From the October/November 2002 issue of New Urban News

The devil in the details
Municipalities in the Toronto area are promoting New Urbanism — but struggling to get the details right.

Metropolitan Toronto is growing by 100,000 people a year and is the site of some of the most ambitious New Urbanism in the suburbs anywhere in North America. Much of this is happening in the City of Markham, which has changed its development pattern more radically than just about any other suburban municipality.

In the past five years, perhaps 4,000 homes have been built in new urban neighborhoods — and more in hybrid projects that contain some new urban elements. This emphasis on pedestrian-friendly design has yielded dividends, especially in Markham. Toronto Star reporter Brian Dexter recently wrote that Markham is “one of Ontario’s nicest-looking suburban cities, even though the place is growing like crazy. ... with New Urbanism-style planning, the city is trying to tackle urban sprawl while making new communities more compact and pleasant for residents.”

And yet, some critics see an almost mechanical uniformity to the Toronto region’s New Urbanism. Dozens of builders are involved, and nearly all are offering what can only be described as faux Victorian homes, each with a surplus of what appear to be poorly executed details. “It’s not vernacular — it’s some kind of plastic composite builder special,” says Michael Morrissey, a new urbanist Toronto architect who has worked in Markham and throughout North America.

Morrissey, who spent five years traveling to distant charrettes and visiting some of the best new urban communities, vividly recalls his first trip to Cornell, a development that probably has more new urban elements than any other project in the Toronto suburbs. “The main street, a curving street, leading into the town square couldn’t be more than 400 feet long,” he says. “There must have been 100 gables on that street. There’s absolutely no restraint.”

A similar scene unfolds in every sizable new urban project I visited in the region. Single homes are tightly packed — generally about five feet apart — with short setbacks from the street. Brick facades are ubiquitous, with intermittent vinyl. Porches are shallow — four to five feet deep generally — with concrete floors. A plethora of dormers, gables, columns, towers, feature windows, and gingerbread — mostly shoddily detailed — meets the eye on block after block.

	photo by Robert Steuteville A visually busy streetscape in Cornell.

This ensemble is most evident in Markham — because that’s where much of the New Urbanism is taking place — but it is also standard in greenfield developments in Oakville and Orangeville. Markham uses a panel of control architects to review the builders’ designs, but their influence is questionable, says architect Michael Spaziani, who is on the panel. “I’ve drawn lots of authentic details for porches, but never had one built correctly,” says Spaziani. “There is a [construction] delivery system in place that inevitably changes the design.”

Cost issue
Much of the dumbing down of the details is the result of attempts by builders to cut costs, Spaziani explains. Yet the lack of simplicity in the street facades also adds cost. “My suspicion is it’s a graphics problem,” he explains. “If you draw a straight line on a page with simple graphics, builders don’t think anything interesting is being done. If they see lots of gables, doodads, and circular windows, then they think some real design is happening.”

Others argue that New Urbanism in the Toronto region works just fine. Dan Leeming, a planner active in Markham, notes that city is achieving higher density, more walkable streets, a degree of mixed-use, good-looking public spaces, and strong home sales — all while city officials are planning a major downtown and pushing for a light rail line. “For a greenfield area, that’s a huge leap forward,” he says.

So how much do the details matter? Morrissey thinks they matter a lot. New Urbanism is about more than great plans, which he says some of the Toronto area projects have. It’s also about integrity and authenticity — down to the design of porches, windows, dormers, materials, and the configuration of buildings on a block. With that in mind, the following is a review of New Urbanism in the Toronto suburbs with attention to a variety of planning and building issues:

• At the regional scale, the Toronto region is still growing predominantly in the form of sprawl. Counterbalancing the sprawl is Toronto itself, one of North America’s healthiest cities, where a lot of transit-accessible infill development is taking place. Also, Markham offers a case study of how suburban growth can achieve a denser, more walkable form. Markham is working on plans to build a large, walkable downtown with 25,000 residents, 17,000 jobs, four million square feet of commercial space, and rail connections.

• The road networks are beginning to get better, but they still have plenty of room for improvement. Markham streets, for example, are interconnected and walkable within new neighborhoods, but developments within Markham are still divided by suburban-style arterials — which present formidable barriers to pedestrians. Oak Park, a new urban development in Oakville, has internal boulevards and avenues that are unfortunately detailed like suburban arterials.

• Mixed-use is still largely just a vision on paper. Markham has only one small new urban retail center of about 20,000 square feet — in the Cornell community. “Developers have been cooperative in doing the housing, but not the retail component,” says Jim Baird, head of Markham’s planning department.

• The mixture of housing types needs work. In almost all of the Toronto area projects, there are too many small-lot single homes and hardly any rental apartments. One possible reason is that municipal development charges — which cover water and sewer, school construction, parks, and other services — are too high on apartments. In Markham the fees are about $14,000 per unit (Canadian).

• Planning at the neighborhood scale is excellent, especially in Cornell. “There are many things about Cornell, and some of the other new urbanist developments in Markham, that are much better than typical sprawl development that is swallowing up the farmland all over southern Ontario,” says Robert Freedman, director of urban design for the City of Toronto. “The scale of Cornell is walkable, the streets are much better designed, there are rear lanes — so parking and garages are in back. There’s a commercial center that’s within walking distance of many homes.”

• Planning at the block and sub-block scale lacks imagination and subtlety of technique. Morrissey points out that there’s been little attempt in the Toronto area to vary streetscapes by pulling back some houses, bringing others together in small closes or courtyards, or rotating some units to create miniature green areas. Doing this takes skill, yet it sets great projects apart from mediocre ones.

		photo by Robert Steuteville Children play in a park in Cornell.

• There has been almost no attempt by builders to understand the vernacular — or to create modern designs with urban integrity — so the details are poorly conceived. “There are wonderful local architectural precedents in southern Ontario — both in Toronto and in all the small towns — that would have made for a very interesting mix of units,” says Freedman, adding, “There should have been more variety in style, and ... the porch and window details and materials in particular — in all of the developments I visited — were not at all convincing.”

• The builders in Toronto-area new urban communities have been able to deliver houses at a high volume, while keeping them relatively affordable. This has partly been due to inexpensive materials and details. The risk is that more authentic designs will drive up costs, yet Freedman says that’s not inevitable. Canadian builders should look at US federal Hope VI projects and certain economical private sector developments which show that “good New Urbanism doesn’t have to be more expensive than conventional development.”

• The financial viability of some of the early new urban developments has been questionable. The first major developer in Cornell, Larry Law, didn’t do well and had to give up his options on future phases. Law was plagued with production difficulties, Leeming says, adding that other builders in Cornell did fine. Houses sold well, and the initial units appreciated 30 percent in the last four years, compared to a 15 percent average appreciation in Markham as a whole, says Leeming. New developers are lining up to get property in Cornell, he adds. “They know they can make money on it now that enough of the project is finished and homebuyers can kick the tires and see what they will get,” he adds.
suggestions

Freedman, who worked as an architect for many years at UDA in Pittsburgh, contends that pattern books, if used in towns like Markham, would enable builders to tap into the vernacular and get details right. UDA pioneered the modern use of pattern books, which show how to create more authentic architectural details based on the vernacular. Other new urbanist firms are beginning to create pattern books as well.

Part of the solution may lie in the integration of professional disciplines, Morrissey says. Builders who are putting up homes in new urban neighborhoods must realize that they are contributing to the overall community, he explains. “ Once you realize you are not just a builder or a developer and that you are shaping the plan and creating a place, then it all begins to make sense.”

A growing region with a solid foundation of historic urbanism, metropolitan Toronto should be fertile ground for New Urbanism in coming decades, both in the central city and suburbs. What is needed now are building details and configurations that match the quality and creativity of the master plans.