1. The last site I examined this day was the complete and total antithesis of all the other spaces I had been to so far. As can be seen in the above picture, the Costco warehouse on The Queensway is an absolutely immense building on an even larger property that probably takes up the same space as a few city blocks. The two major features on the property are the large parking lot and the building itself, but there are many other smaller structures that catch my eye. The first are the many shopping cart corrals (I count 12, but the property is so big that I can not be certain I got them all) and bright red plastic garbage cans that are placed together throughout the parking lot. On the east side of the building is an area that I assume has been set up for employees who are on their breaks because of the table and benches and nearby cigarette disposal. Another cigarette disposal is mounted at the entrance of the store, behind another of the many red garbage cans that dot the premises. I notice an empty bicycle rack on the side of the building with room for at least four bikes to park, and I wonder who would ever take their bike to Costco (where even the smallest purchase would be quite a handful), until I realized that it was more likely for the employees. Obviously, none of them chose that option when I was visiting. The area is well lit with tall industrial lampposts throughout the entire parking lot, and a few lights are also mounted on the side of the building.
It is the start of rush hour so the area is fairly busy and I can hear a lot of different noises, although the majority of them are car-related; trunks and doors being slammed shut and engines being turned over. I can also hear the hum of the Gardiner Expressway faintly in the background. I hear someone cough in the distance, but otherwise, the only other noise I hear from the people is the sound of their shopping carts as they wheel them to their cars and the shopping cart corrals. A few seagulls have set up camp in the area and once or twice I can hear them cry out.
2. Also in contrast to the other sites I visited this Monday, Costco is one place where there were a lot of people for me to observe. Unfortunately, all of the people outside of the building are either walking from their cars to entrance, or leaving the store with a shopping cart full of purchases that they are bringing back to their car. The only other people I see are store employees, taking lines of empty shopping carts from one of the many shopping cart corrals back to the store for the next batch of shoppers to use.
3. Unlike the clubhouse at the St. George's Golf Club or the Humber Bay Butterfly Habitat, I could not wait to leave the Costco property. It was cold and sterile and noisy and busy, and about 95 percent grey. It seemed like the only colour allowed on the premises was the red colour used for the sign that was also used for the bike racks and garbage cans; if it wasn't for the sea of cars in the parking lot, there would be almost no colour at all. The small amount of "nature" the developers did return to the site (after paving over it completely) is so pitiful that I find it more depressing than anything else. The spindly little trees that look sadly out of place do little to lift my spirits. As I look back on my visit I realise that the relationship I had with this site had absolutely nothing to do with nature, and everything to do with capitalist consumption.
4. There are many readings in the SUDR that came to mind after I visited this site, mainly as an example of what most of the authors said that urban planners should NOT do when designing a new development or neighbourhood. I immediately thought of Eisenberg and Yost's piece about the excessive nature of modern building codes when I looked at the vast parking lot that takes up a large portion of the property. I imagined what must have once been a natural landscape that had now been flattened out and paved over with a thick layer of concrete, ensuring that anything that once lived there would be destroyed. Of course, a parking lot brings cars, which in turn bring with them the air and noise pollution that are part of their very essence. As I stood on the edge of this immense parking lot and stared out into the sea of concrete and cars, feeling very small, the damage the creation of this site has done to its environment was obvious.
I also realized that the site was pretty much exactly the kind of thing that Jane Jacobs was critiquing her article: a sterile, automobile-oriented urban landscape dominated by a multi-national corporation. It does nothing to encourage pedestrian traffic in the area, since a vehicle is almost a requirement to make it from one end of the gargantuan parking lot to the other, never mind getting to the actual neighbourhood in which it is located. In addition, big box businesses like Costco quickly drive local vendors and storeowners, unable to compete with the selection and price these huge warehouse stores can offer, out of the area (which also ties in to Michael Shuman's piece on import replacement). Naturally, the more people have to leave their community to work and shop, the more people will be burning fossil fuels by driving, creating a continuous cycle of environmental damage that becomes almost impossible to repair.
5. The only evidence of nature on this site were the narrow strips of dirt (with the occasional tree) that separated some of the parking lot rows, and the few trees that lined the property which somehow got spared from the clear cutting that otherwise occurred in the area, so it is hard to say that it is constitutive of a human/nature relationship in any way. Everything about the site is industrial, from the neighbourhood in which it is located to the building itself, which is essentially one big box. The area on the south side of the building is the only one where it looks like any thought was put into the landscaping, but the majority of people who get to appreciate it are passing by at 120 kilometres an hour on the Gardiner. Most visitors to this site never make it that far around the building.
The problem (one of many) with a site like Costco is that its very composition encourages its continued destruction, ensuring that a connection to the natural environment will continue to be ignored and eventually causing potentially irreparable damage. It is located far away from residential areas and on an unpopular (i.e. slow and infrequent) bus route, so anyone who wants to go there must take a car. In fact, a car is almost mandatory to shop at Costco, considering almost everything they sell is in bulk and any more than one or two items would be incredibly awkward or difficult to carry on a bus. While they did provide a bike rack for their employees, it is interesting to note that it only has space for about four-six bicycles (at a place that must employ dozens, if not hundreds, of people), and is empty, even though it was a beautiful day. Not that I can say I fault any of the employees for not riding their bikes to work. Not only is it much easier to get to the location by car, as it is next to both the Gardiner and 427 Highway, but it is not bike-friendly at all, located on an extremely busy six-lane street with no bike lanes.
We have often been taught that buying products in bulk is the more environmentally friendly choice when shopping for household items, but this potential benefit is often negated at Costco thanks to their excessive wrapping. Instead of buying one large box of 300 garbage bags, they will put together three boxes of 100, and then wrap all of that together with plastic. I suspect this is why they have put so many garbage cans in their parking lot - shoppers got annoyed with having to dispose of or having to find room in their recycling boxes for all of the excessive packaging when they got home, so they just started unwrapping it all in the store parking lot and leaving it for them to deal with. Instead of addressing the problem of excessive packaging, their solution was to put out more garbage bins.
While this one specific site will not be the reason nearby residents lose touch with their natural surroundings, the fact that such sites are now the norm rather than the exception in this neighbourhood is a definite problem if one is concerned about the loss of green space in favour of parking lots and local businesses being choked out of existence. A community may be able to handle one warehouse store in its backyard, but even if they do, such stores never seem to stand alone for long. Within a few kilometres of the Costco, there is also a Walmart, Canadian Tire, Ikea, Home Depot, Staples, and several franchise restaurants, just to name a few. If the growth and development in this area follow the same trends they have been for the past decade or two, it won't be long before that section of The Queensway is little more than a giant stripmall.
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