well, for the record i made my official announcement that i hated the suburbs in 1985. june 30th, 1985 to be precise. so, if you're looking for someone to accuse of being bandwagonesque, i'm not he.

having said that, i realize that there are people out there who are willing to trade an hour a day of their life in commuting for the benefit of having a 2500 sqft home with three bathrooms, a ground floor laundry and a garage the size of my house. there are different neighbourhoods for the same reason theatres show more than one movie -- people are different.

there are problems with the suburbs, though, and very serious ones at that. right now, the one that is sharp focus is the travel requirements.

for us to live in our modern, first-world way we need several different sorts of infrastructure: residential, commercial, industrial (including light industrial), and civic (schools, churches and, of course, velodromes). when the suburbs started to show up in force around the mid to late 1950's, the promise was neighbourhoods that achieved tranquility by eliminating the infrastructure that was perceived as annoying or dirty or dangerous or whatever: industrial and commercial. what resulted was hundreds of square kilometers of pure residential areas with some civic infrastructure thrown in.

of course when you decrease diversity in one area you automatically start to decrease diversity in other, surrounding areas as well. if you get a bowl of mixed nuts, for instance, and segregate out all the almonds, the remaining nuts have a higher percentage of peanuts. they're less diverse. the same thing happened with the rise of suburbs. as residential infrastructure got concentrated, other surrounding areas saw an increase in concentration of commercial and industrial.

run that process for fifty or so years and we wind up here: in a land where industrial, commercial and residential infrastructure are concentrated and segregated. in order to avail oneself of all three infrastructures one has to do a tremendous amount of traveling. we start in a residential zone in the morning, travel great distances to work in an industrial or commercial area; buying the stuff we need -- food, clothing, vittoria tubular tires -- also requires tremendous travel. and that travel is predominantly in large, single-occupant motor vehicles.

what we need to do is obvious: we need to re-integrate our infrastructures to reduce our travel requirements. we need to have commercial areas -- and meaningful commercial, not just a 7-11 or gan-n-sip -- within walking distance of residential areas. we need to have our places of work be readily accessible without a massive motorized trek. we can't physically move downtown or the super malls closer to our homes, so we need to break up those those amenities and mix them in to our residential areas.

that's a big task. and, if you elect me mayor (ha!) i will start by doing the following:

1) rezone every corner lot commercial/residential. if you're on a corner, congrats: your property is now zoned for commercial. dear suburb-dweller: you are now allowed to turn your garage into a drycleaner, convenience store, bead shop, day care... whatever. have at 'er.

2) no new buildings can be more than eight stories tall. we build these massive 40 story monstrosities downtown and fill them full of cubicles. where do the people who fill these cubicles come from? well, far away, that's for sure. the fact that we have concentrated so much light industrial in our downtown core means that we guarantee a massive rush hour to and from the city centre. we need to start splitting up downtown, and here's where we start. with eight story buildings.

3) no new buildings less than 2 stories. this is basically a shot at strip malls. put some apartments on top, okay? sheesh.

4) soho and surf-to-workers can now write off 50% of their home costs on their taxes. i know i can't really do that as mayor -- but i have some incriminating photos of the premier so i think i get that through the pipes.