A rendering of the McCleary District plan for Park Street, proposed a few kilometres from Toronto's downtown core along Lake Shore Boulevard East. Park Streets will be slow-paced, narrow and green, prioritizing pedestrian access.CreateTO/DTAH/CreateTO/DTAH
The City of Toronto is planning a brand-new neighbourhood in its port lands, a 20-hectare zone called the McCleary District. Last week, a group of distinguished design professionals offered their conclusion:
“It’s a mess.”
That was how former Toronto chief planner Paul Bedford summed it up at the Wednesday meeting of Waterfront Toronto’s Design Review Panel. This independent group of designers, engineers and academics had spent the day ripping the McCleary plan to shreds.
Various members called it uninspired, confused and without direction. Landscape architect and professor Fadi Masoud cited serious questions about its flood-protection strategy. Architect Betsy Williamson asked why, in a new neighbourhood, “we are inviting cars into every block.” “That makes no sense,” she said.
She is right. Mayor Olivia Chow should direct Toronto staff to tear it all up and start from scratch. After all, the city owns most of the land and municipal agency CreateTO is running the show. If Toronto is ever going to design a neighbourhood that is special, it is here.
The McCleary District in Toronto’s Port Lands offers opportunities for development next to the new route of the Don River, now being rebuilt at billion-dollar expense, and across the road from the planned East Harbour transit hub.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
McCleary District lies along Lake Shore Boulevard East a few kilometres from the downtown core. Today it houses a garbage incinerator, some film studios and little else. Yet it’s ripe with possibility. It lies next to the new route of the Don River, now being rebuilt at billion-dollar expense, and across the road from the planned East Harbour transit hub.
In Germany or Spain, government would launch a design competition to establish the urban design for the area, seeking clear spatial ideas that could give the place an identity.
With the nearby Don River project, that’s exactly what happened. The agency Waterfont Toronto held a competition in 2007. The result was a visionary design led by landscape architects Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, quite different than anything the city had imagined. It is being built.
But when it comes to the design of the adjacent neighbourhoods – their streets, buildings and open spaces – the city is tripping itself up in a tangle of decade-old policy and received ideas.
Construction continues in the McCleary District of Toronto’s Port Lands neighbourhood. City staff want 'fine-grained retail,' such as small shops, and pedestrian routes through the middle of blocks.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
Adding confusion, CreateTO has hired an army of local consultants, including DTAH, Perkins & Will and Diamond Schmitt, to work on different aspects of just one part of McCleary. And of that section, four blocks are owned by private developers. Last Wednesday, the developers presented different (and incompatible) ideas from different design teams.
It’s a mess.
The results of this snafu are – surprise! – uninspired. The plan mostly follows the ideas that Urban Design staff within City Planning have been pushing for 25 years, shaping the contemporary buildings that Torontonians endlessly complain about. Almost everything is on a grid of streets. Buildings take the form of “tower and podium” or “tall midrise,” either of which means bulky, boring, block-long buildings with a lot of dead space in their middles.
The plan demonstrates a half-dozen problems common to recent Toronto building projects. Generally, Toronto urban-design policy faces no meaningful scrutiny at all. The waterfront panel – whose members have fewer ties to the city – has the power to offer such scrutiny, and last week it did.
While city staff want “fine-grained retail,” i.e. small shops, and pedestrian routes through the middle of blocks, this plan calls for buildings with giant footprints that impede those goals. The city wants density, but also wants towers to be 40 metres apart. (Mr. Masoud pointed out that this rule exists nowhere else in Toronto.) The city wants streets busy with pedestrians; yet it also wants to build enormously wide streets, all of them with cars. Plans call for a new stretch of Broadview Avenue to be 37.5 metres wide – bigger than Spadina Avenue.
Plans for the site mostly follow the ideas that Urban Design staff within City Planning have been pushing for 25 years, and almost everything would be on a grid of streets.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
A competition would offer a fresh start. CreateTO should ask designers fundamental questions: What arrangement of buildings and public space generates a successful neighbourhood? Do we need so many roads? Does one small district need two big parks? Is the waterfront actually a good place, as the city seems to think, for huge, windowless film production studios?
Without a competition, the city’s machine will march onward and nothing will change. We’ve seen this movie, next door at Villiers Island. That 22-hectare zone just had its own flawed neighbourhood plan approved through a convoluted process. I criticized it heavily. The Waterfront review panel hated it. Nina-Marie Lister, director of Toronto Metropolitan University’s Ecological Design Lab, called it “hugely problematic,” “misguided” and “a return to mid-20th-century city planning.”
City Planning stood its ground. At a city council meeting, local councillor Paula Fletcher even complained about the “naysayers” who dared to speak up.
But stubbornness and chest-thumping do not produce excellence. These waterfront lands are multibillion-dollar public assets. They offer a chance to show civic leadership and transform Toronto’s identity, as City Hall did through a design competition in the 1960s. Do our neighbourhoods have to be zones of speeding cars and bland boxes?
I say no. So does this panel of experts.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that a street 37.5 metres wide would be bigger than University Avenue. The comparison should have been made to Spadina Avenue. This version has been updated. A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that McCleary District lies along Eastern Avenue. It lies along Lake Shore Boulevard East. This version has been updated.