We must make every effort to avoid returning to “business as usual.” We know that large numbers of people can continue to work from home, perhaps going to the office one or two days a week to allow for some face to face interaction with colleagues. As a result, many companies will have greatly reduced space requirements in buildings within the cities. All that now surplus space could be converted to other uses, including a mixture of residential and commercial uses. Removing restrictive zoning where necessary, we could create multi-use buildings where people live, work, and have access to stores or restaurants.
Cities were once like this before it was decided that zoning should be used to separate land uses – with housing in one area, retail in another, parkland elsewhere. Jane Jacobs brilliantly exposed the fallacy in this way of thinking with her landmark book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. In one of her more memorable observations, she noted that children were actually safer “playing in the streets,” under the watchful eye of parents who lived in apartments above the shops along those streets, than they would be on their own in some separate park area.
Where surplus structures are torn down, they should not be replaced but converted to open space and parkland – precious commodities in the core of our cities. Some of the open space should be used for community gardens and rooftops should also have gardens and greenery. Such coverage reduces heating costs in winter and air conditioning costs in summer. More importantly, it provides food “on the spot” not trucked in from a distance with associated pollution. When I first began staying at the Royal York over 40 years ago, it had a rooftop garden and the crops were harvested for use in the hotel restaurant. How sensible. I have noticed some increase in rooftop greenery in Toronto, but much more could be done.
At the moment an incredibly reactionary city by-law continues to thwart even modest gardening initiatives in Toronto. A homeowner replaced her neatly mowed front lawn with a natural area where “goldenrod nod under the weight of yellow blooms. A goldfinch visits thistles, collecting seeds. Monarch butterflies drink from black-eyed Susans and milkweeds….” Four days after the Toronto Mayor had proclaimed Flight of the Monarch Day (on August 22), calling for action to improve the local habitat for bees, birds, and butterflies, this homeowner was served notice that she was in violation of a city by-law due to “long grass and weeds.” How ironic.
Even if our governments have the insight to pursue new approaches to city living, they may still fall short unless local communities are prepared to support such changes – and Toronto provides another discouraging example. Creating more mixed use development is stymied by the fact that its official plan bars new development in 90% of the city (and restricts much of the area to single family homes). The remaining land often has older building and while they might be good candidates for conversion to multiple uses, many of them are located within heritage conservation districts. As a result, we have a recent situation in which preservationists are battling to protect such structures as a 1927 office building and a 1942 loft – neither possessing any features of historical architectural merit. [Lest the reader presume that I am simply unsympathetic to such structures, I am proud to say that my wife was a member of the initial Kingston Local Architectural Conservation Advisory Committee, the first such body in Ontario).
None of the beneficial changes will be easy. I appreciate that not all cities have public transit and that cycling to work may not be appealing in the middle of a typical Canadian winter. Promoting multiple use buildings and allowing increased density in areas that had long been limited to single family dwellings will doubtless trigger an outburst of NIMBYism. But it would be a great shame to suffer through this prolonged pandemic and the accompanying loss of lives, and then fail to seize the opportunities now available to us to create new and better models of city living.