The Significance of Building Mixed-Income Communities in Residential Areas

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These efforts empower individuals, build relationships, and strengthen community bonds.

At Q4A, we recognize that we are living in an increasingly digital and disconnected world. This is why we firmly believe in the role of architecture in enhancing social interaction and community engagement. Our guiding principle is that the most effective community architecture attracts people by instilling a sense of ownership over the spaces where they work, play, and live. By emphasizing these elements in architectural design, we can create environments that inspire socialization and a sense of belonging.

Most of our projects embody this vision. While architecture cannot dictate outcomes, it can create opportunities for spontaneous encounters and social interactions, thereby fostering community building and influencing our social fabric.

Mixed-income housing benefits resiliency

Current development practices often target very specific buyer groups, including “first-time homebuyers”, “retirement living” purchasers, and homes for growing families. This results in the creation of neighborhoods with homogeneous cultures, socio-economic status, and life-experiences that lack a sense of belonging and diversity of uses. In contrast, designing a community for the accommodation of people with varying ages, origins and social status and different schedules and lifestyles, inherently requires the creation of housing for varying incomes. And as a result, we achieve more resilient communities that allow homeowners to remain. A prime example of this type of vision is Cornell Village, in Markham. Master-planned in the 1990’s by Duany Plater-Zyberk (DZP), it was envisioned as a model New-Urbanist development.

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Q4A has been involved in the development of Cornell Village for nearly 25 years, creating a curated collection of neighborhoods that share common goals but are visually unique with their own character. Cornell has succeeded in incorporating a wider array of housing types which better facilitate the dynamics of the neighbourhood. Chief among Cornell’s planning practices was the design and development of a community around a rear-lane street network, which unlike typical suburban planning, reduces the automobile’s primacy within the community.

Rear-lanes allow for the creation of secondary suites with frontage on the lanes in the form of suite-above-garage coach housing or at-grade garden/laneway housing that allow two residents to comfortably share a property. As a result, many Cornell residents use these secondary suites to house and share resources within an often-multi-generational family.

Cornell creates a mixed-income neighbourhood with a variety of rental housing stock that is not typically found in the suburbs, resulting in a varied, safer and more active community. This is one of the qualities that the jury highly valued when it awarded the prestigious Markham 2006 Design Excellence Award, recognizing and promoting excellence in urban design.

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 A community is a tapestry woven with the threads of human interaction.

Our practice has a strong residential focus, and we take great pride in designing places that many people call home. We believe that architecture should enhance individual well-being. It has the potential to bring people together and encourage socialization by removing barriers and making meeting places useful and attractive.

By designing for multiple and varied user groups which inhabit houses and communities at different stages of their lives, there is an opportunity to create truly resilient communities for our future.

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