They make cool skyline photos, but the older I get the less impressed I am by tall skyscrapers. Actually the older I get the more convinced I am that smaller/midsize buildings are where it's at. Go to any great city in the world, and it's more like than not that it's the denser neighborhoods with 2-5 story buildings that are the most vibrant and interesting. Human-scale buildings for human-scale people!
To me those Toronto renderings look just as dystopian and inhumane as any cookie-cutter suburb. Rack 'em and stack 'em. Corbusier would be proud.
I used to be all about towers too when I was younger. The part that I missed when focusing on height alone and declaring more height = good thing, is the "why". Why do we have such tall buildings in the first place? Why is this a good thing?
Height is most usually on outcome of demand for space and the cost to build it - it's obviously expensive to build giant buildings, but in some cases demand for space is great enough to make it worth it.
What raises eyebrows is when you end up in situations like Toronto, when you have 60 storey forests of towers next to single family homes across the street. If demand was so great to support 80 storeys in a location, surely it would be sufficient to support wide swathes of the nearby neighbourhood being townhomes, smaller scale apartments and mid-rises. But that didn't happen, and suggests a broken mechanism in this supply/demand/cost process - the much discussed "missing middle" of housing and development.
Put another way, excessive height is sometimes a symptom of the process gone awry and leading to inefficient outcomes, not an inalienable good thing. In aggregate, this reduces choice to only two extremes - incredibly high density or unsustainably low density. This leads to all sorts of the problems Canadian cities face today - affordability, congestion, over and under supply of services, schools and amenities.
This is why I am very optimistic about Calgary's medium term future. While Toronto and Vancouver ended up in this tall or short paradigm, Calgary has had more favourable incremental infill policies when it mattered, specifically at about that 1 million - 2 million growth phase. This has prevented many neighbourhoods from locking down and restricting growth completely, while allowing for much of the rejuvenation of the inner city we have experienced in the past 20 years.
We have a long way to go and lots more work to do to keep it up - urban street and sidewalk design is a notable gap - but the momentum is there to develop more stuff at a more sustainable scale in many locations, reducing the pressure to have this total all-or-nothing, tall or short paradigm. Townhomes, row houses, apartment infills are more important than the pure height of the towers.
That said, towers are still important and will still occur. We need to ensure they are allowed and encouraged in more places. As we get bigger and more dynamic as a city, it's not just the immediate city centre that will have situations where they make sense. Perhaps we don't want or need them to be 80 storeys though. If we play our card right we can have a far denser and more livable city without that scale.
