In the Urbanist Agenda podcast episode “How to Actually Improve a City,” urban planning practitioner Brent Toderian outlines the steps most cities go through while ostensibly trying to make their cities better. This was originally described as five stages but expanded to six during the discussion. For each step, in square brackets I will show the time in the podcast episode where they discuss the stage (though they go through them pretty quickly).
In this article, I’m going to take these steps and apply them to Orléans to see how we can take our urbanism game to the next level(s). In the future, I’d like to start looking at all kinds of projects through this lens, but setting out these guidelines is a great start.
Brent Toderian’s 5 (or 6) Stages of City-Making
Stage 1: Doing the Wrong Thing
This is the baseline status quo where a city actively pursues outdated or harmful planning practices, such as providing no bike infrastructure at all. [38:15]
Looking at Stage 1 from an Orléans perspective, in my opinion it is characterized best by the exclusionary zoning that keeps residential and commercial land almost completely separate all across the suburb.
Stage 2: Doing the Wrong Things Better
Cities often mistake this for success. It involves making slight improvements to fundamentally flawed systems, like adding trees to surface parking lots or promoting electric cars as a singular solution to car dependency. [38:23]
In Orléans, Stage 2 (to me) looks like allowing up to 4 units per lot in single-family home neighbourhoods, but in a highly restricted form that realistically won’t change much.
Stage 3: Having Your Cake and Eating It Too
This stage is characterized by contradictory policies. A city might invest in light rail or bike lanes while simultaneously widening roads, which ultimately nullifies any significant shift in how people choose to move. [38:54]
Stage 3 in Orléans is best characterized by adding rapid bus transit lines in South Orleans, while widening Brian Coburn and refusing to make existing transit routes more frequent and reliable.
Stage 4: Doing the Right Things Badly
Toderian labels this the “most dangerous stage.” It involves implementing the right ideas in ways that are destined to fail—such as “sharrows” or painted bike lanes—which then allows skeptics to claim that those solutions “don’t work” in their specific city. [39:30]
When you see Stage 4 in Orléans, it looks like building large low- and high-rise apartment buildings in less densely populated areas, but surrounding them with massive parking lots and no amenities.
Stage 5: Doing Only the “Low-Hanging Fruit”
Added during the conversation, this stage describes cities that only implement projects where they are “easy” or opportunistic, such as placing bike lanes only in parks or areas where they won’t inconvenience drivers, rather than in the “hard places” where they are most needed for transportation. [44:33]
We haven’t gotten to Stage 5 very often in Orléans, but it looks like slightly upzoning low density residential areas near transit, but leaving other communities at the sparsest possible density and with no mixed use.
Stage 6: Doing the Right Things Well
This is the ultimate goal where high-quality, proven infrastructure and policies are implemented effectively to achieve meaningful outcomes like safety and financial resilience. [40:23]
Stage 6 in Orléans is coming in some ways, albeit slowly. There is a plan to rejuvenate St Joseph Blvd, although it remains to be seen whether plans will eventually be watered down. If we really do get a lot more mixed-use development there, and/or some nice walkable streetscapes it could turn out to be a great place to go.
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