In contrast with my previous post, I want to describe the suburban environment that accompanies my walks. I will write specifically about my corner of Georgetown, Ontario. This is important because I think it is one of the reasons that walking is unappealing at a subconscious level, though I think it applies in some parts of town more than others.
Georgetown is roughly divided into the older North and the newer South. I have little experience walking in the South, but from my car travels through it, I assess it to be a thoroughly unpleasant habitat for walking. There is very little visual variety. Most if not all of the houses look the same because they are of the same archetype, built by the same builder, and most are hidden behind up-front garages. So, even if they claim to be different "models" that by code can't be placed within 3 houses of other identical "models", the lower level of detail is lost because the abstract is the same and this overrides everything else in terms of the impression you are left with. There is a lot of asphalt and concrete in these neighbourhoods because this is the model on which Georgetown South is built: drive-in houses fed by asphalt roads where the only place for kids to play safely is on the concrete sidewalk.
The trees are token gestures that may never grow to mature size and nature band-aids are everywhere, as if they make up for the terrible layout. If you look at Oakville's Glen Abbey, you can see how these places will look in 20 years' time: the accents will have faded, the vegetation won't out-scale the poor scale of the buildings, and the asphalt and concrete will suffer from poor maintenance because there are so few houses to provide so little property tax to pay for so much maintenance. Aside from this, there was never any serious intention that you would see these places from the perceptive perspective of a pedestrian, but rather from the standpoint of someone travelling 50km/h in an automobile.
The contrast with somewhere like Georgetown's King St. is significant. In some places, towering trees arc over the sidewalks and make it an overall pleasant place to walk, although this is only sporadic. There is some unfortunate rental conversion on the street, where cheap buildings have been put up, or haphazard "improvements" have been made with income generation as the main consideration. I live next to one such house myself, where an ugly wooden staircase has been bolted to the outside of the house so that the upstairs and downstairs can house different tenants. But all of the houses are different. Some are large, some are small. Some are clad with brick and others with siding of different composition and widths. Some houses have Victorian flourishes. Some have modest front steps and others have grand porches but there are no midget porches that are de-facto for decoration only because they are not of a scale that makes them comfortable to sit in, as you see in the newer developments. Some buildings that look as if they used to be corner stores have been converted into rental housing -- there is no commercial property remaining, perhaps because of the more recent style of zoning that makes it illegal to put shops near houses. It is a street in transition to somewhere worse, I think, but it has had a chance to "cook" and find its place. It has character.
But, overall, the outdoor landscape in urban Georgetown is bleak wherever anyone born in the last 60 years has had anything to say about it. The downtown area is of traditional design and is a pleasure to walk through but, as is common with many towns these days, it is preserved in a cocoon -- as if it was a thing of the past and we couldn't imagine a way to reconstruct something so nice in the present day. I'm not sure why this is done. If we like downtowns and their human scale so much, why can't we build more like it? Why do we "ooh" and "aah" over downtown and then give permission to put up acres of space junk like what passes for housing and "community" in Georgetown South? Because the fire truck can't do a donut in the middle of it?
It is unfair to restrict criticism to Georgetown South, though. Highway 7 is in the North, is unfriendly to pedestrians, and is filled to the brim with strip malls with in-front parking holding the most miscellaneous things -- pizza joints, fry pits, submarine sandwich shops, tattoo parlours and "adult" boutiques (in contrast to their name, aren't they quite childish?), the occasional ugly, flat-roofed apartment building, and the odd refugee building from the past which for some reason wasn't demolished and has been "preserved" and inhabited by a modern business (again, the assumption is that if it was knocked down, there would necessarily be crap put in its place and that we couldn't control ourselves into putting a nice building there).
There is also the old Dominion Seed House land in the North, and what has been done there is also somewhat of a travesty. This development bumps right up against Mountainview Rd, separated from Mountainview's sidewalk by an iron fence, a thin landing strip of grass, parking spaces, a road, and an assault of vacuum-packed houses. The houses are virtually on Mountainview itself but the strange appearance of it makes you think that there must have been some rule preventing them from facing directly onto Mountainview, so they put another road in between and gave it a different name. Some of the driveways on these houses are comically too short for what pass for automobiles these days, and the front nose or back bumper of the cars stick out into the roadway -- sometimes by a considerable amount.
When you walk through this neighbourhood, the houses are packed so close together and look so similar that the attempts by residents to differentiate their patch look kind of sad: many have turned their small patch of grass in front of the doors into horticultural experimentation areas with no over-arching sense of integration or common sensibility whatsoever. Walking past the side of one backyard, I noticed that the entire yard had been mulched over with wood bark mulch. On top of this, all of the garages have the electrical and/or gas meters on the front of the houses at eye level and in plain sight. With so many houses close together, it almost looks like a concentration camp type of effiency, where the goal above all else is for you to be "processed" as quickly as possible by pedestrian meter readers. With the close proximity of the houses and the fact that the parking is all private and all in front of the houses, the main thing you notice looking down the street -- even when the vegetation is in full bloom -- is the cars themselves, making it look like an abandoned scrap yard where seeds have fallen through the cracks between the cars and trees have sprouted amongst the rubble. Combined with the experimental and chaotic nature of the "front-yard" vegetation -- some have grass, some have mulch, some are giving the "native plants" thing a go -- it looks almost like a posh trailer park and could hardly look worse if you astroturfed the whole lot and put down some false plastic flowers.
So, this is a partial perspective of a walker of reasonable pace through Georgetown. Over time, it has made me more and more convinced that these places are not meant to appeal to pedestrians at all. They are meant to appeal to the property owners themselves first, and drivers travelling past them at considerable speed second. And when I say that they are designed for the latter, I say this only because the implication is that they will not notice what is being done to their urban habitat. In other words, it is designed for them because it is designed for people that will not complain.
I think that the remaining valuable public places are slowly becoming vehicular destinations wherein the endpoints are dressed up for their guests and the automobile passageways between them are neglected or handed over to economic market forces. Simply because nobody is looking at them.
Labels: Georgetown, Ontario, walking
