In advocating for low density living, people often contrast their peaceful suburbs and quiet small
towns with the crowds and chaos of “downtown”, especially if they live close to a big city with a
major central business district that’s a regional destination. In this video we want to propose that
people from outside of cities tend to have a skewed perception of urban living and density
because their experience with city life is mostly with “downtown” in the most literal sense.
When they go to the city, they’re commuting to a job in the financial district or they’re going
to an event at a downtown stadium or convention centre, typically with lots of other suburbanites
and out-of-towners. They’re generally not visiting the countless dense residential neighbourhoods
outside of downtown where most urbanites actually live and spend most of their time.
The disproportionate amount of space taken by the central business district in people's
perception of city life is something we’ve seen from other people but also experienced ourselves.
We both grew up well outside of cities and for quite a few years didn’t have
a great sense of what it was actually like to live in one.
When I first moved to Toronto for grad school I talked to someone about an apartment opportunity
in a house and I remember asking whether they could see the CN Tower from their street.
They found that funny because the CN Tower is just not something they think about on a daily basis
but the city’s downtown landmarks were such a big part of my perception of the city. After moving
to a different apartment nearby I realised just how much downtown actually feels like
a different world, even though it was still kind of cool that you could sometimes see the CN Tower.
This was near the University of Toronto, which is only 2 or 3 kilometres from downtown. There are
lots of other dense urban neighbourhoods further away that feel even more removed from downtown.
We actually understand the aversion that many people have to downtown living.
In both Toronto and Montreal, we often went downtown for things we needed or just to explore,
but it wouldn’t be our first choice for where to wake up every day. Many people enjoy the
unparalleled convenience but we find it can be overwhelming when you combine the residents,
commuters, tourists, and other visitors, including people coming to the central city just to be
loud and express their views, like protesters and preachers. There also usually isn’t as much quiet,
calming space immediately accessible, whether quiet streets or parks. Canadian downtowns
don’t have the associations with violence that many central cities in the U.S. have,
but property crime can be an issue and it’s probably not a coincidence that the year we
lived on the edge of downtown Toronto was the year one of our bikes got chopped up and stolen.
It might seem funny that the people behind an urbanism channel aren’t big proponents
of (quote-unquote) “downtown living” but the part of the city we’re talking about, with the biggest
concentration of residential density, office towers, and attractions for tourists and visitors,
is actually pretty small. That’s not what city life is for most people. You can live two or
three kilometres away, sometimes even less, and have an entirely different experience. The two
neighbourhoods we have the most experience with, the Annex and Harbord Village area in Toronto
and the Plateau in Montreal, are good examples but we could list dozens of other comparable
neighbourhoods, like the Golden Triangle in Ottawa and the West End in Vancouver. All of these areas
are quite dense, housing four to eight times more people than a typical suburban neighbourhood.
But to focus on the Plateau and the Annex, where we have the most experience living,
neither of these neighbourhoods felt crowded, noisy, and overwhelming in the way that the
two cities’ downtowns sometimes did. Both had lively commercial streets with bars,
restaurants, and shops, and these could definitely get busy at times, but they were also balanced out
by so many quiet residential streets that you could easily walk to or live on if you prefer.
In both neighbourhoods, we lived on residential streets two or three hundred metres from the
main commercial streets and basically did not encounter noise or commotion problems at all.
Well, until the Montreal Canadiens made it to the Stanley Cup Finals
and the entire city went absolutely crazy, and a nearby apartment got gutted from a fire.
Ok, that doesn’t sound great, but you have to give Montreal some leeway for hockey. Aside from that,
our experience living in these dense urban neighbourhoods was remarkably calm and peaceful,
no less so than in the suburbs. In some ways there was more peace and quiet because suburban areas
have their own noise issues, like large dogs, loud machinery like lawn mowers and leaf blowers,
and the bigger, noisier cars and trucks that are more common in the suburbs.
We’ve said that we prefer the environment of a dense residential neighbourhood over downtown,
which raises the question of whether that’s a good reason to block new
development in these neighbourhoods to cap density and avoid becoming
downtown. The Annex in Toronto is always in the news trying to block development.
Is that legitimate? They’ll note that they’re already fairly dense, which is true,
at least by suburban standards, but they have a very long way to go before they become downtown,
and they’re less dense than the Montreal neighbourhoods that we also find very calm.
On top of this, downtown is far more than just residential density. Unless you have the
big amenities that draw people in from all over the region in the middle of your neighbourhood,
like stadiums and shopping malls and office towers,
it’s pretty unlikely that you’ll end up with the same level of commotion. Even small-scale
amenities won’t do that — we had a cafe, bookstore, small grocery store, and music
conservatory in the middle of our residential neighbourhood in Montreal and it was pretty sweet.
Finally, a big part of the commotion of downtown is all the cars driving through — substantial
car traffic adds stress and commotion to a place like almost nothing else, especially
if there’s honking. If a neighbourhood minimizes that with traffic calming and pedestrian streets,
and they prioritize accessibility through walking, cycling, and transit instead,
they can house a lot more people while still providing a calm and relaxing environment.
Changes like that could be used to make actual downtown a more calming and relaxing place
even with large numbers of people, although that’s a different video.
Obviously not everyone has the same preferences and tolerances as us.
Some people thrive in a bustling downtown environment and other people want nothing
more than to live in the middle of the woods far from anyone else. We just want to point out that a
lot of people from outside the city, including us at one point, don’t really know what it’s like to
live in a dense urban neighbourhood because their main experience with a bigger denser city is as a
visitor, maybe coming in on a crowded highway and having trouble finding parking, then going to the
downtown attractions at the same time as lots of other commuters, suburbanites, and visitors.
These things are part of city life, urbanites often go to these events too, but it’s just one
small slice of city life. Something really gets lost when we debate “downtown living” compared to
“suburban or small town living” because there’s a very wide range of possibilities in between.
Thanks for watching through to the end of the video. Don’t forget that dense living
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