in my basic search for work.
Over the past couple of weeks a number of people have voiced concern about a proposal for a 4-storey building in the heart of Wortley Village. The site is currently a surface parking lot topped with gravel and is the former site of a church that was demolished some years ago (knowing London, perhaps after a fire.) As an aside, empty lots are always harder to oppose for re-development than an existing structure since they don't convey the kind of emotional response that a site with a building does.
For a number of reasons, I have not been tremendously 'excited' about this project and by excited I mean angst-ridden about the future of Wortley Village. For quite some time I've been of a view that no one is on this earth long enough to really be overly concerned about the size, shape and colour of a building, so long as it embodies a sustainable approach to development. In other words, be as concerned as hell about plowing under arable farm land but worry not about those buildings that are built within existing neighbourhoods.
Buildings stand for a long time. Some in our City are 200 years old. In Europe there are 1000-year old Cathedrals. We hope that buildings will last generations spanning our lives on this mortal coil. Contrarily, development is actually a gradual and fairly slow process. The neighbourhood I live in, Westmount, has not changed much if at all since it was built in the 60's and 70's. The potential to intensify the residential and mixed-uses in this area is fraught with difficulties.
At the same time, along Wonderland, new Big Box Stores have killed the Mall that was built when the neighbourhood I live in was built, depreciating the value of the surrounding neighbourhoods by decreasing the amount of amenities within a walkable distance.
So if I don't get up-in-arms about 4-storeys (where 3 and 1/2 is permitted as-of-right) requiring minor variances from the Zoning By-law, I hope you'll understand. Architectural style and building materials, in a hodgepodge neighbourhood with inconsistent standards and patterns of development is a matter of taste that I am not prepared to debate or get worked up about. No neighbour of that building would subject their own property to the whims of neighbourhood taste either.
One thing has become clear of late. We must intensify existing neighbourhoods and make better use of existing infrastructure. By those standards, a 4-storey building painted Hot Pink with big juicy lips on its cornices would be entirely acceptable.
Call me when someone proposes turning more green-space and/or farmland into a house-farm.
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The Big Boxes didn't kill Westmount Mall. The mall was losing tenants long before the big boxes were built, and very few of the tenants in the boxes would be mall tenants anyway.
ReplyDeleteWestmount died due to strong competition, an over-built mall market and a poor location in relation to its competitors.