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Trying to create suburban downtowns: harder than it looks

May 11th, 2011 · 37 Comments

The suburbs are the most interesting places to watch these days. They’re where people are trying to create new forms of urban life — not the bedroom suburbs of yore, not the traditional cities of the past either. Something new, which no one quite knows what it will be.

My story in the Globe this week looks at how they’re trying to create new downtowns, often with not even so much as a historic old town centre to build from but just out of whole cloth. That prompts the question of, what is a downtown? What makes it work? What are all the pieces you need?

At the moment, too many of them consist of a few large towers or civic buildings next to a transit station and a mall. But they’re all at work trying to figure out how to fill in from there with smaller streets, more mid-rise buildings, more of the kind of variety that older towns naturally produce, where you can have an office building next to some dilapidated one-story building with a tattoo shop next to a historic old bank next to a cool new bar at the bottom of a condo tower.

Surrey and Mississauga in particular are pushing hard to transform themselves, in a time frame as short as two decades they’re hoping.

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