Is intensification the new urban renewal?

In the middle of the last century, “urban renewal” peaked as the cutting edge of urban planning. Renewal referred not to restoration or renovation of neighbourhoods, of course, but to removing large swaths of older urban residential areas. New developments were often large civic buildings, public housing, or highways. In Ottawa, the destruction of Lebreton Flats in 1962 was a federal urban renewal scheme that led to the loss of a huge area of housing, producing an empty area in the heart of the city that is just beginning to be filled in.

This type of urban renewal is no longer in favour these days. The preservationist movements that began in the late 1960s, led by urbanists like Jane Jacobs and her colleagues, decried the loss of historic urban neighbourhoods, particularly for highways. More recently, “New Urbanism” has championed the dense, street-oriented neighbourhoods of the same type that were often removed in renewal projects.

In addition, the fact that the older neighbourhoods destroyed by renewal were often replaced by non-residential or lower density uses helped promote urban sprawl and reliance on cars for transportation, as residential areas were displaced farther and farther into the suburbs. It also was clear that such “slum removal” targeted the homes of the most disadvantaged, removing this population from cities. The America novelist James Baldwin famously called urban renewal “Negro removal.” The reality was that urban renewal removed only areas in which the disadvantaged lived, and such wholesale cleansing came to be discredited.

Today, cutting edge urban planning involves “intensification,” increasing the numbers of residential or employment units in the urban area, particularly on land served by existing infrastructure and transit. A reasonable level of intensification has broad public support, although the amount of intensification deemed appropriate is often controversial. What we do not seem to be questioning, however, is whether we are avoiding all the mistakes of urban renewal in our current schemes for intensification.

In Ottawa, the greatest intensification is mainly targeted to a number of areas in the downtown core and in nearby urban areas within “Mixed Use Centres” and other designations near transit. One target for new units is in underutilized lands (vacant lands, brownfields, or parking lots, for example). However, it also appears that some covert urban renewal is taking place. Why else would fairly dense existing residential areas like Little Italy, Mechanicsville, and large parts of Centretown be given zoning (and frequent spot rezoning) that is guaranteed to lead to the replacement of existing affordable housing in those areas with high-end condos?

While the older, crude method of evicting the disadvantaged, leveling their houses, and building something new that characterized urban renewal would not be tolerated today, is this not just a more subtle way of getting the same result by encouraging parcel-by-parcel demolition and replacement with housing only for the affluent? Certainly none of the wealthier neighbourhoods are being rezoned in this way, even when they are equally close to rapid transit.

We do need to intensify our fairly low-density urban core in Ottawa. But we should also be asking why it is disproportionately low-rise areas inhabited by residents of lower socioeconomic status that are targeted for replacement, while more affluent areas of equally low density are to remain untouched.