Beyond hard social truths and common perceptions, Highfield Park-Pinecrest and Clayton Park West share a number of social and spatial qualities. Both transformed empty fields, wetlands and forest to under-serviced, high-density housing clusters in less than a decade; more than 75% of private units are found in apartment buildings, and approximately 85% of residents in Highfield Park- Pinecrest and 75% in Clayton Park West rent their dwelling. Situated between detached, single-family housing communities, major highway interchanges and industrial parks, both are comprised of mostly four-storey horizontal walk-up apartment blocks with generous setbacks, surrounded by fields of asphalt. Often clustered in groups of two or three, buildings show little relationship to the street (in both cases a highway connector) or to one another. Cul-de-sacs and courtyard entrances significantly increase distances between building entrances, sidewalks and bus stops. Residential parcel size is scaled up from 2000 square foot townhouse plots to the outer edges where 90,000 square feet (more than two acres) is the norm. For non-residents, all roads seem to lead nowhere. The 1964 City of Dartmouth Urban Renewal Study praised the new development of multi-unit housing on ‘the recent finished loop streets such as Cedar Court and Pinecrest Drive’, precursors to Highfield Park, and encouraged the development of the adjacent lands using more ‘cul-de-sacs or loop streets, running
off the main grid’. 3 And this is exactly what occurred in Highfield Park-Pinecrest, re-occurred 20 years later in Clayton Park West, and is a trend still evident today. house - home - habitat Stripped down to all but the most fundamental features, this condition represents the ‘dirty real’ in urbanism – the seemingly unpreventable degradation of the urban fringe into nothing more than asphalt fields and uninspiring structures. These banal places are often ignored, yet they represent what to many people is a familiar urban context. For Liane Lefaivre, an architect and scholar credited with first translating the concept for use in architecture and urbanism discourse, dirty realism is precisely what we see and experience along such industrial-urban edges, where big infrastructure dominates the landscape and where ‘reality is sensed as harsher’. 4 As the antithesis of everyday or new urbanism, dirty realism is evident in the fact that many of us actually inhabit such hostile environments.These housing clusters suggest temporality – a place to meet an immediate demand for housing, but not having what is needed to build desirable neighbourhoods. This separation of house, home and habitat, rarely as sharp as it is at these edges, is reflected in a quality of place that has more in common with the temporary camp than of the neighbourhood that one would call home.
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