John Lorinc, contributor to the forthcoming book uTOpia, praises 1950s-era shopping plazas that have come into the gunsights of urban planners.

An excerpt from the Now Toronto story:

In any taxonomy of urban retail establishments, the strip plazas around Toronto's inner suburbs enjoy the status of a weed species. They don't have the utility of local shopping plazas, the ones wrapped around a large parking lot and tenanted by a supermarket, a bank, a drug store and a video rental outlet. Nor do they have the vitality and aesthetic appeal of the downtown retail strips.

Urbanists indict them for crimes against the pedestrian realm because they're separated from the sidewalk by those narrow, unattractive parking lots. Yet they are qualitatively different commercial creatures than the endlessly blah stretches of stand-alone drive-through fast food and auto-body outlets that have had such a profoundly deadening impact on suburban arterials.

Toronto planners have nevertheless come to view these low-slung structures as development fodder. Why? Because they under-use commercial land that can support denser mixed-use buildings.

Many suburban arterials have been redesignated as "avenues," where landowners will be given carte blanche to develop buildings that are as high as the street is wide, provided they hug the sidewalk and keep the parking out of view. The goal is lofty and urban-minded, at least in theory.

The truth is that these older strip plazas facing onto busy arterial roads have become as important, in an urban sense, to their communities as the old warehouse and market districts have been to the inner city. We demolish them at our peril. ...

if those modest 1950s strip plazas begin to disappear in the name of suburban intensification, a critical piece of what built Toronto's peaceful diversity will go with them.

After all, the luxury condo developers won't be leasing their ground-floor stores to tiny Argentine bakeries. They simply couldn't afford the rent.

Perhaps there's an alternative future, one that can grow out of a renewed appreciation for places like Wexford Plaza and their evolving role as surprisingly spontaneous community hubs.

Because the fact is that they have become "places" in their own right.

In our vision of a transit-friendly, compact city, let's not lose sight of the fact that in these unassuming corners of suburbia there's already a there there.

There's a uTOpia launch event on Sunday at the Gladstone. Paved.ca has the scoop on it.