Growth of exurban communities (the "exurbs")

[Urban Peasant]

As an erstwhile member of the American Planning Association (APA), I'd always take any expert's definition of walkable or dense with a grain of salt. There are simply too many definitions of everything in urban and regional planning and to categorize definitions is pretty much pigeonholing and it's not fair. I am not going to get into the argument over density because unlike physics, the definition of density in planning is qualitative and open to subjectivity. I'd never outright call Canadian cities ugly however and to say that Canadian cities are uglier than American cities is outright absurd. The ugliest, most run down city in Canada I've been to so far is St. John, NB and even St. John has its charms (at least its downtown is walkable and it has no far out exurbs to speak of) so it is not all bad. Sheesh, I know a few professors and die hard AICP/CIP certified enthusiasts might try to brainwash you into believing their vision of dense urban planning but there's no need to have a verbal fight over definitions.

[fusion2]

Originally Posted by Urban Peasant

As an erstwhile member of the American Planning Association (APA), I'd always take any expert's definition of walkable or dense with a grain of salt. There are simply too many definitions of everything in urban and regional planning and to categorize definitions is pretty much pigeonholing and it's not fair. I am not going to get into the argument over density because unlike physics, the definition of density in planning is qualitative and open to subjectivity. I'd never outright call Canadian cities ugly however and to say that Canadian cities are uglier than American cities is outright absurd. The ugliest, most run down city in Canada I've been to so far is St. John, NB and even St. John has its charms (at least its downtown is walkable and it has no far out exurbs to speak of) so it is not all bad. Sheesh, I know a few professors and die hard AICP/CIP certified enthusiasts might try to brainwash you into believing their vision of dense urban planning but there's no need to have a verbal fight over definitions.

This is a fair and good post. I do think Cox makes some valid points about built up urbanized areas however. Some of them are simply more dense than others. So I don't think his methodology should be dismissed wholesale. In some cases as well, it is really surprising that what you assume would be the more contiguously dense urban area actually is not. In spite of it having a dense core, once it gets outside of that core, the density can trail off quite considerably.

Density itself isn't necessarily the best form of urbanity (whatever that is), but I do think it has a role to play in urban planning. Do you build subways to satellite or adjacent cities in the built up urbanized area for example, or just have bus routes because they are largely sparsely populated.

If our planners in the GTA took note of where growth was happening for example in the latter part of the 20th century, there would be subway links from Toronto city to Brampton, Mississauga and Pickering. Now that our regional transportation mentality is no longer just Toronto, we are actually making progress.

Physics has its qualitative and subjective realms