Big, successful cities can’t survive on twee Jane Jacobs–style neighbourhood preservation alone.
That’s the essential message in Perfect City, by the prominent Toronto planner Joe Berridge, whose work with the increasingly controversial Sidewalk Labs, a project of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, exemplifies his preference for the yin of city building over the yang of lovely little urban villages. The yin, at least as he views it, is the big exoskeleton that cities need as the foundation for those well-designed residential streets and shopping districts: the highways, the transit, the airports, the financial districts, the big master plans, the library networks, and more. In Berridge’s assessment, every great metropolis needs not just a Jane Jacobs but also a Robert Moses. Actually, Moses first and then Jacobs later.
Moses, who mowed down neighbourhoods in New York City to build its freeways in the 1950s and ’60s, is often...
Frances Bula has covered Vancouver city politics and development for the last thirty years. Her reporting regularly appears in BCBusiness and the Globe and Mail.
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