Toronto is No Paris

7 April 2004 - 5:00am

A Canadian writer questions why North American cities look and feel nothing like their European counterparts.

Do Europeans maintain a fundamentally different definition of what makes a city than residents of North America? Although French suburbs are developing in similar ways to those surrounding U.S. and Canadian cities--rows of single family homes, strip malls, and single occupancy vehicles--the views about urban form and density remain uniquely European. As this article's author maintains, North Americans live in cities. Europeans inhabit them.

Source: The Toronto Star, April 4, 2004
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And many of us – the majority, in fact – find ourselves living in a drive-only landscape, where we must burn gas even to reach a transit stop, if one exists.