The Importance of Complete Neighbourhoods

Kim Naqvi

October 10, 2024

Kamloops identified complete neighbourhoods as its first community value in its 2018 Official Community Plan (KAMPLAN), embedding their development in goals and policies. The Kamloops Food Policy Council (KFPC) highlights the importance of green spaces in complete neighbourhoods for their material and cultural “ecosystem services” and their urban agricultural potential. Creating compact, walkable and bikeable neighbourhoods with good public transit and diverse functions needn’t be at the expense of natural environments for recreation, natural processes, and personal and communal gardening.

Complete neighbourhoods “incorporate places for people to live, work, shop, learn, play, and thrive. Complete neighbourhoods provide a diversity of housing choices, as well as safe and convenient access to commercial amenities (including places of employment), community gathering places, and parks and recreational facilities via active transportation routes and public transit” (City of Kamloops, 2018: H-4). The KFPC emphasizes two additional dimensions: 1) generous and integrated green space for recreation, natural processes, and gardens, and 2) incorporating ecosystem services into every aspect of a neighbourhood.

Ecosystem systems include both natural and cultural dimensions. These are 1) providing resources (e.g., fresher air, shade, sound barriers, productive trees and gardens), 2) regulating natural functions, such as heat, water cycling, and nutrient cycling, 3) cultural resources, such as recreation, meaningful places, such as sacred spaces, and 4) supporting functions such as soil formation, pollination, and migration between ecosystems (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005). Thoughtfully incorporating green space guided by ecosystem service concepts will help address both the growing need to manage escalating climate related heat, fire, and flood incidents, and complex needs to combine greater compactness with green and biodiverse landscapes within and between neighbourhoods. To illustrate this potential, several case studies are introduced.

Conflicts do arise when promoting compactness and accessibility in existing neighbourhoods, including concerns over lost trees, green space, sunlight, privacy, and community identity. Rather than dismissing this as NIMBYism (“not in my backyard”), we can acknowledge people’s legitimate concerns, and focus on existing options and a need for more creative and sensitive designers and builders. The cheap, profitable, ugly, light-blocking, and community-killing five-over-one (five floors, one door) apartment-style building is too easy, too tempting, and far too prevalent. It increases density, but not amenity or community, as empty commercial spaces attest. Instead, neighbourhoods which can replace unused or underused private green space with usable public space and affordable housing, without accessible green space is needed. Such options can be seen in some Missing-Middle forms in figure-1.

Figure 1. Missing Middle Housing Examples, City of Edmonton

The norm before the 1940s, complete neighbourhoods declined in two phases. First, 1940s zoning separated residences from work and services. Second, 1980s policies favoured profit-maximization over providing affordable housing, producing a “sprawl or tall” urban form. Eighty years later, there is both a housing crisis and an unmet desire for complete communities. Housing form alone is neither price nor community, but appropriate planning and guidelines can integrate missing middle housing into complete neighbourhood goals.

He also found a persistent conflict between strong desire for single family homes and strong desire for walkable communities This conflict, the KFPC suggests, can be addressed by appropriately harmonizing complete neighbourhoods, which inherently include diverse and affordable housing, with green space, productive land, and ecosystem services.

Because missing-middle housing, by definition, is not provided, estimating potential demand is complex. Arthur Nelson (2020), professor of Urban Planning and Real Estate Development, examined US real estate survey data and concluded that one third of households preferred attached units in walkable neighbourhoods and that over 60% of new housing would need to meet these criteria by 2050. He also found a persistent conflict between strong desire for single family homes and strong desire for walkable communities This conflict, the KFPC suggests, can be addressed by appropriately harmonizing complete neighbourhoods, which inherently include diverse and affordable housing, with green space, productive land, and ecosystem services.

Architect Daniel Parolek (2020), who coined the phrase “missing middle,” offers several case studies, two of which are examined next. The Cottages on Greene, in East Greenwich, Rhode Islands, holds 15 dwellings on 0.85 acres (0.34 hectares), about twice the density of most US suburbs (figure 2). Including single family, duplex, and town house styles, the form matches commonly desired housing forms; all look like free standing 1½ half story dwellings from the street. Dwellings face inward on community gardens and a green spine perpendicular to the street, incorporating the complex into the street facade. Twenty-four parking spaces provide 1.6 spots per dwelling. While parking provision is higher than ideal for complete neighbourhoods, it arguably allows a transition from car culture over time, when some of the parking can become housing.

Figure 2. Cottage style housing embedded into an existing neighbourhood

Rural infill pocket neighbourhood Kamloops’s extensive rural and agricultural land might not seem suitable for more compact development, but Cully Grove in Portland, Oregon shows potential (Parolek, 2020). Community-driven design led to infill housing in a semi-rural, low income neighbourhood, Cully Grove contains 16 units and communal green space within 1.87 acres (0.76 hectares) with guest house, community gardens, bike and storage sheds, and additional diverse-use green spaces (figure-3). While densities are similar to US suburban averages, they are higher than those for semi-rural neighbourhoods, while maintaining green space and agricultural potential, and creating communal space where rural isolation can become a problem.

A more urban “complete neighbourhood” is Toronto’s St. Lawrence, a rare example of post-war, mixed-use development. In a city-driven project, 44 acres of underused industrial land was developed into a neighbourhood of 3200 residences, supportive services, and businesses. Architecture reflects, but doesn’t imitate, its surroundings, and short blocks create numerous street corners to increase interaction, while connecting to surrounding neighbourhoods. Centred on a well-used linear park, St. Lawrence’s mix of market, public, non-profit, and co-operative housing ranges from townhouses to multi-story blocks. Multiple residence and business doors connect directly to the street. The historic St. Lawrence market adds to the dynamism, connecting people to each other and Toronto’s diverse food systems and cultures. Green spaces are either private yards, or public parks, ensuring that they remain someone’s responsibility. Builders had to include 25% rent-geared-to-income units; today, about 40% of housing is below market rate. Affordable housing is indistinguishable from other housing, fostering inclusion. St. Lawrence is immediately recognizable as a community from within and without, maintaining its distinct identity as glass and steel condominium high rises emerge around it.

Montreal’s Benny Farms highlights different elements of a complete neighbourhood emerging in a different setting. Here, subsidized veteran’s housing in a low-rise, medium-density suburb gradually became incorporated into the city. By the 1980s, declining conditions and prime location meant the site was threatened with redevelopment and its aging population threatened with relocation. Residents organized and pushed back, debating and negotiating the community’s redefinition amongst themselves and with authorities from 1991 to 2006. While clearly not an easy process, the community became an example of local organization, environmental conservation and reuse, sustainable water and energy use, and retained a significant portion of social housing. Central to the redesigned complex, its new community gardens create a social hub and express cultural diversity.

While built on “garden city” principles with extensive internal green space that can become unsafe and unmonitored, Benny Farm’s partial street orientation connected the community to the expanding city. A strong community identity, new goals of environmental sustainability, older goals of social sustainability, collaborative partners, and community control of the process allowed a post-war suburban form to adapt.

Figure 3

References:

Atelier d’histoire /History workshop (2015) Benny Farm from the Ground up, http://atelierhistoirendg.ca/, downloaded 9 October 2024.

Goldie, Imogen 2017 Benny Farm Redevelopment – Maintaining Community While Greening Affordable Housing, Sustainable Heritage Case Studies, Carleton University.

https://sustainableheritagecasestudies.ca/2017/12/08/renewing-social-housing/

Lewinburg, F. 2022 Creating Affordable Rental Housing: The Lessons of St. Lawrence, Plan Canada, Winter, 26-28.

Parolek, Daniel 2020 Missing Middle Housing – Thinking Big and Building Small to Respond to Today’s Housing Crisis, Washington: Island Press.

Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005. Ecosystems and Human Well-being: Synthesis. Island Press, Washington, DC

Nelson, Arthur C. 2020 Demographic Changes and Growing Preference fo Missing Middle Housing, in Parolek.

Why Toronto’s St. Lawrence neighbourhood is a model for affordable housing, THE MODERN CITY, Special to The Globe and Mail Published August 3, 2016

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/partners/advmoderncity2016/why-torontos-st-lawrence-neighbourhood-is-a-model-for-affordable-housing/article35872718/

Page updated

Report abuse