Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
consisted of 59 bridges and 18 km of walkways connecting the main downtown
buildings which also included extensive retail areas (see Fig.
8.2
), which has cre-
ated a more extensive network than a similar system in Minneapolis. Building de-
velopers pay the cost of construction of the bridges and interior walkways because
they are compensated with permission to include higher densities in their buildings.
New buildings that are still isolated pay development costs into a fund that is used
to construct the bridges when density increases in their area.
By contrast, the downtown areas of Canada's two biggest cities, Toronto and
Montreal, have developed a series of
underground connections and plazas
domi-
nated by retail facilities which makes it easier to shop or walk between many of the
key downtown buildings in winter. Toronto's PATH system now connects over 50
major downtown buildings as well as subway, railways and entertainment facilities,
with 27 km of paths and 1,200 shops and services in 370,000 km
2
of retail space
(Fig.
8.3
). A similar system in Montreal began in 1962 with a simple connection
between a new office building and a major hotel, but has now expanded to 32 km
of tunnels and walkways in the downtown commercial area that is used by a daily
average of over a half million people and is called call La Ville Souterraine by
the francophone population. Of course, as with all plans designed to prevent some
problem, some unexpected negative factors often emerge in these underground or
above-grade systems. These passages are essentially private spaces, except on the
public bridges, so security personnel have the ability to exclude people thought to be
undesirable. At ground level the loss of retail space to the interior of buildings along
the walkways, and the frequent blank concrete walls of major office blocks, provide
an unattractive visual experience on the streets. These problems can be counteract-
ed, in part at least, by a more enlightened approach to the use of these spaces and by
display cases at street level for the shops above or below ground level. However it
must be admitted that all three of these solutions are designed to effectively exclude
winter from these parts of the city, rather than accommodating to the conditions.
Within the built-up areas it is also important to design areas so as to
reduce the
severity of cold as well as snow accumulation
. The most obvious ways of dealing
with this is by decreasing the amount of shade from buildings and preventing pre-
vailing winds from creating wind tunnel effects along streets, such as by orientating
them across the major wind directions. Calgary's modern high rise towers built
along narrow roads present a real problem in winter due to shading and wind funnel
effects in the downtown area. But one building stands out as being adapted to the
conditions. The modernistic City Hall opened in the mid-1980s was deliberately de-
signed by the originator of the Plus 15 system, Harold Hanen, as a series of stepped
floors with successively lower levels occupying larger areas. This blue-tinted glass
structure has also added an element of colour to an otherwise drab area, and has
drastically reduced the amount of shadow on the city square that lies on the western
side of the building. Snow accumulation in urban areas can also often be reduced
through the careful sitting of snow fences, increasing roof angles, or adding spoilers
on them.
The
addition and redesign of public spaces
is another important general trend,
to make them more user-friendly and adaptable to multi-purpose use. These pub-
lic spaces, especially the smaller pocket areas, need to be designed to absorb as
