Canada: Escape from suburbia

If professors of urban planning wanted to present their students with a vivid example of suburbia gone wrong, and went looking across North America for one, it’s entirely conceivable that they’d eventually find themselves in Kanata, gazing upon the unfortunate community of Bridlewood.

Citizen columnist Randall Denley has invoked the apt metaphor of a horror film — it could be called Escape From Bridlewood — to describe life in this neighbourhood. Like other subdivisions, the only way to and from Bridlewood is by car, but due to the particular layout of Bridlewood, residents can be stuck in traffic for 45 minutes during rush hour and still be barely out of their driveways.


And why are Bridlewood residents hostage to their cars? One reason is that there is no place that they can walk or cycle to, or that they’d want to walk or cycle to. As Mr. Denley points out, the community is the size of a small city — 20,000 people — but there’s no library, hockey arena, swimming pool or even a high school. There are few businesses.

A community should be a place where people live in the full sense of the word, not just a place where they sleep. We mean no disrespect to the people of Bridlewood, but from a planning perspective the community illustrates the worse aspects of suburbia because it risks becoming a place where one’s home is simply a pit stop between car trips. This is what the American planning critic James Kunstler is getting at when he warns that “megaburbs have all the congestion of the city and none of the human contact. They have all of the isolation of the country, but no real connection to nature.”

Ottawa Citizen