Canada Lands Company's district plan for Downsview West in Toronto's northwest could include 8,800 homes – with more than 1,700 affordable homes.Supplied
The biggest development project in Toronto is moving forward – and its design will explore some novel ideas. This week, the federal government’s Canada Lands Company submitted its application to the City of Toronto for a “district plan” of Downsview West, a 30-hectare area in the city’s northwest that could include 8,800 homes – including more than 1,700 affordable homes in buildings from six to 60 storeys tall.
Situated on a former Canadian Forces base, next to the Downsview Park subway and GO station, the plan is remarkable for its scale and for its design approach. The plan, led by Urban Strategies and SLA, does not use a conventional arrangement of blocks and streets. Instead it proposes an intricate network of parks and semi-public spaces for social gathering, ecological function and capturing rainwater to be managed onsite.
But most notable perhaps is how much affordable housing Canada Lands aims to deliver. Stéphan Déry, president and chief executive officer of Canada Lands, says the agency now requires a minimum of 20-per-cent affordable housing within any of its developments. “We follow the government’s direction and we aim to create communities where everyone can live,” he said.
Twenty per cent may not seem high; however, it reflects the financial realities of not-for-profit housing without subsidy. Here, market-rate housing and commercial uses will help fund affordable housing. And in Toronto’s real estate market, getting to 20 per cent is challenging. Along with housing, the plan calls for 1.3 million square feet of retail, industrial and office space and a generous approximately 3.8 hectares for parks. The project will reuse the former Canadian Forces base fire hall, and more importantly, the base’s supply depot – a gargantuan blastproof concrete building that occupies 7.5 hectares in the middle of the site.
Downsview West is one portion of Canada Lands’s development plans for Downsview, which will include a total of 22,000 homes. And it is separate from work on the adjacent former Downsview Airport, where Northcrest Developments is pursuing its own development, dubbed YZD, for about 55,000 residents and 23,000 workers.
Plans for the site do not include a conventional arrangement of blocks and streets and instead propose a network of parks and semi-public spaces for social gathering, ecological function and capturing rainwater to be managed onsite.Supplied
Both plans are building on a four-year joint “framework” design, in which the two developers engaged top-tier design consultants including local architects KPMB and Copenhagen landscape architects SLA.
The design centrepiece of that plan is “an unbroken network of greenways, parks, and urban spaces,” SLA partner Rasmus Astrup explained in an e-mail. But this presents technical challenges at the detail level, when such issues as parking and loading need to be accommodated. “The district plan shows that we actually can deliver the Framework’s vision,” Mr. Astrup said.
Here’s hoping. The framework was a somewhat utopian document that proposed a different kind of city than Toronto has seen, one organized around transit; one where cars are pushed to the margins; where buildings of different sizes and shapes are arranged along right-sized streets lined with greenery and continuous corridors of green space. It was, in short, contemporary Scandinavian urbanism allied to the higher densities of Toronto development, and incorporating the legacy buildings of a military base and airport.
The new Downsview West document does not specify exactly the shapes and sizes of buildings, and the plan will rely heavily on good architecture – preferably without the bulk and sterility common in Toronto these days.
But the plan gives a strong sense of where they will go and – importantly – how they will be linked by public spaces. The north-south site is punctuated by three major public parks and more than a kilometre of off-street pathways. One route, dubbed “Courtyard Commons,” establishes a zone of plantings and pedestrian pathways that connects to four distinct blocks of apartment buildings. An “Ancestors’ Trail,” designed together with Indigenous-led Trophic Design, is an 800-metre pedestrian route connecting the transit station to its namesake Downsview Park featuring Indigenous-inspired public realm design and art.
It is heartening that Canada Lands is committed to a degree of design innovation. The status quo in Canadian urban design, including in the city of Toronto, favours big buildings, big streets and little variation. The planning and design culture in Canada – especially so in Toronto – simply does not understand how to build spaces for people and spaces for nature into the city.
Even in Downsview West there’s evidence of that status quo. A new street will be cut through the middle of the giant depot building, which will in turn be repurposed for commercial use. (It’s already got one of the best markets in the city.) But that new street, in the Downsview West drawings, is massively too big; all the nuance and complexity in the plan gives way to a highway-sized arterial road.
Mr. Astrup, in an e-mail, told me not to worry. “The depot itself will be revitalized and further activated, transforming it into an incredibly dynamic space,” Mr. Astrup said. “I guarantee it will be super cool!” With luck, he will be right.