News that the iconic Hudson’s Bay Company may close all of its stores under a restructuring agreement is a hard blow; the Hudson’s Bay Company has been Canada’s central, British colonizing presence since 1671. To say that every Canadian throughout history has somehow been touched by ‘the Bay’ during its history is an understatement, be it their elegant department stores, their overtly practical Northern Stores, their real estate holdings, their oil and gas department, their…. Let’s just say that ‘The Bay’ was big.

The way that we buy and sell goods is a very dynamic, always changing endeavour. Starting with open air markets, it came indoors to general stores, to department stores, to commercial strips, to shopping plazas, to climate controlled indoor shopping malls, to power centres – the way we buy and sell goods has gone through a lot. Architectural trappings aside, the purchasing of goods – shopping – became a social experience.

The 19^th Century brought about a middle class that was structured around a family with one wage earner who went off to work five, maybe six days a week. It left another family member at home to run domestic affairs. A hallmark of the late 19^th Century and through the 20^th Century has been the advent of labour saving devices. That person who stayed home to run domestic affairs suddenly had time – and money – on their hands. The purchasing of goods – retail – suddenly became a recreation endeavor, something to do with newfound spare time.  Social scientists gleaned over this marvelously, as it increased the standard of living!  The department store format came into being and catered expressly to this market.

Department stores themselves became attractions. One of my favourites, the Wannamaker Store in Philadelphia housed one of the world’s largest pipe organs and played organ recitals regularly throughout the day, to attract and entertain shoppers. And it had an enormous brass eagle, standing guard over the shoppers! Marshall Field’s in Chicago noted that there were no socially proper places for a lady to have lunch, so they introduced the Chestnut Room and their classic pot pies for this market.

At Christmas time – a major shopping event – ‘all stops were pulled’: decorations, choirs, Santa Claus…. The Louden Machinery Company leased ‘kiddie monorails’ suspended from ceiling that would transport kiddies overtop the toy departments in a thrilling amusement park ride. 

Shopping malls came into vogue, as the big department stores acted as anchors for an entire gaggle of complementing smaller stores. Shopping malls enhanced the retail social experience dramatically.  Indeed, the West Edmonton Mall in Edmonton had an entire amusement park with carousels, roller coasters, an enormous wave pool, a hockey rink and a lagoon with more submarines than the entire Royal Canadian Navy, plus more than eight hundred stores, all under one roof! Shopping became a social experience and an increasing pool of spare time and disposable income made this experience very popular; a neighbourhood centre. Architect Victor Gruen is credited with developing the shopping mall format. He foresaw the shopping mall as becoming the ‘town center’, as demonstrated in his Midtown Plaza, in Rochester New York. It too came with a kiddie monorail, a fountain, and an animated clock that would perform on queue every hour on the hour.

Alas, all good things come to an end.  Perhaps it was the cost of supporting this increasingly better standard of living, or perhaps simply to afford a mortgage on a house, but more and more, households were beginning to need two wage earners. The idea of attracting someone with spare time on their hands was a vanishing endeavour. Shopping became more of an acquisition of commodities than a social experience. Alas, enter the 21st Century shopping concept of ordering online – sight unseen – from a warehouse. Granted, major department store of the 20th century had large and successful catalogue shopping operations, they were soon phased out to bring shoppers into an enhanced social experience that a mail order catalogue couldn’t offer. That however, was a very 20th Century concept, we’ve moved into a 21^st Century society of a highly competitive, highly managed workforce with little spare time, or at least, different diversions than before.

Wannamaker’s in Philadelphia was acquired by Macy’s and has since been closed, despite it being one of the world’s largest department stores. Marshall Field’s was similarly bought by Macy’s and appears to be downsizing its operations. Midtown Plaza was closed and has since been demolished. And now we’re left with the West Edmonton Mall, which will see its only traditional mainline “anchor” tenant, the Hudson’s Bay Co. Department Store, close. Just like all the other mainline anchor tenants: Sears, Woodward’s, Eaton’s, closed before.

Driving into the office, I came across this warehouse that was a Simpsons Sears Clearance Center. The building had been painted during that era but since then, Simpsons Sears became Sears which eventually folded. The ghost of the Simpsons Sears sign, which was probably from the early to mid 1970s, still haunts.

“First we shape our buildings, and then they shape us” 

                      —  Sir Winston Churchill

            “……Motion is the aesthetic of modern man” 

                      —  Clifford Wiens

Maybe it was driving through a crowded parking lot, looking for a parking space.  In amidst the row of SUV’s there appeared to be an empty space, only to come upon it and discover that it’s simply a smaller car packed between the Escalades.  Or maybe it’s noticing the difference in scale between neighborhoods built at different decades; and that their scale varies directly with the size of their garages. Whether we want to acknowledge this or not, we’re designing our housing stock around our taste in automobiles.

            “First we build our cars, then build our communities around them”

                       — Darrel Babuk

The 1951 Ford, a Forward Thinking concept at the time.

Take the ’51 Ford as example.  In retrospect, it might seem to be something akin to a lunch bucket on wheels; yet in it’s day, it was a Ford’s first revolutionary design of the modern automotive era.  Revolutionary in more ways than one; as the embodiment of the GI Housing Bill and the Interstate Highway Act of a few years later, it conquered countless acres of former rural farmland and helped populate these territories with people and commercial strips.

Levittown – a 1950s tract community – was another Forward Thinking concept for its time.

In 1951, the sought after housing stock was a single family home of two, maybe three bedrooms with only one gathering space not related to food.  These houses were probably configured as two separate levels, one being built inside a roof attic space to conserve materials, thus price.  It allowed its occupants to spend more money on other things, like fancier cars…

1960s cars had smiles – ironically, this is the car our dentist drove!

Note that the roofline of this house creates the same sort of smile as did our dentist’s car.

Later on, by the late 1960s, it was commonplace to expect our cars and houses to be exuberantly flamboyant.  Houses had grown into sprawling ranches and split levels; despite experiments with swoopy rooflines, they still weren’t too large in floor area.  Instead, individual houses sat on large plots of land, requiring cars to ferry their occupants back and forth.  The idea of a two car family had just entered American lexicon, a two car garage proudly displayed to the street was a status symbol to behold.  Cars enveloped similarly swoopy masses of sheet metal, they were difficult to manouever through city street.  Chicago reverted many of its neighborhood streets to one way traffic, to accommodate these vehicles.

The freshness of sixties design got a bit tired, then mired in the seventies.  Maybe it was the energy crunch, or maybe it was by a series of laws that controlled, rather than encouraged design.  By the time the eighties came to be, a book by Jane Jacobs “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” came to be better accepted, and we sought ways to do more with less.  A few indulgences came in small packages.  Sudden interest in condominiums and townhouses were met by happy buyers in BMW 5 Series sedans.  Oddly, while we learned to drive more fuel efficient cars, we started to drive more cars, it really didn’t stem our consumption of resources. We rebuilt our cities, yet kept developing new suburbs. We simply found ways to use more resources. 

These days, we have McMansions and SUV’s of all sizes, though the family units that live inside the McMansions are smaller than what lived in the 50’s or 60’s tract homes. The McMansions lack design originality, though they boast rare and expensive finishes, like kitchens with granite countertops.  Didn’t the original marble cladding of the Amoco Building mine out one of Michelangelo’s historic marble quaries? Our freeways are constantly choked with traffic.  Our expectations have become supersized as we simply want more of everything – good design doesn’t really count, just that there be more of it! The car enveloped by a swoopy mass of sheet metal in the late 1960’s is no larger in floor area than a 21st century full size SUV, yet our SUV’s take up considerably more volume and weigh substantially more.  And about the original marble cladding of the Amoco Building – once it was removed due to damage, wasn’t it pulverized and used as roadbed gravel for an extension of the Stevenson Expressway?

It makes one wonder about the preponderance of human nature to simply go on autopilot without question:  where would we be now if during the fifties and sixties, we had stuck not to the large cars but rather to concepts like the original Austin Mini or Fiat 500; the concepts being produced in Detroit as Ramblers or Crossleys.  Would our cities be much more geographically compact, would we be using public transit more often, and would we be living our lives in public rather than in the cocoons of gated communities?

Would we have a different urban infrastructure if we had started to drive cars like this?

“How often I found where I should be going, only by setting out for somewhere else”

         —   Buckminster Fuller

Darrel G. Babuk, NCARB, MRAIC (retired) is the Founding Principal of Boreas Architecture & Civic Design, Inc,  an Alberta-based Architecture and Urban Design practice.

Successful streetscapes are defined by spaces between buildings. The spaces become successful places; streets where we live out our lives, nooks and crannies that create pleasant oasis, buildings that form backdrops and walls that give meter to time and space….all decidedly urban concepts.

A downtown Chicago streetscape

Let’s take the flipside to this thought and think of streetscapes that are defined by buildings between spaces.  Eye catching, exuberant buildings and identity signage set inside parking lots, or man made landscape that won’t detract from the eye catching, exuberant buildings and identity signage.  This is the essence of the suburban experience.

Art becomes life in this retail structure from the early 1970s.

The idea of negative, rather than positive space – or however you want to cast it – is something that Victor Gruen thought was America’s downfall, yet something that Robert Venturi has portrayed as a quality deserving of American pride.  Instead of abiding by the rules of being polite to our neighbours in context, we simply build as far away from our neighbours as possible, to be something individual.  One could even draw similarities between this design comparison and the way our society functions today.  Art becomes life.

Edward Ruscha’s bird’s eye view of parking lots

Let’s go a step further.  In the urban streetscape, one approaches places on foot, whereas in a suburban streetscape, one approaches a place while inside an automobile.  Between suburban buildings, places are populated by automobiles – in motion, or being stored.

Beat era guru Edward Ruscha looked at parking lots and ancillary landscaping much the same way that Andy Warhol looked at soup cans.  Testing this hypothesis, the elements of suburban streetscapes aren’t buildings or ancillary landscaping – let’s get down to business here, folks – it’s our cars.  despite the advent of “dress down working environments” and “casual Fridays”, we still devote time and effort to primping our automobiles.  Though we eat junk food, we would never fuel our cars with nothing but the best gasoline and motor oils.  We dress them up more than we do ourselves, quite often.

Mobility as architecture

The British movement ‘Archigram” recognized this concept of mobility as architecture well beyond our suburban bounds. they imagined buildings that could move to new settings if one was bored with the existing one. Still others envisioned our transportation as a type of clothing, an extension of our persona – our automobiles are every bit a part of our personal image as are our clothing.  More imaginatively, one could devise a set of clothes that become our environment and transportation, all in one.  Imagine a set of trousers that sprout wheels and take one to work on a busy freeway; what about jackets that double as jet packs and rocket one to another continent for an afternoon visit…or inflatable coveralls that provide the ideal, temperate indoor environment while visiting the arctic, the jungle, or outer space…Spacesuits are clothing that provide all necessary support for life, much like any other built environment.  But, are they architecture?

Back on earth, or at least the North American suburb, we need interesting parking lots to sustain a vibrant suburban streetscape, flamboyant buildings on their own just don’t cut the mustard.  Detroit’s “Big Three” did better when they recognized this, and designed cars every bit as exuberant as were suburban buildings.  However, gasoline was cheap and abundant, we could fuel this type of environment.  Now that automobile styling is boring, dull and gray; and that gasoline is reaching record prices, it’s time to rethink.

Suburban streetscapes are left with highly individual buildings with parking lots.  Parking lots have become prime real estate, they tend to have supported commercially successful buildings whose only direction to expand are into their parking lots.  Suddenly, these exuberant buildings that stood alone in their flamboyance are cheek and jowl with other, dissimilarly exuberant buildings.  And they’re still approached by automobiles.

Understanding a suburban streetscape, and retrofitting it for the new century is one of our greatest challenges.

Darrel G. Babuk, NCARB, MRAIC (retired) is the Founding Principal of Boreas Architecture & Civic Design, Inc,  an Alberta based Architecture and Urban Design practice.

Infills

While this was written twenty years ago from a very Chicago perspective, it still seems fresh today, applying to many cities:

Much has been said about issues concerning development on the periphery of Chicagoland.  Sprawl – even the name sounds like a lethargic beast.  I’ve oft wondered what sort of commute times we’ve created for folks living in the new tracts.  Certainly, sprawl stands to diminish the quality of life by forcing one to spend lengthening times in daily commutes, by lessening the supply of agricultural land, and by investing enormous public funds into new infrastructure projects that serve the far flung reaches.

The notion of increasing density in existing communities often evokes arguments of crowding and increasing crime.  Yet, many older communities in the Chicago area historically have been more populous, more dense and seemingly more liveable. When the city of Chicago hit its population zenith in the 1950’s, many would argue that it was more livable then, more liveable than in the intervening time until today.  While Chicago experienced population growth in recent years, it has yet to recover back to this population level. Some may observe that the inner city has become a more attractive place to live with the increase in population.  Not only is it desirable to live closer to work and cultural centres, density hits on a specific social quality that Chicagoans have been known for.  We like to schmooze.  And one may say that density assists one’s ability to conduct schmoozing.

By increasing density in established communities with well respected ‘urban images’ and reputations, wanton urban renewal would simply destroy the very qualities that are desirable.  Infill development, respectful of existing infrastructure, may be designed in such a way to maintain those very qualities that are desirable in an existing community.  For a municipality, carefully thought infill may bolster local tax bases to fund services.

Infill development may take different shapes and sizes, and may seek many different settings to accomplish its goal.  The former Dearborn Station yards are an excellent example of large scale infill redevelopment of existing land that triggered a renaissance of the Near South Side. In Bucktown, the abandoned “Bloomingdale Line” became a pocket neighbourhood providing housing and commercial activities.  One only needs to gaze at the large tracts of vacant land seen from the CTA Green Line to envision future potential.

Yet, these examples are all larger scaled, and sought to bring about change to existing urban context.  What about established communities looking for densification strategies? Beyond “downtown densification’ and ‘transportation corridor development’ – both excellent strategies – imagination provides a wealth of solutions done caringly with an existing context so as to not disrupt scale and urban image.

One easy example of small scale, yet effective densification is the potential of the coach house, sometimes called the laneway house – the ‘granny flat’.  When done properly to respect overall site coverage and setbacks from property lines and other buildings to allow sunlight and open space, the notion of an apartment over a garage on a residential alley addresses many issues.  The overall site coverage increases minimally, a neighbourhood known for open spaces and gardens can still maintain that image.  The notion of people living off of alleys helps to police those spaces by giving a full time human presence.  The notion of smaller living units addresses affordability.  As for what this may look like, one only needs to conjure images of quaint London-style ‘mews’ of flats located off of the main street on lanes.

A modern coach house on a back alley                      

Housing on a mews in London

London-style ‘mews’ provide a further example of creative densification when applied to other neighbourhoods.  Think of the sort of artist studios that could be created along alleys.  The idea of a community having its own ‘Gallery Walk’ along its backside has an attraction.  Growing from this, some small commercial galleries could blossom along alleys.  Home offices could flourish, with addresses based on “Randolph Lane” rather than “Randolph Street”.

Notice that I did not endorse ‘skinny houses’, the practice of demolishing an existing house in a stable, established neighborhood only to subdivide the lot and build two, radically overscaled houses. I’m not about to endorse skinny houses, either.

I wonder….what if a neighbourhood put very small theatres and cinemas along its alleys, and used this to generate festivals for the locals…

Urban infills offer countless creative solutions to urban problems.

Darrel G. Babuk, NCARB, MRAIC (retired) is the Founding Principal of Boreas Architecture & Civic Design, Inc,  an Albert-based Architecture and Urban Design practice.

Time was, driving was a fun recreation.  From a casual Sunday excursion, to a cross country trip, to something energetic like Nascar racing, the experience generated by being catapulted through ever changing scenery was exciting.

A happy way to commute…

Automotive design enhanced the experience. Swooping masses of sheet metal clad in bright colours, outlined in shiny chrome, housed behemoth power plants and sumptuous interiors swathed in deluxe upholstery.

It was a see and be seen experience.  People actually drove with their windows down, weather permitting.  That morning commute into work just didn’t seem half bad.

But then, the morning commute was far shorter then than it may be now.  The US Census Bureau has since started to measure the number of “extreme commuters” who spend more than 90 minutes a trip commuting from home to work.  Regardless how fanciful one’s wheels may be, that much time down the same roads in the same traffic day in and day out can’t help but become dreary.

And dreary may best describe current automotive design. Body styles are generated by current trends in wind tunnel testing; cars are distinguishable only by slight nuances in wrinkles or folds along sheet metal. Grey – or rather, silver – is a popular colour. Interiors offer much the same choice, perhaps with a cloth or leather option; higher priced cars sport two toned colour schemes. 

Given parameters, powerplants have improved but that may signal the difference in concept. New powerplants exhibit engineering prowess, as does the styling. Styling – for the sake of styling – played a larger role when the morning commute was still fun.

Imagine the morning commute in this !

Still doesn’t explain why we started living ninety minutes away.

Darrel G. Babuk, NCARB, MRAIC (retired) is the Founding Principal of Boreas Architecture & Civic Design, Inc,  an Alberta-based Architecture and Urban Design practice.

It was an odd conversation over a backyard barbeque.  One side started talking about the increasing waistlines of various people.  The other side was talking about my Mini, and their new-found interest in Microcars.  Then – like a flyswatter hitting a mosquito – the two groups found out about each other.  A sort of reverse serendipity in a way.

My Mini in a suburban parade

For some years, I’ve been promoting the virtues of smaller houses, and expounding on my theory of how we’ve designed our neighborhoods around cars, and that the size of our cars has directly influenced the size of our houses. 

A building with people, built to the scale of jetliners

Think of an airport terminal, and how gates need to be spaced far enough apart to allow adequate space between airplanes, and enough internal space to accommodate enplaning and deplaning passengers and supporting areas.  Same kind of idea. 

1957 Chrysler 300

There is fresh, new interest in smaller houses, The most notable example of interest in market driven, small houses – like the line of Katrina Cottages marketed by Lowe’s Home Centers after Hurricane Katrina, or the multitude of prefabricated “tiny homes”  available on the market today.

1972 Fiat 500L “Cinquecento”

While this change was driven for reasons other than our taste in automobiles, it’s ironic that Chrysler – formerly known for very large cars – is now part of Fiat, which is known for very small cars. 

Land uses and traffic along the Chicago River

During the age of canal building, substantial monetary capital was invested into building canals.  Land along the canals – a manmade feature – became very valuable because of the uses one could put beside this new transportation artery.  This concept was magnified with the advent of railroads and became known as “frontage”.  Build the largest building possible on the smallest of frontage, for economy and efficiency’s sake.  This concept was extended to a hierarchy of roadways, and gave rise to “skyscrapers”.  Not every land use wants to be in a neighbourhood of tall, closely built buildings.  Dwellings – where people live – need sunlight, and a connection to land. 

The type of transportation used between places defines the physical area covered by a neighbourhood of places. 

A “mews” or backstreet, in London

Walking between places usually led to places located within a half mile or a kilometer of each other.  These neighbourhoods are more apt to have a variety of services on a smaller scale, built closer together.  Think of how many groceries one could carry while walking – this may define how many grocery stores one could find within the radius, while that radius area needs a certain population density to support these stores. At one point in history, to support a walkable economy, grocery type items were sold in “general stores” – increasing product lines to allow financial viability.  And likewise, to maintain this density, dwellings were closer together.  In Chicago, we have “bookend” neighbourhoods – blocks of single family houses that are terminated with walk up flats.

An unknown regional mall in an unknown city

Personal, mechanized transportation – the automobile – exaggerated this notion to an extreme; in doing so, this scale of neighbourhood – the scale of the automobile – dedicated the most amount of land necessary for transportation uses while increasing the area of our neighbourhoods.  One won’t bat an eyebrow to travel more than a mile to shop at a store where one could purchase an entire week’s worth of groceries.  In dispersing the apparent neighbourhood so sparsely over such a great area, the social fabric unwinds.  People become anonymous.  Driving everywhere cuts down on exercise opportunities, just as a loose urban fabric doesn’t seem to care as much about physical appearances – like obesity.

Light rail transit on sodded trackbeds in Grenoble, France

The perfect compromise seems to be public transit – capable of carrying large numbers of people varying distances.

The coming of smaller cars to North America may create denser, closer knit neighbourhoods.  Anyone who has spent any amount of distance in my Mini will attest to its lack of comfort, one shies away from travelling far. One would tend ot patronize closer services, or use transit.  The smaller dimensions may give way to smaller streets.  Chicago neighbourhoods were a mass of two way streets until cars came to be so large that only one drive aisle – not two – could fit on a roadway.  Yet, one still needs streets to allow travel between places.  Movement between places is an important concept in this era. 

The small house movement is an interesting one. A sustainable community needs a critical mass – a density that will allow a certain number of people to be within a certain distance of employment, cultural and shopping services to support the same.  A hallmark of land planning since the industrial age has been the importance of movement between places, manifesting itself in transportation.

Federal Hill, Baltimore. These houses measure sixteen feet (about five metres) wide

And certainly, smaller houses with smaller footprints could use far less land than McMansions.  Smaller houses could be placed together in relatively dense groupings and achieve the same sort of – whatever openess – one may achieve in low density, large footprint dwelling configuration.

An interesting study could be the ratio of transportation right of way area per capita of a post war suburb vs. a pre war neighbourhood to find efficient and effective land use.  Further, my gut feeling is that some of the more effective land uses may be more livable neighbourhoods.

Darrel G. Babuk, NCARB, MRAIC (retired) is the Founding Principal of Boreas Architecture & Civic Design, Inc,  an Alberta-based Architecture and Urban Design practice.

Some time ago, an article by Paul Kaihla in BUSINESS2.0 Magazine brought me to think about the parking lot as a prolific, yet endangered landscape feature of the post war era.

The article, entitled The Next Real Estate Boom (November 1, 2005) spoke of a coming wave of expansion, growth and redevelopment of American cities, of a scale not seen since the decade immediately following the Second World War, to accommodate 70 million more people.  It congealed several concepts that aren’t terribly out of the realm of imagination – “megapolitans” infilling the areas between cities, such as one urban unit consisting of Seattle and Portland; in a way, not unlike how Baltimore / Washington are being reported as a single census unit today.  It predicted that existing neighbourhoods may be infilled, perhaps densified, to allow for energy conservation. In my estimation, this type of growth would require a similar movement to preserve agricultural lands, in order to feed the additional hordes of people. A quirky snippet from the article is what caught my eye, concerning the redevelopment potential of surface parking lots in American cities.

            “They paved paradise / And put up a parking lot
            With a pink hotel, a boutique / And a swinging hot spot
            Don’t it always seem to go
            That you don’t know what you’ve got ’till it’s gone
            They paved paradise / And put a parking lot”

                      —  Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi

Parking lots have been somewhat of a fascination, if not an icon of post war growth.  More people became mobile, we came to expect large, convenient surface areas where we could park our flamboyantly styled yacht of sheet metal, as if to put of symbol of status on display for all to see while we engaged in some activity of commerce within close walking distance.  Like them or not, parking lots were an important component to the generation of gross national product. While many times they were our bane – like when Life Magazine declared a hillside completely paved in asphalt as being one of the worst urban eyesores of the year; they achieved an undercurrent of recognition and appreciation in other, equally artistic circles.

“The Spike” car sculpture that graced the parking lot of the Cermak Shopping Plaza has since been demolished.

“Thirty Four Los Angeles Parking Lots” by Beat Era guru Edward Ruscha elevated expanses of empty pavement to high art – a quite random pattern of oil spots that were actually well organized. One winner of the 1978 “McDonald’s of the Future” design competition if the American Institute of Architecture Students realized their design was to place a building seen behind a backdrop of cars in a parking lot, so that parked cars were arranged with the same care and fashion as one would expect to see soup cans placed in a supermarket display.  Even the Cermak Shopping Plaza in Berwyn, Illinois turned a parking lot into a glamorous art gallery.

Quite properly, some may begin to wonder just what has happened to our sense of art, if we see surface parking lots as being our highpoint of artistic expression.

True, the sort of vehicles we park these days all tend to look like everyone else’s, even automotive interiors are rarely offered in vibrant colours like they once were. It’s imaginable that the want to display our vehicle has gone by the wayside. Perhaps lengthening commutes have made driving more drudgery than pleasure, we’re not as attached to our automobiles as we once were. Indeed, automobiles have become very expensive, out of the financial range of many. And perhaps time has come to rethink the parking lot. The Chicago area has several examples of what can be done if a portion of the parking lot is developed into a parking garage that can hold at least as many vehicles as once parked on the surface, and the remainder of the site redeveloped as something else. The parking lot’s sense of scale is what’s most intriguing; by tract standards, they are relatively small, lending themselves to development by smaller, private groups, much the same entrepreneurial spirit that saw to their initial development.  What’s more, parking lots are usually well located, their location is handy to urban amenities.

Joni Mitchell’s lyrics bring to mind a quote King Charles once made about London tabloid newspaper; how they took perfectly wonderful wooded forests, and cut down all the trees to process into pulp newsprint that in turn became Fleet Street tabloids that printed stories of dubious gossip.  In our case, the original landscape that was turned into surface parking lots may not be salvageable.  However, the integration of parking lots into worthwhile neighbourhoods is akin to turning the proverbial sow’s ear into a silk purse.

Darrel G. Babuk, NCARB, MRAIC (retired) is the Founding Principal of Boreas Architecture & Civic Design, Inc,  an Alberta-based Architecture and Urban Design practice.