Muller, Gary F., "Creating Successful Downtowns in the Suburbs: Subcentre Development in the Greater Toronto Area"

As the requirement for greater environmental awareness becomes evident, our attitudes toward the future form of suburban development must also change. We can no longer afford the luxury of extending inefficient subdivisions endlessly across the landscape, nor can we alter valuable ecosystems and needed agricultural lands. The intensification of the existing suburb must occur. Ile first step toward this goal must be the creation of a new centre, whereby suburban residents can access services in an energy efficient manner, while serving as a centre point for further intensification. The development of new centres in the suburbs is an efficient way to rationalize the use of existing infrastructure, while injecting a sense of urban and social belonging in those areas where they are not evident. Therefore, the physical form of these centres must be conducive to the needs of humans to interact within a social context, while providing for the biological requirements of safety, comfort and community.

New centres must promote energy efficient travel, and should promote pedestrian movement whenever possible. The built form of these areas must be conducive to a pleasurable pedestrian experience, must provide for access by many means of transport, must allow for development densities which permit the efficient provision of services and must reduce the sole emphasis on automobile transportation whenever possible. The automobile emphasis has compromised the integrity of the pedestrian environment, which can not be mitigated by landscaping or other cosmetic gestures. A general intensification of built form along a clearly identifiable hierarchy of streets will help to provide for the essential qualities of pedestrian orientation, convenience, multiplicity and activity.

In order to be successful, new centres must be meaningful and relevant in the context of the history of the suburb. A centre can not exist in a vacuum. A clearly identifiable, diverse and pre-established set of intense social, infrastructural and historical linkages must exist at the regional, local and immediate levels. Only then will the centre act as a gathering place for the meeting of a diverse group of individuals.

Atlantic Planners Institute

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This document was last modified on January 3, 2001.