de - zoning | toronto ontario by drew sinclair
ownership urbanism property development agency
the secret life of property or why property matters in the contemporary city
In Toronto the effect of a continuing program of by-law zoning has led to a stagnant, dispersed urbanism that all but eliminates the potential of individuals, or small-holders, to affect the future evolution of urban form. The costs of this affront to the agency of real property owners are dispersed throughout the entire urban population, wealthy and poor, and apply to every site developed under the regulatory control of a code-enforcing organisation, a municipal or state government. Division and control of ‘real property’ is the single most important discursive subject in preparation for the future city. ‘Real property’, and the rights offered to its holders by the state, gives form to everything. For economist Hernando De Soto, the success of the entire Western world’s capitalist project relies on the secret life of properties. If the advantage of ‘real property’ owners from the collateral benefits of their holdings is constrained, so to is the potential growth of a city of property owners. It should be, and could be, the project of our cities to elicit the greatest value and benefit from the extent of its properties – both public and private. A solution: The two elements the traveller first captures in the big city are extra-human architecture and furious rhythm. geometry and anguish. —Federico Garcia Lorca Toronto, where zoning and bylaws are the primary governors of urban form: imagine Toronto characterised by a finite set of ‘interior limits’, a set of legible internal divisions known as lot lines or ‘real properties’. We know that land property, or ‘real property’, has a set of behaviours defined by law, code, municipal planning, zoning and a demand-oriented market, and we are, most frequently, led to believe that property boundaries and distinctions are an immoveable, permanent designation. Lost properties, setbacks and voids are held in place by a legal framework that restricts severance and architectural development. Now imagine the possibility for this city to expand within itself, appropriating lost and unused properties to invent new systems of address. Imagine this new ‘found’ material. Idiosyncrasies and frictions visible in the current property mat become newly codified in local rules at the scale of block and intersection, encouraging the severance of lots and the development of new sites. Imagine that within this city, all restrictions on the expansion, division, or contraction of property are removed. Everything becomes saleable, every surface a potential site for speculation and development. The rights of possession and exchange are applied to every tessellation and every metre of air. How do we begin to imagine the future of this city as it emerges from the present legal distinctions and distributions of property? Where can the urban core mine new sites and evolve new syntactic forms? Can we re-assert the individual agent into the future form of the city?
of the quantity of land or air owned by any given individual or corporation, a certain portion is given over to the state or municipality in the form of setbacks, height limitations, and code requirements. The quantity of private land held in trust by the state varies according to property location, zoning by-laws (although many cities are eliminating zoning altogether) and adjacent utility infrastructure. There was a time when an individual’s ability to profit from or occupy the full extent of their land holding was limited only by their wealth and ambition. The will of the smallholder or lot owner – their interest in subdivision, building enterprise, or agglomeration – was the catalyst for an evolving urban form. Over the past one-hundred and fifty years, the ability of the individual ‘real’ property owner to affect the form and direction of urban growth in the contemporary western city has diminished. This article will propose to return the individual owner to his former status as the principal agent of urban transformation. In Architecture of The City , Aldo Rossi proposes that the first subdivision of the agricultural plot into a feudal estate, predecessor to the urban enclave, has an enduring effect on contemporary urban form. Taking late nineteenth century Toronto as an example, the subdivision of neighbouring pastoral plots along Bathurst Street north of Eglinton Avenue created a patchwork of disparate surface roads, aligned perpendicular to Bathurst Street but not connected north and south. As the city evolved, connecting these primitive subdivision grids required the removal of houses and the introduction of utility corridors that stitched neighbouring plots into a contiguous urban fabric. For better or for worse, the aesthetic agency of the original estate owners (Do I make curved or straight roads?) is still legible in the contemporary city. This scenario describes pioneer developments on pristine, pre- urban terrain at the edge of the city. A similar process is seen in eighteenth century Amsterdam and nineteenth century Manchester where a locus of economic, industrial and mercantile activity led to massive densification in the inner city. Every metre of available ground surface was appropriated and built to its fullest extent with either transportation infrastructure or architectural development. Epidemics of the nineteenth century became the motivation for the administered depopulation of urban cores in Europe and North America throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Municipal codes, first in Germany, and then England, major European centres, San Francisco and eventually New York, cemented the will of the hygienists – those that believed the density of the urban core was a primary cause of the spread of pathogens and social ills. By the mid-twentieth century, both the beneficial qualities of municipal codes and their social paranoias were firmly entrenched within the operational faculties of municipal administrations worldwide. Code had replaced architecture and landscape as primary authors of urban form.
onsite 19: street, streets and lanes, the straight and narrow, wide and busy
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