![787px-Royal.crescent.aerial.bath.arp[1]](http://zhamid.ca/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/787pxRoyal.crescent.aerial.bath.arp1.jpg "787px-Royal.crescent.aerial.bath.arp[1]") |
| Bath, England viewed from a hot-air balloon. 18th Century private sector development was designed to appear attractive with with aesthetics in mind. |
Urban planning, in its essence, is nothing more than the integration of land-use planning, transportation planning, parks and recreations planning, trails and everything else a municipality has control over to create a detailed plan that defines a wide range of social and urban environment of a municipality (including landscape, architecture and transportation).
Milton has done a fair job being practical. But is it doing a fair job in actively crafting a character as it grows into a mid-size city? In older non-residential parts (Steeles Ave, Bronte North of Main) aesthetics seem non-existent.
Think of most beautiful historic cities you have visited. They were are a result of careful urban planning that gave creative freedom while still enforced style, sizes, uses and features.
Where does Milton stack up?
I have actually walked around that exact area and building before whilst backpacking in the UK in 1998. Bath is a beautiful city but unfortunately I would say that Milton, generally, is not.
The downtown core is nice actually — it’s not quite Lakeshore Rd. through Oakville, but it is a nice, quaint (albeit small) downtown area. Unfortunately once you get to Ontario St. to the east and Bronte to the west, everything is an eyesore with no character.
One of the biggest disappointments were the renovations to Milton Mall — that corner was screaming out for some kind of retail frontage onto Main/Ontario with some character that you could walk around/to etc.
Let’s hope the infill development in the coming years really takes aesthetics into consideration, including also many of the ideas you have proposed over the past few months here, Zeeshan.
Let’s spend a little more to give some of the buildings some character, and when in doubt, add trees, trees, trees.
The residential areas of Milton are ok — they are a little Mississauga-ey (is that a word?), but I do believe that HV and HVE, although very “cookie-cutter” (or the ‘urban filing cabinet’ as my Uncle would say) are nice-looking residential areas. The Mattamy Homes especially have a nice look to them for the most part and as the trees grow, the area will take on a nice character — you are already seeing this in the Derry/Trudeau area where some of the trees are 8+ years old now — there are some very nice streets. Yes, the houses are crammed in and close to the roads, but I’m not bothered by that as long as there are many parks nearby for everyone.
As you’ve pointed out, what needs to be done is high density housing along the major routes as opposed to McMansions to make our transit system more effective — that is a huge challenge for this town.
Again, what hurts Milton is that most people’s impression of the town (it was mine before I moved here) is the stretch of Hwy 25 to the 401 – Ontario St. past EC Drury, the Mall, low-income housing near Steeles, strip plazas along Steeles, restaurants/gas stations at the 401. I remember being so pleasantly surprised when I first drove into downtown Milton by accident….
Zeeshan is right — Milton needs to start aesthetically becoming an ‘Escarpment Community’ as we move foward — let’s start ‘looking’ like a desirable town nestled at the base of Ontario’s best (and possibly only) geographic feature!
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