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Helsing posted:People tend to focus on the growth of a handful of major cities but if you look around the world there's actually a huge amount of urban shrinkage occurring as well. As some cities are growing many others are hollowing out. That was part of my point but i guess I didn't make that clear. Even smaller cities are being hosed by this consolidation of everything unless they're close enough to one of the handful of cities experiencing any kind of meaningful progress that people can stomach the hours long daily commute.
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Jan 30, 2016 20:18
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Ccs posted:My uncle almost lost his home after 2008, but the bank that held the deed went bankrupt, and somehow all the paperwork was lost in all the re-aquiring, so he's been living in a nice house and paying no property taxes since then since the ownership of the house is totally unknown now. After 8 years wouldn't that house is close to being your Uncle's, again? I hope he can get through a few more years because that would be hilarious! Professor Shark fucked around with this message at 20:30 on Jan 30, 2016 |
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Jan 30, 2016 20:22
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EvilJoven posted:That was part of my point but i guess I didn't make that clear. Even smaller cities are being hosed by this consolidation of everything unless they're close enough to one of the handful of cities experiencing any kind of meaningful progress that people can stomach the hours long daily commute. Well you covered Canada well, and I didn't think it would be news to you, I just thought I'd chime in to let people who might not be as up to date on urban policy know that this is even worse in Eastern Europe or parts of the US rust-belt (Detroit being the poster child for urban decay). What's really disturbing is how much Richard Florida and his "creative cities" bullshit caught on in the planning world about a decade and a half ago. Florida pretty much says that we should encourage and accelerate the consolidation of countries into a few big cities and that rising property values should be seen as a sign of policy success. While a lot of his influence probably comes from city planners and politicians just using his terrible ideas to do things they would have done anyway it's still kind of disheartening when you find out that many of the worst trends in urban policy are currently being celebrated by one of the most influential pop-urbanists in the English speaking world.
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Jan 30, 2016 20:28
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As resource operations and agriculture become more efficient I fully expect that most rural communities will die. There is no real need for them. The ten or twelve largest cities in Canada will probably have 90+% of the population in a few decades, they're the only places where non resource business can reach efficient scale.
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Jan 30, 2016 20:43
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There is a reason / need for rural communities though. People like living them in them and they provide an alternative to city life. A lot of 20th century planning was dedicated to trying to create perfectly efficient and rational cities that would maximize production and consumption and transform homes into "machines for living", as Courbusier called them. The results were catastrophic and created lead to urban planning disasters we're still recovering from.
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Jan 30, 2016 20:49
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Helsing posted:There is a reason / need for rural communities though. People like living them in them and they provide an alternative to city life. You might as well say: There is a reason / need for horses though. People like riding them and they provide an alternative to vehicle life. There has to be a better reason for rural towns to exist than "some people like them". If their underlying economic rationale goes away (e.g. the mine closes or whatever), I'm not sure that we should be expecting much effort to keep them afloat. They're tremendously wasteful in terms of transportation, for one.
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Jan 30, 2016 21:20
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Why is "giving people the ability to choose where and how they will live their live" such an extravagant goal? Presumably the main value of having a political democracy and a vibrant economy is to increase people's freedom to determine their life circumstances rather than maximizing productive efficiency. Also, we still have horse ranches where people can go and enjoy horse riding and I would completely support redistributing income in such a way that low income people who are currently priced out of the ability to enjoy horse riding could now experience their hobby of choice.
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Jan 30, 2016 21:26
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Helsing posted:Also, we still have horse ranches where people can go and enjoy horse riding and I would completely support redistributing income in such a way that low income people who are currently priced out of the ability to enjoy horse riding could now experience their hobby of choice. Lol, what? I was with you right up until this last bit
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Jan 30, 2016 21:39
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Helsing posted:Why is "giving people the ability to choose where and how they will live their live" such an extravagant goal? Presumably the main value of having a political democracy and a vibrant economy is to increase people's freedom to determine their life circumstances rather than maximizing productive efficiency. Well it's a matter of "cost to society" really. If rural living required massive subsidies (it does to an extent) then it's not really in society's best interests to subsidize them to such a degree. But trying to min/max society doesn't work either, specially when your "dump stat" is just the entire working class. I think a whole spectrum of types of living from rural to big city should be possible, but within reason. We also need to re-look at these types of living to minimize their social and upkeep costs. Rural living doesn't have to be totally car/truck dependent and devoid of any sort of culture or human interaction. A small town can actually be a walkable village, there are hundreds of very cozy villages and small towns in europe for instance. Like the "strong towns" guy is always going on about the classic main-street small town model. That's perfectly reasonable living and those types of towns can absolutely still have economies when their cores haven't been totally abandoned after some big-box stores open up juuuust outside the city limits. Once again, going back to small towns in europe, they are often totally different than small towns here. Despite being small, they're still dense since they were built pre-automobile. So instead of just a vague geographic area with a bunch of random houses and business spread randomly over the countryside with the only planning seeming to be "keep buildings as far apart as possible" they'll be a pleasant cluster of buildings around a town square or high street of row buildings with shops on the bottom and offices/apartments above, then a ring of classic single family houses but still with everyone within a short walk to the centre, and then from there actual farms and rural estates and such. Despite being tiny these small towns and villages usually have a bus route or two or even a train station. You can hop on the train or bus and be in a much larger city in a short time, so they are still quite connected with the rest of society.
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Jan 30, 2016 21:47
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Vote for Helsing of the New Equine Party as he promises to lower the barrier of entry so that every Canadian can enjoy Polo regardless of economic background.
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Jan 30, 2016 21:48
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I've put a lot of money into my horses, they're investments you can ride. I know people worry about horse affordability but I don't want to see government policies that would lower the value of my horse equity.
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Jan 30, 2016 21:49
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Eej posted:Vote for Helsing of the New Equine Party as he promises to lower the barrier of entry so that every Canadian can enjoy Polo regardless of economic background. 
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Jan 30, 2016 21:55
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Lexicon posted:Lol, what? I was with you right up until this last bit I think we should redistribute income because more income is one of the most reliable ways of increasing a persons actually existing personal freedom. If people want to use that additional income to visit a horse ranch, or to save up and buy their own horse, then more power to them. To be clear, I am not specifically advocating that maximizing horse ownership should be the goal of redistribution, I just assume it might be a side effect. Baronjutter posted:Well it's a matter of "cost to society" really. If rural living required massive subsidies (it does to an extent) then it's not really in society's best interests to subsidize them to such a degree. But trying to min/max society doesn't work either, specially when your "dump stat" is just the entire working class. This really is the heart of the issue. We happen to build a lot of our rural communities in an incredible extravagant and inefficient manner that isn't really sustainable under current conditions. But I feel that there's a difference between saying "society faces trade-offs regarding transportation, and it isn't really fair to ask the rest of Canada to subsidize a highly inefficient form of living that requires the unsustainable use of auto-mobiles". That, to me, is just a part of democracy and collective decision making. However, when someone says " There is no real need for [rural communities]" while ignoring the fact that people want to live in rural communities is, to me at least, kind of forgetting what the actual point of our economy is. If a lot of people want to do something then that's a legitimate reason to try and structure the economy to make that thing a possibility. It doesn't mean we should totally ignore the trade offs or avoid doing a cost-benefit analysis, but I don't think its healthy to slip into a mode of analysis where the only reason to do anything is some narrow and reductive question of maximizing productive efficiency. If large numbers of people want to live in rural settings then that's a reason to try and make it possible. You laugh now, but I bet millions of temporarily-embarrassed-ranch-owners are going to be lining up to vote for the NEP in four years.
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Jan 30, 2016 22:11
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You know what, gently caress it, let's all work towards ensuring that our entire society is reduced to a collective of pale barely alive drones all performing our labour in perfectly optimized habitats, devoid of anything that might hamper our efficiency.
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Jan 30, 2016 22:20
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Helsing posted:You laugh now, but I bet millions of temporarily-embarrassed-ranch-owners are going to be lining up to vote for the NEP in four years. Wild Rose didn't go anywhere last time, did it? 
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Jan 30, 2016 22:24
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Baronjutter posted:Well it's a matter of "cost to society" really. If rural living required massive subsidies (it does to an extent) then it's not really in society's best interests to subsidize them to such a degree. But trying to min/max society doesn't work either, specially when your "dump stat" is just the entire working class. The other place that has created fantastic small towns and rural communities like you describe is New Zealand. They lack the rail infrastructure of Europe and so are more car oriented, but nonetheless are compact, walkable and focused on the high street. New Zealand is as modern of a nation as Canada, so you can't explain the compact well designed cities on the fact that they were built long before the car. At some point a set of policies was put in place that created really great towns. I think the comparison between British Columbia and New Zealand is interesting because they're somewhat similar (same population) and yet starkly different. In BC you have Vancouver, Victoria, Kelowna, then a step down to a few small towns, and then a drop off to almost nothing, where a "town" is a gas station/market/liquor store. Many of of BC's towns seem to be struggling, with run down main streets surrounded by big box stores and urban sprawl. In contrast New Zealand has Auckland (Calgary sized), Wellington (Regina sized) and then half a dozen pretty large, self sustaining towns all across the country around ~100k -70k. In between that there's an absurd amount of small towns with significant main streets. As a tourist maybe I'm not getting the whole picture, but to me these small towns look more successful and sustainable than any of BC's small towns. I'd be really interested to learn more about what policies shaped this dramatic difference between how BC and NZ have developed. It may just come down to climate, but surely there's more to it than that. New Zealand is milder than BC with a sort of Northern California to Washington state climate, whereas BC gets too cold for most pretty quickly once you get away from the south west coast.
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Jan 30, 2016 23:23
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EvilJoven posted:You know what, gently caress it, let's all work towards ensuring that our entire society is reduced to a collective of pale barely alive drones all performing our labour in perfectly optimized habitats, devoid of anything that might hamper our efficiency. Outside of perfectly optimized habitats were already there. And even then Im sure the upper crust thinks that the average worker deserves nothing more than a hovel to return to in order to recharge before the next 20 hour work day in the tech mines of
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Jan 30, 2016 23:24
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Helsing posted:I think we should redistribute income because more income is one of the most reliable ways of increasing a persons actually existing personal freedom. If people want to use that additional income to visit a horse ranch, or to save up and buy their own horse, then more power to them. To be clear, I am not specifically advocating that maximizing horse ownership should be the goal of redistribution, I just assume it might be a side effect. Haha, ok, well we're in complete agreement then. The NEP has my vote.
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Jan 30, 2016 23:25
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Femtosecond posted:The other place that has created fantastic small towns and rural communities like you describe is New Zealand. They lack the rail infrastructure of Europe and so are more car oriented, but nonetheless are compact, walkable and focused on the high street. New Zealand is as modern of a nation as Canada, so you can't explain the compact well designed cities on the fact that they were built long before the car. At some point a set of policies was put in place that created really great towns. Having lived in both (currently living in Prince George) the difference is probably down to land use. ~55% of the total land area of NZ is farmland (mostly dairy I think, despite the sheep stereotype), forestry is something like 5% (all IMPF, 30 year rotation Radiata pine). Rotation in B.C. is double that or greater, you can just drive to the site for harvest, no need for anyone to live there. Edit: Guessing the urban sprawl in B.C. is just down to lax zoning/planning permission or whatever you would call it. You don't tend to see stores outside the center of town in NZ, whereas in Prince George they seem to build them wherever. pinarello dogman fucked around with this message at 00:17 on Jan 31, 2016 |
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Jan 31, 2016 00:12
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Lack of any coherent civil planning is most certainly a huge blow to how towns have developed in BC. If you look at the older towns established prior to 1900, especially in the south-central interior (Nelson, Castlegar, etc), you'll see that they all followed the "old world" model of civic planning that NZ has managed to stick with. A dense commercial core with offices / apartments on the upper floors, and residential surrounding it. For towns that managed to hold a sustainable population level this worked, and continues to work fantastically. The problem (for BC) came during the post-war population boom, especially in the 1960's when the SoCreds built the provincial highway system. Suddenly you could access these well established frontier communities in hours rather than days (Pemberton was rail-only until 1966), resource extraction meant there were jobs for everyone everywhere, and any sort of planning went out the window in the face of how fast every city in BC grew in those years. Massive public works projects saw places like Revelstoke triple in population in a matter of months, with government agencies hastily constructing suburbs to house the workers. Perhaps this is an inevitable result of being such a young country that the foundations for sustainable communities outside urban centers were never laid down, that every town is treated as just an exurb for whatever large town is the closest. Perhaps it's the gutting of local commerce by the aggressive influx of international big-boxes like Wal-Mart and low-grade food chains like Tim Hortons, I've certainly witnessed that decline first hand. It scares me, the global trend of urbanization. We saw the same thing happen during the industrial revolution, where impoverished peasants fled to the cities to seek their fortune in the factories. A few did well, most died after a life of scrabbling to pay the increased cost of living while crammed into tenements in the cesspool of London. I can only speak from personal experience, I don't know how things are in Regina or Toronto, but we're already seeing Vancouver stretch to the breaking point as the country falls into recession and people flee from the hinterlands seeking employment or big-name education. There is nothing for rent here, two years ago I had trouble listing an 8'x10' room for $400, now I'm being bombarded after listing it for $550. After years of increasingly clean streets, there are more people sleeping hard in the DTES this winter than I have seen since I moved here in 2008. I am seeing homeless in places I've never seen them before, it's a crisis I've heard not a whisper of yet. We can't expect to pour the nations populace into the major cities of each province and have things not break down into a shambles, there isn't enough housing and employment in place to take up that much volume. The employment that is available doesn't pay enough to cover the rent. The notion of the housing bubble horrifies me, absolutely horrifies me, because construction jobs make up such a massive portion of the economy these major cities have. Yet, because of the way our electoral system works, cities like Vancouver decide who gets to rule the province and country and so those cities are where the budget is poured into like a black hole. If we spread that investment out the impact of what's coming would be considerably softer, but instead we've put all our eggs in a single basket. This country is hosed. 
Rime fucked around with this message at 02:31 on Jan 31, 2016 |
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Jan 31, 2016 02:24
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Rime posted:Lack of any coherent civil planning is most certainly a huge blow to how towns have developed in BC. If you look at the older towns established prior to 1900, especially in the south-central interior (Nelson, Castlegar, etc), you'll see that they all followed the "old world" model of civic planning that NZ has managed to stick with. A dense commercial core with offices / apartments on the upper floors, and residential surrounding it. For towns that managed to hold a sustainable population level this worked, and continues to work fantastically. This is the same dynamic that turned Toronto into the weird hybrid monstrosity that it is today. Many of the downtown neighborhoods were already flourishing before the postwar car and highway boom, and while there are issues with affordability they are quite walk-able. We even have a few areas with European style devleopment where you have storefronts on the ground floor and then a couple stories of apartments stacked on top. But these neighborhoods are ridiculously gentrified, and evne worse they are embedded within ever growing concentric rings of terrible postwar neighborhoods. Like most of the world we were building mega highways in the 50s and 60s but in our case there was a huge backlash so after the Spadina Expressway was cancelled the province stopped building high ways into the downtown but also never really replaced them with anything (the NDP in the 1990s was going to build a bunch more subways, along Eglinton and such, but when the Harris Tories got elected in 1995 one of their first acts was to cancel the new subway building). As a result the city has some of the worst driving conditions in all of North America. As an added bonus Toronto in the 1950s and 60s had a huge appetite for building tower apartment blocks that look like something out of Eastern Europe, except they were mostly built by private developers. These towers are a great idea in principle -- they were supposed to combine dense population centres with lots of surrounding green space -- but for a variety of reasons they are terribly zoned and instead of being used by middle class car owners they ended up mostly becoming low income housing for New Canadians, with the result being that these communities that were built for cars are filled with pedestrians. Also the green space turned out to be a huge incentive for criminal activity and the zoning ensures there aren't enough local stores to provide either shopping or employment opportunities. So in addition to endless lots of identical town houses and bungalows our "inner suburbs" are also filled with dystopian tower blocks that look like pint sized versions of the Megablocks from Judge Dredd. We hear a lot about the failures of central planning in Europe and Asia but here in North America we have our own example of catastrophically bad planning, and you can see the ongoing impact in almost every city and town in Canada.
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Jan 31, 2016 02:36
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You know how we can get European style towns and cities? Bring back feudalism. Make the church the primary tax collector.
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Jan 31, 2016 02:48
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Helsing posted:We hear a lot about the failures of central planning in Europe and Asia but here in North America we have our own example of catastrophically bad planning, and you can see the ongoing impact in almost every city and town in Canada. I look at Toronto or cities in the US and it's like they just took the small-scale central planning design and decided that, thanks to cars, it would totally work guys at a scale spread across hundreds of square kilometers. Helped along by the fact that a lot of older cities (Toronto, London, New York) evolved naturally from smaller villages into towns and into individual cities which eventually amalgamated into their current namesakes, so there was a relatively even distribution of zoning in the existing system. Was the nuance of that evolution entirely lost on planners, or they just decided it didn't apply in our transport-rich modern era? It wasn't until they took that evolved core and then put an expanding halo of utterly dead suburbia around it, starting in the 1950's, that things started to break down. In hindsight it's pretty dumb, but it's also so very stereotypical of the mentality which drove everything in the west from the 1950's through 80.  Vancouver is lucky that the planners in the 20th century must have been huffing spice or something, because the design they laid out for the next 100 years was goddamn prescient and it wasn't until the late 1990's that the new generation really started loving up the layout in the lower mainland.
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Jan 31, 2016 03:02
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Vancouver's planning was more dictated by geography rather than any privileged access to the spice melange.
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Jan 31, 2016 03:06
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Cultural Imperial posted:You know how we can get European style towns and cities? Ban automotive travel for a few centuries
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Jan 31, 2016 03:07
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Eej posted:Vancouver's planning was more dictated by geography rather than any privileged access to the spice melange. Is that code for weed
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Jan 31, 2016 03:17
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Eej posted:Vancouver's planning was more dictated by geography rather than any privileged access to the spice melange. Maybe at first but certainly not now.
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Jan 31, 2016 03:44
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I love that, even in the midst of the Alberta economy being essentially decimated, I still see tons of ads encouraging me to buy a house in a lovely, cookie-cutter boring suburb out in bumfucking Egypt, south of the ring road. I think you'd have to be completely mentally defective to even consider the idea, but even if I'm absolutely correct about that, I expect they'll enjoy brisk sales in this moronic city. There's areas in this city I honestly had no idea existed, and I will never go to them because they have nothing of any worth anyway. It's bizarre. At least the northeast has T&T and Nando's Chicken.
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Jan 31, 2016 03:51
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PT6A posted:There's areas in this city I honestly had no idea existed, and I will never go to them because they have nothing of any worth anyway. It's bizarre. At least the northeast has T&T and Nando's Chicken. That is a really pathetic bar for culture or diversity or whatever you think Nando's and T&T represent.
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Jan 31, 2016 04:23
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It's Alberta so you gotta give him a break
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Jan 31, 2016 04:25
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T&T is owned by Loblaws which also owns Superstore, you can get everything in T&T for cheaper at RCSS, except for durians or pig offal I guess so I don't know why you would want to go to T&T unless you were making large quantities of authentic (i.e. terrible) Chinese/SE Asian food from scratch. I'll admit that I loath Chinese/SE Asian food in general so my opinion on this matter may be skewed.
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Jan 31, 2016 04:32
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the talent deficit posted:That is a really pathetic bar for culture or diversity or whatever you think Nando's and T&T represent. No, I just like those things, so I have a reason to go to the NE. I can't think of another reason to go there, offhand, as I don't live there. I have no reason to go to Legacy or Academy or whatever they're calling these lovely far-flung suburbs; they don't even have anything as interesting as a South African chicken chain or an Asian supermarket, and that is indeed a very low bar to cross.
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Jan 31, 2016 04:32
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Throatwarbler posted:T&T is owned by Loblaws which also owns Superstore, you can get everything in T&T for cheaper at RCSS, except for durians or pig offal I guess so I don't know why you would want to go to T&T unless you were making large quantities of authentic (i.e. terrible) Chinese/SE Asian food from scratch. There's a tea shop in that complex that has very good tea that I cannot find elsewhere. Also, RCSS isn't convenient for me because they decided to put all of them very far away from where I live for some reason.
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Jan 31, 2016 04:34
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https://cfaa-fcapi.org/pd2/CFAA_FRPO_Govt_Sub.pdfquote:
 that's awesome
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Jan 31, 2016 05:45
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Rime posted:I've got two interviews lined up next week, one in Smithers and the other in Vanderhoof. Double my current salary for the summer, with the potential to extend the contract through the winter. Who are you applying with in Smithers?
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Jan 31, 2016 06:09
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Eej posted:Vancouver's planning was more dictated by geography rather than any privileged access to the spice melange. Vancouver leadership of the 60s and 70s were happy to follow same terrible urban planning schemes that the rest of North America was implemeting. They were stopped by neighbourhood activism before they could do much damage.  Vancouver Mayor Tom Campbells limo edges through a crowd of protesters at the opening of the Georgia Viaduct Jan. 9, 1972. http://www.vancouversun.com/news/look+back+1972+sees+georgia+viaduct+open/10716508/story.html
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Jan 31, 2016 07:04
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crbrsd posted:Having lived in both (currently living in Prince George) the difference is probably down to land use. ~55% of the total land area of NZ is farmland (mostly dairy I think, despite the sheep stereotype), forestry is something like 5% (all IMPF, 30 year rotation Radiata pine). Rotation in B.C. is double that or greater, you can just drive to the site for harvest, no need for anyone to live there. Sup PG buddy, how about that Lowe's going into the mall. e: re:urban planning and design, I was born in and grew up in Kitimat and when we finally moved away to Fort St. John and then PG I was really disgusted at how unwalkable these shitholes are. boneration fucked around with this message at 07:08 on Jan 31, 2016 |
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Jan 31, 2016 07:06
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cougar cub posted:Who are you applying with in Smithers? Junior Forester positions. Trying to get a years experience (and cash) in since I can't get into school till 2017 now.
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Jan 31, 2016 09:44
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Cultural Imperial posted:You know how we can get European style towns and cities? Bring back feudalism. Make the church the primary tax collector. I dunno, churches are already getting into the condo racket 
UnfortunateSexFart fucked around with this message at 12:36 on Jan 31, 2016 |
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Jan 31, 2016 11:58
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So what city(s) are likely to become Canada's Detroit once the poo poo hits the fan?
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