Toronto continues to grow taller and denser in and around its core. With 99 new high-rise buildings under construction (second only to New York’s 179 among North American cities) and more than 11,000 new housing unit starts this year, real estate developers are now building as much housing in the center-city as in the suburbs, leading my Globe colleague, John Barber, to pronounce the “age of sprawl has passed.”
On a per capita basis, however, there is currently twice as much high-rise construction in Toronto as there is in New York. On an absolute basis, no other U.S. city is comparable. Chicago has 54 high-rises under construction, Boston has 14 and Atlanta 19.
Toronto is already No. 10 in the ranking of world cities with the most skyscrapers, according to Emporis. Among world cities with more than two million people, it ranks third – behind Hong Kong and Singapore – in most skyscrapers per capita.
September 16th, 2008 at 10:28 am
Perhaps the age of sprawl has passed in major cities, but the suburbs surrounding those cities just keep getting denser and denser. New townhouse communities and housing developments and downtown redevelopments abound. Seems as though places can’t get big enough.
September 17th, 2008 at 4:43 am
Contrast this to the reception that proposed skyscrapers get in London, mainly in the financial quarter, confusingly called “The City”, which just happens to have the Tower of London and St Paul’s cathedral in the middle of it. Pesky heritage getting in the way of real estate profits which swell the coffers of the rich who keeping getting immoral bonuses until… oh, look what happened!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/12/heritage
I like this line the best: “Most are of glass and steel, energy-hungry, unadaptable and stylistic pastiches on Mies van der Rohe. They are for looking at rather than using, let alone walking past”.
Skyscrapers represent the antithesis of creativity, surely – centralisation, enclosure, profit-skimming, anti-social, sterile, claustrophobic and paranoid.
And Elizabeth, I would add that places can’t get big enough because people can’t stop consuming stuff they are forced to belive that they need (interestingly by those “creative” types who work in advertising…).