Comment 102675

By RobF (registered) | Posted June 19, 2014 at 12:04:02 in reply to Comment 102668

The data above indicates that almost twice as many Hamilton residents work in the GTA west and Toronto as work in Downtown Hamilton (as defined above). This doesn't really lessen the arguments in favor of building the LRT B-line, but it does suggest we need to update how we think about the lower city within Hamilton as a whole, and Hamilton as micropolitan centre within a larger urban region.

We aren't talking about a single dominant urban core surrounded by dependent residential peripheries anymore in most urban regions. Yes downtown is distinctive, because of the density of employment. But in overall or absolute terms employment is now multi-nodal and dispersed across regions, which is why congestion and sprawl are such vexing problems. Of course, the logic of transit investments now and the dominant strain of new urbanism is to shift growth toward a node and corridor (re)urbanization model ... a return to the spatial structure and form reminiscent of the streetcar metropolis of the 1890s to 1930s, except with greater regional integration.

I'm of the thinking that the political problem is that some areas, the lower city for instance, are more amendable to a reversion back to an earlier form of urbanism (albeit in re-urbanized or transformed form). I imagine the GTA and Hamilton as being split between those spaces that are relatively easy to shift from automobility to those which must cling to some form of it because the built form makes it difficult to conceive of any other way to function. Many early postwar suburban areas fall in-between and these places interest me the most in my own work.

Comment edited by RobF on 2014-06-19 12:11:51

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