I was in New York today for meetings. Our office is next to the 9/11 memorial pools and so I walked over with a colleague during lunch. It was my first time visiting the completed memorials and it was hard not to feel things as I stood there watching the water fall into the mysterious squares in the middle of each pool. But even more impactful were the flowers that people have inserted into the various names, and the messages that they have left for their loved ones.
A portion of the street that I live on has been thinking about going pedestrian-only for a few years now. Last summer it was pedestrianized for a few weekends . And this summer, it'll be pedestrianized until, I think, September as part of a more extensive pilot project. These sorts of moves can be controversial and so our usual approach is to ease-in with a pilot project.
When our condominium board sent out a notice about the pilot project, they framed it as a closure to vehicles. But of course, the other way to frame this is that the street is now open to pedestrians. And since I happen to walk this street every day (and oftentimes multiple times a day), I've been tweeting out pedestrian usage updates.
Click here to view on Twitter if the embedded tweets below aren't showing up for you properly. Spoiler: it's all working according to plan.
Not every street (or area) is necessarily a good candidate for a pedestrian-first focus. But there are many great examples across the city, including Kensington Market and this stretch of Market Street. So let's start investing in mechanical bollards , as they do in Europe, and make this pilot a permanent fixture.
Balconies are a never ending debate here in Toronto (and in many other places). In some cities, like New York, they don't seem to matter for new housing. Residents seem to be generally content without them. But here in Toronto, we have typically included them in new high-rise housing and there has been a lot of debate and criticism around both their utility (high up in buildings) and their impact to overall energy performance.
I have noticed that we are starting to see fewer balconies on new buildings, and I suspect this might increase with the way that costs are right now . And for some people and some (sub)markets, this will be just fine. But I happen to be a huge fan of outside. As my tanned dad likes to say when asked about the value of outdoor spaces in multi-family housing, "you don't get this dark by staying inside." He is pretty tanned.
I also believe that great outdoor spaces are an important ingredient in shaking off the deep-rooted cultural biases that this city has toward low-rise housing. Since pretty much the beginning, low-rises houses with backyards have been seen as noble, whereas apartment buildings have been viewed as disease-breeding tenements liable to morally corrupt even the best of intentions.
This is one of the reasons why we created the two-storey House Collection of suites at Junction House and why One Delisle is almost entirely formed by its outdoor spaces (both balconies and terraces). We wanted to celebrate multi-family living.
At the same time, I really like this adaptive reuse proposal by Peter Song over at BDP Quadrangle. The idea is to allow people to infill their balconies with more interior space so that our existing stock of housing can become more flexible for growing families and for when people's lives just generally change.
It would be a great way to capture additional space within our existing stock of buildings, and I think it would be pretty interesting to see what people ultimately choose when given a binary option: more interior space or more outdoor space. Maybe it would help provide some clarity to the great balcony debate.
Technically, it is my understanding that this is entirely doable.
In the middle of writing this post I shot an email over to one of the best structural engineers in the city (James Cranford, Principal at Stephenson Engineering ), and he confirmed that strength is no problem. Typically balconies are designed to accommodate more load than the suites. The thing we'd have to look at is slab deflection, since this is not usually limited on balconies.
The greater challenge is likely to be the overall coordination.
In some cities this sort of thing happens all the time on an ad hoc basis. People just do it and the end result is likely more functional, but the building elevations end up looking pretty schizophrenic. Here you'd need each condominium corporation to bless the change (since the envelope is a common element). And people would also need to agree on what design(s) should be used across the building.
