the ‘Mansion on the Hill’ about which Bruce Springsteen sang so plaintively has become a mass phenomenon. Several conventional suburban neighbourhoods have been recently blasted into the top of rocky hills – a case of local skills facilitating a normative vision of dwelling that is at odds with the facts of the ground and far from any contemporary vision of ecological harmony. The city has numerous features that defy all expectations of both urban and natural form. Maki Avenue, an elite residential street, is a fascinating example of the confusion of nature and culture in Sudbury; built on a peninsula that extends almost a kilometre into Lake Nehpawan, it appears to be a perfectly ordinary suburban street, except that every house on both sides overlooks water. The Kingsway, where the banal melds with the fantastic, is another example. At first glance, it appears to be an absolutely typical North American commercial strip, more or less level and straight, and lined with fast-food restaurants and strip malls. Yet just behind the parking lots are walls of rock carved out by blasting. Car dealerships cluster in this channel of partly natural, partly fabricated space, defying their usual association with wide-open lots at the edge of town. Recently, a district of big-box retail stores was built on a stone plateau where Barry Downe Road intersects the Kingsway, demonstrating the power of new retail models to overcome the most forbidding technical impediments. Just beyond the parking lots of the New Sudbury Centre, trucks that transport ore and slurry rumble down Lasalle Blvd. - New Sudbury’s only through road.The ore trucks, which in the early eighties replaced a system of rail transport, put an immense physical burden on the street, but the Ontario Mining Act prevents the City of Greater Sudbury from levying against them the fee of 7.5 cents per tonne applied to aggregate moved over provincial roads. Plans have existed since at least 1992 to divert the truck traffic by extending the next rural road to the north, Maley Drive, but the city’s funds are tied up in maintaining the overworked boulevard.Transport fees could pay for the new road, and all would benefit. Rather than continuing to relying on mining companies and accepting that the agenda they set, Sudbury’s way forward may be through a form of decoupling. By detaching its interests from those of the mining companies, the city stands to gain greater control over its own affairs. Recently, two mining companies agreed, for the first time, to pay some of the cost of upgrading regional roads for their use, suggesting that a new solution to these structural problems might be emerging.
Decoupling Consumption and Production in New Sudbury: The scarcity of buildable land in Sudbury’s downtown, compounded by rapid urban growth after World War Two, lead to the development of a ‘New’ Sudbury about 5 km northeast of the original settlement, at the intersection of Lasalle Blvd. and Barry Downe Road (the border between two former family farms, the Barrys and the Downes).This district is anchored by the New Sudbury Centre, a shopping mall that opened in 1957. Founded initially as a strip mall by bus- line operator-turned-developer Paul Desmarais Sr., New Sudbury Centre was acquired, expanded, and enclosed about a decade later by Robert Campeau, who was to become the largest retail shopping developer in Canadian history. In 2005, responding once again to market demands, the mall was further restructured.Wal-Mart, Future Shop and other chain stores were spun off as freestanding buildings in the site’s vast parking lots.
Now that the city is emerging from the grip of mining, it is tempting to consider nickel Sudbury’s damnosa hereditas –the boon that eventually reveals itself as blight. For all the deficiency of its urban culture, Sudbury is graced with an unusually well- developed urban core. Though small, in part because half of the available contiguous area is occupied with rail yards, the core has a full matrix of streets and lanes, making it a significantly more advanced urban form than such main-street towns as Kitchener or Waterloo. Ultimately, however, the limits of Sudbury’s initial townsite led to the construction of New Sudbury after World War II and the resulting bifurcation of the city. A similar process is presently underway with the development of the South End, rendering the city ever more dispersed. Finding sufficient suitable land on which to build is a constant quest. The constraints on land available for development are, in part, the result of a peculiar and complex legislative history, but primarily are a result of the landscape which really provides no adequate place on which to build a city. Sudbury’s builders have always faced the Scylla of steep, rocky hills and the Charybdis of swamps and muskeg. Though poorly drained, the sparse areas of flat land took little effort to clear and thus developed as the city’s earliest neighbourhoods. The wealthy and powerful, however, favoured living on the shores of Sudbury’s lakes, even if it meant building private roads or locating on the city’s hilltops. In Sudbury, topography corresponds quite closely to class, but lately
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