Small Houses, Big Impact

Sam Wan was 10 years old when his father, an officer in the Royal Hong Kong Police Force, died in the line of duty. Reeling from his death, Wan’s family moved from their Tsim Sha Tsui apartment back to their ancestral village, Tai Po Tsai, where they owned a small tile-roofed house.

The year was 1966 and the village couldn’t have been more different from Kowloon. Situated on a small plateau beneath Razor Hill, about halfway between Clear Water Bay and Sai Kung Town, Tai Po Tsai was a centuries-old collection of ramshackle houses and farm fields. Almost everyone in the village was related to a common ancestor. Most of them made a modest living.

“The villagers were small-scale farmers — they grew rice and vegetables for sale in the market in Sai Kung,” recalls Wan. “Their income was not very good, so most of the male villagers went outside to work as sea crew members. Some went to England to work as labourers or in Chinese restaurants.”

But things were changing. Shaw Brothers had opened a film studio nearby in 1961 and many of the studio’s employees, including some future film stars, started renting houses in the village. Then, in 1972, a revolution: the government passed the Small House Policy, which gave each male villager and his descendants the right to build a 700 square foot house in the village, without having to pay a land premium or licence fee.

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A Day in Petaling Jaya

Kuala Lumpur is a city that settles into its streets like a comfortable pair of jeans. Hawker stalls and coffee shops spread out on the pavement, where a vast range of people — old, young, Indian, Malay, Chinese, immigrant — eat delicious food on folding tables and bright plastic stools.

But the irony is that, despite this vibrant, informal streetlife, Kuala Lumpur is a resolutely suburban place. Its neighbourhoods sprawl for miles, connected only tenuously by sidewalks and public transit. Without a car, the Klang Valley, as the whole metropolitan region is known, can be a very alienating place.

We didn’t have a car when we visited KL last September, but we did make an effort to venture out beyond the small city centre and into the suburbs beyond. One day, we took the train out to Petaling Jaya, a large suburb just west of the city proper, where we walked and took taxis to get a sense of what everyday life in the Malaysian capital is like.

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Elected by Ethnoburbia

Election results in Toronto in 2008 (top) and 2011 (bottom)
Red is Liberal, blue is Conservative, orange is NDP

Canada held its 41st federal election on Monday and the results have unleashed a seismic shift in the country’s political landscape. After two consecutive minority governments, the Conservatives have now won a majority. The left-wing NDP, a marginal party for much of its existence (it ran fifth for most of the 1990s), is now the Official Opposition.

Much attention is being paid to the massive surge of support for the NDP, especially in Quebec, where two decades of dominance by the Bloc fell victim to the “Orange Crush.” But Quebec is prone to political mood swings, and even as an NDP supporter, I’m sceptical that they will be able to maintain their current level of support until the next election. What I find especially remarkable about this election is the near-collapse of the Liberal Party — and the political rise of the ethnoburbs.

Take a look at electoral map of Greater Toronto. Red has given way to blue in virtually all of its fast-growing, immigrant-dominated, ethnically-diverse suburban areas. Losing these ridings is what pushed the Liberals to the edge of oblivion. “Of the 18 seats they gained in that region, 14 are more than 45 per cent immigrant, and most would not long ago have been considered un-winnable for the Conservatives,” notes the Globe and Mail.

In other words, the Canadian election was fought and won in ethnoburbia, the suburban immigrant enclaves first identified in 1997 by the geographer Wei Li. Ethnoburbs are socially and culturally self-contained, but unlike the urban ethnic enclaves of decades past, they are also prosperous and extensively connected to transnational networks. Their affluence and influence have given them enormous political leverage.

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Modernism Debauched

Villa Besnus in 1922 and 2010.
Photo compilation by Laurent David Ruamps

In 1922, Le Corbusier was hired by a man named George Besnus to build a new house in the Paris suburb of Vaucresson. It was the architect’s first chance to put the Purist ideals he had been toying with to practice: an architecture stripped of its excesses, made as clean, clear and efficient as possible. The house was meant as a statement, from the gracefully rounded edges of its balcony to the bathroom, which was placed in the centre of the building, allowing for an uninterrupted flow of interior space.

As you can see in the photo compilation above, though, Le Corbusier’s original design has been altered beyond recognition. Gone are the carefully-considered proportions, the clean contrast with scrubby surroundings. A four-sided roof replaced the original flat one and shops were built in the house’s front garden. It now looks like a slightly more modern version of the petit bourgeois houses that surround it, which is ironic, considering that Le Corbusier’s Modernist villa predates them by at least several years. In a way, knowing that those fuddy-duddy traditional houses were built during the emergence of Modernism makes you all the more sympathetic to Le Corbusier’s ideals. You can see very clearly what he was working against.

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Gargoyles, Horny PhDs & Spoiled Newspapers: an Afternoon at McGill

Ce mois de mars. Incroyable par sa fraicheur, déroutant par sa chaleur inopinée. Frébilité perceptible. Émotions intenses.

Je parcours le campus de l’Université McGill, en plein coeur du centre des affaires de Montréal, à la recherche d’une place apaisante où lire ce journal pris à la course aux portes du métro. J’adore ces petits endroits, le jardin généreux,  où il est possible de se promener sans empressement, avec pour seul objectif la détente et l’évasion.

McGill est un Éden, downtown Montreal, comprimé entre les tours cristallines des avenues et les broussailles en pente du Mont-Royal. Architecture variée. Élégance victorienne. Châtelets aux tourelles inusitées. La visite de l’université me donne toujours un petit frisson nostalgique, le regard en balade sur cette grisaille burinée d’abondantes formes fantaisistes.

Jeunes en rut. Ethnies au garde-à-vous. Le printemps s’annonce précoce, les regards sont alertes. Je me retire de la foule compacte et repère une place mi-ombre, d’où il est facilement possible de jouir de la scène agitée tout en respectant mon rôle de spectateur.

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Unbuilt Cities

The world is filled with mad dreams only partly come to life. In Eastern Europe, half-built skyscrapers that neither communist governments nor their free market-friendly successors could complete form ironic landmarks, totems of ideological overconfidence. In China’s Inner Mongolia province, authorities built a whole city to boost the country’s GDP — that no one could afford to live in. And vast, empty grids etch the surface of the United States: the hidden ruins of capitalism’s most spectacular failures.

Fly out of Fort Myers at dusk, catching the glint of the setting sun on the vast grid of streets stretching across the marshlands to its east and you may come to understand the level of ambition that led the airport you just left to be grandly styled “Southwest Florida International”. This is Lehigh Acres, quickly becoming America’s most notorious — if not its first — suburban ghost town.

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Quebec City Tour: Le Campanile

In the early 1980s, New Urbanism arose as a reaction to suburban sprawl, advocating a return to traditional city planning. The Campanile area, laid out in 1986, was built according to these ideas. This dense neighbourhood lies beyond the low-density suburbs of Sainte-Foy on the edge of Greater Quebec. Just when you think you’ve hit the wilderness, there it is.

New Urbanist principles dictate that neighbourhoods should have a discernable centre. The centre here is a “campanile,” or clock tower. Beneath the tower is a modern day take on an old market hall, containing a supermarket, a pharmacy, and a few specialty food stores. A typical main street stretches up from this clock tower and has managed to attract an interesting array of shops.

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Quebec City Tour: Suburbia

This is Sainte-Foy, one of Quebec City’s numerous suburbs, where I grew up. Yes, it could be anywhere in North America. 80% of the population in Greater Quebec lives in low-density burbs like this one, with anonymous detached homes on large grassy lots. This demographic majority has redefined the public image of Quebec City, a city often depicted as an enigmatic hotbed of conservatives by the press. The fact that these conservative values are largely relegated to the suburbs has been mapped through demographic research.

Though all Quebec suburbs may feel similarly insipid to some, there is a pecking order for locals. Sainte-Foy is near the top. People from Sainte-Foy look down on people from Charlesbourg, who in turn look down on people from Beauport, who look down on people from Duberger, who look down on people from Neuchatel and Loretteville, who look down on people from Val-Bélair, who look down on people from Vanier. Vanier is the bottom of the suburban barrel, home of the “Coupe Vanier” (AKA Coupe Longueuil AKA The Mullet). Only Cap-Rouge and Sillery are high enough on the pecking order to look down on Sainte-Foy.

But that’s just the north shore, which leaves out the “farmers” on the south shore. And there’s Quebec’s city centre, which looks down on all these suburbanites, their screaming populist politicians, and their “my power centre is bigger than your power centre” pecking order. So who’s the big fish now? Well, let’s not forget Montreal, who thinks the “gros village” of Quebec has its head up its ass for even thinking of itself as a city. But Montreal has “les 450” to reckon with, and that takes us into a whole new pecking order.

So who’s right?

Urbanism on the Big Screen in Two New Films

Director Gary Burns (Waydowntown) moves from fiction to documentary mode, teaming up with journalist Jim Brown to bring us Radiant City, a look at suburban sprawl from the point of view of a typical family living in a new tract development in Calgary, interspersed with commentary from the likes of Mark Kingwell and James Howard Kunstler. It is now playing in select cities (but not in Montreal, yet).

Toronto documentarian Gregory Greene, meanwhile, presents a sequel to his earlier End of Suburbia, with a look at how we move forward in an era of energy scarcity: Escape from Suburbia, which is due out in theatres soon. Interviewees include the Rocky Mountain Institute’s Amory Lovins, the Hon. Ed Schreyer, economist Jeremy Rifkin, and researcher/journalist Richard Heinberg, among others.

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This City Was Built on Urban Sprawl

It’s a snowless December night in Calgary and there’s just a hint of chill in the air as I wander down quiet streets, jacket open. I’m on my way to Broken City, a deliberately ramshackle bar on Eleventh Avenue where I’ve arranged to meet a handful of people from the Calgary Urban Initiative (CUI), an upstart group of young Calgarians concerned with the development of their city. There’s a first-year university student, a real estate agent, an art school slacker, even an orchestral musician who plays bass for the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra.

Then there’s Josh White, a master’s student in urban planning at Queen’s University and the group’s founder. “I started CUI to give more voice to citizens of Calgary who want to help push it in a more urban, diverse and cosmopolitan direction,” he explains to me. The Calgary that White envisions is one that is high-density, transit-friendly, pedestrian-oriented and architecturally sophisticated. His hometown, he says, “is at a critical juncture. Either Calgary will simply grow and become an unremarkable place, or it can develop into an extremely livable and interesting city.”

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The Sprawling City

Most Canadians are aware of Calgary’s status. For those who are not, it is quite simply booming in every sense of the word. Booming may even be an understatement, as very rarely has the city seen expansion at such epic proportions. The population grew by almost 36,000 in the past year, a number only surpassed during the 1980s boom years, and the city has been growing almost as rapidly for over a decade. The boom has brought both many positive and negative changes to the urban and social fabric of the city, including labour shortages, expanded cultural institutions, a growing homeless problem, large reinvestment in the inner city and countless other examples. What is most obvious, however, is the sprawl.

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Los Angeles vs. Orange County

When they think of Los Angeles, people outside Southern California probably think of urban sprawl and freeways. In fact, although historically low rise in its built form, Los Angeles is quite densely populated. Nevertheless, when I moved to Los Angeles from central Tokyo in 1999, my first impression of life here was that Los Angeles conformed to the stereotype: vast, suburban and not very cosmopolitan.

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