In the book Messy Cities, another futuristic tale emerges at the closing of the essay tilted Dixie Road by Fadi Masoud, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urbanism – University of Toronto. What drew me into this story was that for twenty years I once lived a few miles east of Pearson Airport where Dixie Road is reached, (if you don’t take the 401 highway), by way of a messy tangle of roadway.
It is in this tale where a family like Masoud’s lands at Pearson:
“It is 2045…a ‘missing middle’ three-to-four storey residential multi-family housing unit has been constructed, offering affordable alternatives that were not there before. Older adults are ‘aging in community’ and living near college students and young children in intergenerational housing developments…homes that were once separated by eight lanes of traffic from the nearest store.”
That short future snapshot was the first reference in this book that mentioned an important aspect of urban living – the age inclusive alignment in urban design.
In 2007 the WHO Age-friendly Cities Guide was published and since then, nearly 20 years later, it has grown into a widely accepted global movement. But at times I’ve felt that it needs a reboot to improve its messaging; age-friendly is not just about mobility, accessibility and social participation for older adults.
Throughout the book, looking for interlay with messy and the concept of age-friendly, age-inclusive, longevity-ready (or whatever new phrase might ascend in conversation between now and 2045), I didn’t find a dedicated essay to speak to this in Messy Cities, though in Designing Out Disorder, it is Cara Chellew, PhD Student, Urban Planning, Policy & Design – McGill University who does address many elements of age-friendly design in her commentary.
So too, Daniel Gordon, Healthcare Transformation Consultant – KPMG in his essay Mexico City’s Apartment Architecture, with his background as an urban planner, makes an age inclusive, longevity-ready point when it comes to housing and neighbourhood design:
“If we want to create cities where experimentation and innovation take root, where there are all sorts of housing types for all stages of life, and where neighbourhoods and streetscapes are beautiful and diverse, we could do a lot worse than learning from Mexico City’s messy urbanism.”
Coming to the end of my reading of Messy Cities, I found it ironic to find myself one day driving a six mile stretch of a major north Toronto road where sightlines kept changing, very distracting. Considering I hadn’t been up that way in some 20 years, I thought I was on another planet. Roads too wide, mashups of commercial infrastructure on either side and for some stretch, confusing turning lanes crossing a down the middle above ground LRT line not yet in use.
Right after that rather messy trip didn’t I read The Case Against Controlling Infrastructure, the essay by Buenos Aires architect Andrés Borthagary. He spoke of mobility infrastructure here, and I was instantly reminded of age-friendly city elements – transportation and outdoor spaces, and the inclusiveness of design for people of any age to transport safely. Borthagary hit the right age-friendly notes – slower road speeds, shorter blocks, more frequent intersections and so on.
It could have been Toronto that Borthagary was talking about when he said: “Many Buenos Aires neighbourhoods, as in other cities, have different combinations of those qualities. However, there is still a tension between everyday life and a predetermined structured grid, between flexibility of uses and the need for mobility infrastructure.” So yes there is an age inclusive interlay – the young mother with a baby stroller, the older man with a walker, to the teenage girl in a wheelchair.
Altogether, the collection of essays in Messy Cities: Why We Can’t Plan Everything(2025) edited by Dylan Reid, Zahra Ebrahim, Leslie Woo & John Lorinc makes for an insightful read that illustrates so many facets of urban living that sometimes we accept in spite of, or because of the messiness we may feel or see. And in our sigh for wanting of some more order, perhaps we should walk away from this book agreeing with what the subtitle alerts – we can’t plan everything.
