Glad it's not just me that feels this way. Urban form and the street level environment is important, much, much more important than tall towers. Tall towers are okay if you already have solid built up urban form a la NYC, Toronto. Cities with empty lots need to concentrate on those first.
Calgary needs to fill up some of those lots with low and mid rise buildings. Edmonton's case is even worse because they have more empty lots that need to be filled, and are building 2 or 3 really tall buildings when what they really need is 20-30 low/mid rises buildings.
Add me to team urban form > urban height.
Calgary has made some remarkable progress over the past 15 or 20 years, but we had a big hole to dig out of as a result of our development history. Calgary is too young of a city to have a much of a stock of mid-rise/row-house developments popular in big North American cities pre-1930s (i.e. Montreal, New York, Toronto etc.), while experience disproportionately rapid growth once the automotive age was at full power, destroying much of the good urban form to replace with auto-oriented offices, arterial roads and in many cases just parking lots. Combined with a healthy dose of well meaning, but foolhardy mega-project zeal (i.e. Olympics/Stampede Park's destruction of Victoria Park, the Municipal Building's assisting destruction of East Village), the little bit of good urban form neighbourhoods that we did have was aggressively gutted. Thousands upon thousands of units of inner city, mid-density housing had been lost by the late 90s - mid 2000s when the return-to-the-city movement started to slow the all-powerful, car-orientated development machine.
The change since the lowest point has been remarkable. Mission and Sunnyside/Hillhurst have really picked up steam as major urban enclaves, Bridgeland's transition of the old hospital site added thousands of new residents, Marda Loop/Garrison Woods created an urban enclave out of almost nothing to start from in only 15 years. Urban nodes are beginning to take root further afield in places like Renfrew, along Centre Street, Killarney and others. Everywhere infill is redeveloping neighbourhoods - not always affordably, but typically at higher density and with more housing variety.
Development economics being what they are, I understand why towers are popular. We simply are not great at allowing mid-range densities in most places. But if I could, I would take those two Guardian Towers, tip them over and distribute those ~600 ish units on 4 block of 4-8 storey walk-ups in Vic Park rather than half a block like it is. Or even better, I would go back in time and not allow the quasi-state funded destruction of Victoria Park in the first place so we would already have another Mission-style hood.
Perhaps in a more relevant example for this particular thread, I like Parkside for it's range of heights, decent podium units and mid-rise qualities much more than if it had just been two mega-towers with the same number of units.
