When I moved out of residence as a University of Guelph student, I lived in a shared house downtown and experienced the joy of discovering a city on foot and feeling like an adult for the first time. I’ll always harbour a love for Guelph and an interest in the vitality of its communities.
Downtown Guelph features some of my favourite planning for a city of its size, through a combination of original design decisions and modern renovations. For all the nuisance that the construction posed, seeing families gather at city hall for a splash or skate shows that when you create great public space, people will use it. Likewise, the new transit hub is sensible, efficient and an eventual boon for nearby retail sites. However, I believe many of the historic residential areas surrounding downtown could benefit from increased mixed use. While the few corner stores are a great start, getting simple groceries can be quite onerous without a car. Live-work units (what we call properties such as storefronts with an upstairs apartment) are essential, providing affordable housing and commercial real estate while contributing to safer, livelier streets. These transformations take time, but become the cornerstone of walkable cities.
Beyond downtown, I want to touch on a high-potential area that I find exemplifies much of the development and redevelopment that we can expect in the creation of better places. First, it’s important to pause and recalibrate community scale in our minds. Consider Toronto, a massive city composed of individual little regions with their own cores, peripheries and personalities. Similarly, I think that Guelph has some distinct areas that should focus on becoming complete communities. When it comes to sense of place and integration between downtown and suburban Guelph, I foresee a future of interconnected nodes.
For example, passing through the Clairfields area on south Gordon, I find myself wondering what it could look like in 50 years. Developers seem to have attempted a small-town aesthetic, with features like a clock tower and architecture that vaguely hints at ‘main street.’ What if the community got serious about the small-town objective? Imagine if Clairfields became a small-town node, connected to other Guelph nodes (like the university, Kortright, downtown) by rapid transit? Achieving that first requires that we demand our suburban communities become livable, vibrant, mixed-use places. Right now, Clairfields has diverse land uses, but they’re separated by a highway, oceans of parking and vacant lots. Reorienting Clairfields for the safety and enjoyment of pedestrians, cyclists and transit users, as well as motorists, would add authenticity to that small-town approach. This means making trips short and pleasant for people who are experiencing them on the ground.
All over North America, this small-town approach called New Urbanism is being used as a form of suburban redesign. Under its guidance, dead shopping malls have metamorphosed into mixed-use town centres; automobile-dependent developments have transformed into walkable neighbourhoods.
Of course, Clairfields does not have a dead shopping mall beckoning reinvestment. Transforming suburbs would be motivated by the dream of a better Guelph, where people are happy and healthy and the local economy thrives. The process begins when we start talking with our neighbours and elected representatives about how our communities will stand the test of time and rising energy prices. So make it a conversation at the next backyard BBQ – how can we improve the quality of life and general value of our neighbourhoods?
Gracen Johnson is about to release an ebook at gracenjohnson.com called The Layperson’s Guide to Suburban Transition.