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JOHN BROWN is the editor of theslowhome.com and the founder of the Slow Home Movement. He is a registered architect, real estate broker and Professor of Architecture at the University of Calgary.
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Reinventing suburbia
Jun 05, 2008
By Phinjo Gombu of the Toronto Star
European-style piazzas for after-work mingling, towering office and residential towers stacked behind tightly packed street-friendly low-rise buildings, thousands of people streaming out of subways or headed home via a network of bicycle paths.
It's not downtown Toronto, or Manhattan or Paris, but how parts of suburban GTA communities such as Vaughan, Richmond Hill and Markham could look in 25 years.
The result of a sea change in planning principles and policies that promotes density instead of sprawl, the visioning exercise underway across the GTA is nothing less than the re-imagining of suburbia.
Propelling the change is a dawning realization that planners got it wrong the first time, yet change, after more than 50 years of unparalleled suburban growth in and around Toronto, doesn't come easy.
In some cities residents are already pushing back, fearful that the quiet suburban life they bought into will be swept aside. And developers – eager to recoup their investments now, not later – could try to move ahead with their own ad hoc plans.
Driving the change is the province's Places to Grow Act, an award-winning work-in-progress that aims to manage expansion and curtail sprawl by focusing growth in urban centres. Municipalities have to show how they'll conform by June 2009. Read the rest of the article.
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We believe that our homes and neighborhoods should be healthy, vibrant places that uplift the spirit and gracefully fit our needs. We call for an end to poor construction, bad design, misleading marketing, unfair lending practices and environmental neglect in the housing industry. We acknowledge our collective responsibility to create CLOSE, SIMPLE, LIGHT places to live that leave a positive legacy for future generations.
provides design focused information that homeowners can use to improve the quality of how and where they live. It takes its name from the slow food movement which arose as a reaction to the processed food industry. The sprawl of cookie cutter housing that surrounds us is like fast food - standardized, homogenous, and wasteful. It contributes to a too fast life that is bad for us, our cities, and the environment. In the same way that slow food raises awareness of the food we eat and how these choices affect our lives, Slow Home empowers you to take more control of your home and improve the quality of how you live while reducing your environmental impact and futureproofing the long term investment value of your home.
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