Infrastructure : Development News

The ridiculously tight space between the Westin Harbour Castle, Lake Ontario and the Harbour Square complex was a key inspiration for the winning design for the Jack Layton Ferry Terminal and Harbour Square Park. Chosen last week from five finalists, the proposal from KPMB Architects, Netherlands-based West 8 and Greenberg Consultants solves the space constraints by creating a park whose hills rise to become a green roof for the terminal itself. The plan puts one use quite literally on top of the other.
 
“It’s a flat area and this elevation is very significant. Being able to get higher changes your perspective completely,” says Ken Greenberg of Greenberg Consultants. “You can imagine people picnicking on those hillsides, and having kids sliding down them in the winter. It will be something special and different on the waterfront."
 
Anyone who’s been to the Toronto Islands knows just how uninspiring the current ferry terminal is. “All the charm of a large public washroom,” says Greenberg. The winning design would provide better views, more green space and, within the terminal itself, a grand wooden ceiling that would better protect people from the elements. The rolling hills also faintly echo other new-generation parks along the waterfront, like HTO and Sugar Beach.
 
What happens next? While the city tries to rustle up the funds to pay for the redevelopment project, the winning team will enter a period of study with the stakeholders to work out the details and technical issues. For example, what will the new ferry docks look like and where will they go? Greenberg figures that could take a year. When construction does start, the port needs to remain open, which makes it a particularly tricky redevelopment.   
 
Writer: Paul Gallant
Source: Ken Greenberg

Two new enthusiasms of the provincial government could end up having an interesting synergy across the GTA, especially in neighbourhoods looking for increased community services.
 
On one hand, there’s the beleaguered Toronto District School Board, currently being sized up by an expert panel led by former mayor and chief commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission Barbara Hall. Hall and her panel will lead up to 20 public consultations between March and May 2015 to make recommendations for improving the governance of the TDSB.
 
Under pressure by the Ministry of Education to balance its budget, the TDSB has been selling off underutilized property and has raised more than $400 million from the sale of 66 properties since 2008. And it’s doing a further review to see how it can consolidate its real estate assets.
 
“The province is telling the TDSB, you have a lot of surplus [space], maybe you can turn that surplus into revenue,” says Daryl Sage, the CEO of the Toronto Lands Corporation (TLC), the TDSB offshoot tasked with the redevelopment and sales of property no longer required by the school board. In the process, the TDSB has upset many communities who don’t want their schools closed and replaced by housing or commercial developments.
 
On the other hand, last week Premier Kathleen Wynne appointed Karen Pitre as chair of the new Premier’s Community Hub Framework Advisory Group. The advisory group will review provincial policies and develop a framework for adapting existing public assets to become community hubs.
 
That’s where the two initiatives collide: Can underutilized schools share space with community organizations, or be repurposed as community centres?
 
“TLC is not just in the business of disposing of sites, it’s really trying to find a way to maximize the benefits from a site,” says Sage. “With the province’s interest in community hubs, we’ll be looking through that lens now. If you step back, you realize there are so many amenities that a school may have—gymnasiums, classrooms, fields, tracks, swimming pools. If there are ways that those benefits can be shared in the community, you can see that’s where the province would like to go.”
 
With the city also asking for more input into how TDSB handles properties it deems underused, the possibilities for more intensive use of school properties becomes very impressive indeed.
 
Writer: Paul Gallant
Source Daryl Sage

This weekend, a three-day symposium at the University of Toronto's school of architecture has set itself the task of redefining the way city's are conceived.

Michael Piper, an assistant professor and the organizer of the After Empirical Urbanism symposium, defined one core challenge as an explosion of the concept of urbanism.

The term “urbanism” started out, he said, comprising just city planning, urban design and architecture.

“But in the mid 1970s, for various reasons, the field began to expand,” he said, “into ethnology, anthropology, data analysis. It's become very complex, loaded with a series of other things, instead of just studying the physical space of cities, you'll study the people who live there and their cultural backgrounds. This is all very good, but with all this observing and civic engagement is that we've lost the idea of how to design. So what we're going is try to take all these empirical practices and how to make them operative and more design sensitive.”

The symposium, which is open to the public, has invited people from these many different disciplines and practises, who usually hive off into conferences of their own, to discuss how the future of thinking about cities might incorporate all their areas of expertise without losing track of the basic responsibility of urbanists, which is to make cities, rather than merely analyze them.

Piper says that in the 1970s urbanists, inspired by thinkers like Le Corbusier, began overhauling cities in ways they had not been overhauled since Hausmann re-did Paris. The result was much brutalist concrete and housing projects that have since been deemed disasters both by urbanists and the general public. He gives as an especially egregious example the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St Louis, Missouri, built in 1954 and demolished as early as 1972, but Chicago's Cabrini-Green or Toronto's own Regent Park would serve as well.

Urbanists were ambitious and optimistic in those decades, thinking that their ideas were better than ones that had come before, and willing to sacrifice heritage and history on the altar of the new and Modernist.

“These practices have come from the failure of modernism,” Piper says, referring to the disparate state of contemporary urbanism. “We can't design the whole city, so let's just look at it. What we're saying is you can't design a city like the Modernists tried to, but it does not mean we can't attempt to think on a large scale or to think through design.”

Talks and presentations over the three days, from Feb. 27 to March 1 at 230 College Street, include “The Use and Misuse of History,” “Fictions of the Ordinary,” and “The Bias of Data.”

Entry is free.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Michael Piper




 

It’s not the sort of thinig you tend to know about your home city, but according to a recent global study, Toronto hotels have the 9th best WiFi in the world.

According to Yaroslav Goncharov, head of the Hotel WiFi Test, 39 hotels were tested 171 times by volunteer guests, who used Goncharov’s test site to clock and record the speed of the service in their hotel. This data, along with information about where it was available and whether it was free or a charged service, went into compiling the ranking.

The study found that 76 per cent of hotels tested in Toronto have free WiFi, and the quality of the WiFi was marked at 61.5 per cent, which represents the number of hotels that offer what the organization considers to be “adequate WiFi quality” in the city. The top-ranked city, Stockholm, came in at 88.9 per cent and 89.5 per cent, respectively.

He says the quality of hotel WiFi, which is of increasing significance to tourists and can play a large role in a city’s image abroad, rests on the quality of local Internet service providers, “and whether local hoteliers understand the inportance of good WiFi,” Goncharov says. “For example, in some cities, hotels value their location so much that they forget about other amenities.” He gives Las Vegas as an example, where WiFi tends to be worse on The Strip than in other parts of the city.

Though Montreal came in fifth, Canada did not make the top 10, losing out not only to No. 1-ranked South Korea, but Ukraine (No. 3), Romania (No. 5)  and Hungary (No. 10).

The top 10 city list also included Budapest, Tokyo, Dublin, Portland, Moscow, Amsterdam and Kowloon.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Yaroslav Goncharov

The city's Waterfront now officially has the fastest Internet service in the city.

Waterfront Toronto and Beanfield jointly announced that the infrastructure is now in place for buildings both residential and commercial to take advantage of speeds of up to 500 megabits per second, more than 40 per cent faster than the top speeds currently offered by Rogers and Bell.

“It’s partly an economic development tool that we use,” says Andrew Hilton, who heads communications for Waterfront Toronto. “One of the roles that we have at Waterfront Toronto is to help strengthen the economy of the city of Toronto. The communities we’re building and will build will be far more appealing to people, whether it’s for personal use, or people who work from home. And for commercial use, we’re looking at trying to find ways to attract growth-oriented business on the waterfront.”

These speeds will not be automatic, however. Developers and landlords will have to subscribe to the service for it to be offered in buildings. Some businesses — such as cafes — may offer these speeds to the public, others may not.

The price, to be included in condo fees for condo owners, will be $60 a month. For 350 megabits per second, Rogers is currently charging $226 a month; Bell charges $90 for 175 megabits per second.

In practical terms, 500 megabits per second is roughly equivalent to 60 megabytes per second. Beanfield's service is symmetrical, meaning the speed applies to both downloads and uploads.

For some perspective, however, two Internet service providers in Vancouver are offering double that speed, 1 gigabit per second, as is Google in certain parts of the U.S.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Andrew Hilton

There was a priest at my college, Fr. Findlay, who once told me, a wry grin on his face: “All change is from the devil.”

It’s not an unpopular sentiment in Toronto, it seems.

The latest instance of it came at a recent public meeting on the subject of the new BMX tracks already being put up in Etobicoke’s Centennial Park. Part of the PanAm/Parapan Games, the tracks will be available for use by the public once the games are done.

The public meeting was meant to be informational rather than consultational; construction on the project is already under way. But the 15 to 20 people who showed up were still grumpy.

“It was largely attended by those folks who were never so supportive of the project from the outset, including the former councillor Doug Holyday,” says Catherine Meade, director of the PanAm/Parapan Games capital project.

In addition to concerns about the park’s environmental impact (though the project passed the usual environmental assessment process and got approval from the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority), and the difference between the initial cost estimates and the final budget (the initial budget was for a temporary track built in a parking lot; the final project is for one that will last for several decades), people at the meeting were also worried about the increase in the use of the park that the tracks might inspire.

Others, perhaps among those who did not attend, may think more people using the city’s parks could be a good thing.

The presentation of the work that’s been done — work started at the end of August — and what’s yet to happen was made by architect Roman Mychajlowycz, principal at KMA Architects. Brendan Arnold, the Ontario Cycling Association’s BMX development coach, spoke about the impact of building tracks like this on the sport in the province, including the OCA’s plans to use it themselves for training.

The facility, which will include two tracks, one with a 5-metre ramp open to the public, and one with an 8-metre ramp meant for training and professional use, will be finished by spring.

The PanAm/ParaPan Games are being held in the GTA July 10-26 and Aug. 7-15, 2015.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Catherine Meade

Ground broke last week on a new residence that will form the gateway to Centennial College's Scarborough campus.

Designed by Donald Schmitt, principal with Diamond Schmitt Architects, the new building will house 740 beds, a rooftop conference centre, and a glass-walled culinary school and restaurant on the ground floor. It will double the height of the current tallest building on campus, a library also designed by Diamond Schmitt.

"It will be the first building you see as you approach the campus," Schmitt says, "and it's designed specifically to be the landmark that defines the entry. It will be eight storeys in height, so it will be seen from the 401, and it will give the college quite a bit of presence."

Though the facade and materials will not match the library, Schmitt says the massing and configuration will complement the earlier building.

"We're trying to articulate each of the parts of the building," he says, "with a high level of transparency in the culinary areas, and on every floor of the residences there are these enormous lounges that are all clad in glass, so there will be huge bay windows that project on every level on all four facades."

One of the more novel aspects of the building has less to do with how it was designed than how came together. It's a partnership between Centennial and Knightstone Capital Management, who are the developers and will be managing the building once it's complete. (As Schmitt points out, though government funding is available for academic buildings, academic institutions have to come up with their own schemes for residences.)

Schmitt estimates the 353,500 square foot building, for which Knightstone will be seeking LEED Silver certification, will be ready for students by September, 2016.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Donald Schmitt

Toronto's ravines take up 10 times the amount of acreage of Manhattan's entire park system. And given that Manhattan and Toronto have roughly the same daytime population - about 3 million — we have a lot of grass to frolic in.

But the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority doesn't think we're taking full advantage of this aspect of the urban ecosystem.

"We have all these wonderful ravines running through our city and a lot of people don't know they're there," says Steven Heuchert, the TRCA's senior manager of planning and development.

Though he thinks the city's done "a pretty good job" of keeping the system reasonably natural, Heuchert thinks the next step is incorporation the ravines into the city, and the city into the ravines.

"For example, a lot of entrances to these ravines are nothing more than a little pathway put there to accommodate some sort of infrastructure," he says. "There may be a pipe there and maintenance people need to get in to work on the pipe, but we don't make these things generally accessible to the public."

Heuchert gave a talk on Oct. 9, hosted by the TRCA, on his thoughts about where the ravines have come from, and where they ought to be going to. It was part of a series of talks in the Ravine Portal exhibition that will be continued tomorrow night by the landscape architects of the Lower Don Master Plan, which Heuchert says puts into practice on a relatively small scale the ideas he thinks should be extended to the entire ravine system.

"The Lower Don Master Plan and the work that Evergreen is doing to try to connect their site into the city a little better are good examples of what I was speaking to in my presentation," Heuchert says, "looking at design solutions to make people recognize that the ravines are there, getting them in in a co-ordinated fashion."

Tomorrow's talk, titled "Possible Futures," will include Seana Irvine, Chief Operating Officer of Evergreen, with Bryce Miranda and Brent Raymond, landscape architects and partners at DTAH.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Steven Heuchert

A major new transit-friendly development is almost ready to go ahead near the Kipling subway station and the future Metrolinx Kipling mobility hub.

The Kip District, being developed by Concert Properties, is a re-imaginging of a large site originally owned by Canadian Tire, who got the initial approvals for 1.1 million square feet of density back in 2005, equivalent to a 4.23 density.

And Concert thinks that will still work fine.

"We want to move the density around," says Andrew Gray, vice president of Vancouver-based Concert Properties' eastern region and former vice president of development with Waterfront Toronto, "but we don't want to increase the density."

The original Canadian Tire submission envisioned much of the ground covered in relatively squat buildings. Concert is planning to squeeze them upwards into higher buildings that allow for more green space, including a central square.

They also intend to build a two-level parking garage underneath the entire site, and include retail at the ground level of the buildings to encourage local activity.

"We really wanted to emphasize a quality public realm," Gray says. "You can leave your car, walk around the site at grade, and in the winter walk through the parking garage, because it'll be heated. It's a five-minute walk to Kipling station."

The first phase of what Gray figures will be a 10-year project will be going before the city's Committee of Adjustment on Nov. 13 for approval of, among other things, the initial 90-metre tower designed by IBI Page and Steele.

Given its proximity to the planned mobility hub, which would include a new regional bus terminal, Gray says that, over the decade it will take to build, the development's planned parking facilities may be reduced.

The old Canadian Tire store is being demolished now, in expectation of some form of approval in the offing.

The Kip District, if it goes ahead, will join developments by Tridel and others centred on Kipling station, all looking to take advantage of the area's access to the subway system and western-bound roads, as well as its relative proximity to Pearson airport.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Andrew Gray

Waterfront Toronto is not satisfied to wait until the East Bayfront is finished before opening it up to cyclists. It wants them there now.

And so they’re building an interim cycling infrastructure (and one for pedestrians as well), that will serve the burgeoning area until development and funding are in place.

“East Bayfront was a formerly industrial part of the waterfront,” says Waterfront spokeswoman Sam Gileno. “It lacked basic infrastructure such as a continuous sidewalk on the south side of the street. The full revitalization of Queens Quay in this area is dependent on funding for the East Bayfront LRT. The interim pedestrian and cyclists improvements will help connect the area until funding for this important transit line is in place and construction is complete.”

According to Gileno, there are two major projects getting underway.

First is a cyclist network.

“We will create a continuous off-street Martin Goodman Trail on the south side of Queens Quay which will separate cyclists from motor vehicles along the waterfront,” she says. “By spring, 2015, when both this project and the revitalization of Queens Quay are complete, the Martin Goodman Trail will be in place from Bathurst Street all the way to Parliament Street.”

The second is a continuous sidewalk for pedestrians.

“Currently the sidewalk in this area is an asphalt path,” she says. “It will be replaced with a city standard concrete sidewalk with landscaping alongside. A north-south pedestrian crosswalk will also be added along the east side of the Parliament Street intersection.”

The two will cost $1.8 million, which includes both hard and soft costs, and will remain in place until Queens Quay has been fully renovated.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Sam Gileno

Chief city planner Jennifer Keesmaat is the star of a new short film by Freeman House Productions, a Toronto firm doing a series about creative people called The Guild. The project does Keesmaat, and the city, a big favour. In the seven-and-a-half-minute black-and-white film, Keesmaat  makes urban planning sound like fun.

“I believe we are inherently creative as a species,” she says at the outset. “I'm a city-builder. I build cities every day. That's my job.

“It's really tricky for me to walk down the street without looking at the shape of a building, the way the entrances are shaped, the width of a sidewalk.”

Though people looking for Toronto specifics will be disappointed – this little film is all blue-sky, big-picture stuff – the way Keesmaat thinks about her profession, as a mix of engineering and art, should make us all sleep a little better at night as our city, as dreamt up by her, coalesces around us.

Writer: Bert Archer

The planners are taking to the streets again.

After a successful inaugural event in 2013, which saw city planning staff meet and talk with more than 1,700 Torontonians in 20 locations across the city, Planners in Public Space (PiPS) is returning with it's $5,000 budget to take city planning to the people.

"The information we received was broad and ranged from topics such as the Ontario Municipal Board to City governance [to] what worked (and what didn't) with respect to planning City-wide and in a local context.," says planner Giulio Cescato, who noted this is vital to informing the city's planning options. "As planners, our primary ethical responsibility is to the public interest, and PiPS helps connect us with the public in a way we haven't done before," he continues.

Perhaps PIPS greatest success last year was its ability to get up close with the public and educate them on what planning is, and what planners do. 

"An informed and educated public is key to effective public consultation, and the extent to which we value feedback from the community is based on our efforts to empower them. PiPS is a step to achieving that goal," Cescato says.

The initiative, modelled on something similar in Melbourne, Australia, is focusing this year on three planning programs, which the department's calling ResetTO, Growing Conversations and Feeling Congested.

"ResetTO is about bringing forward a Development Permit System, which is a more streamlined and predictable way of dealing with development applications," Cescato says. "Although its been in the Planning Act for a long time, it hasn't really been implemented before and there's a lot of confusion about what it is."

Growing Conversations on the other hand is City Planning's "new outreach program centred around how we undertake community consultation itself. Growing Conversations will examine how City Planning undertakes public consultation particularly in regards to Planning Applications. The initiative will see City Planning going to the community and stakeholders to ask how we could do it better.

Finally, "Feeling Congested is the ongoing consultation process on reducing congestion and improving public transit both from an infrastructure and planning point of view."

Cescato points out, however, that in addition to the focus areas, people are welcome to talk to planners about any issue that interests or concerns them.

PiPS runs until Aug. 27. Dates, places and times are available here.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Giulio Cescato

The Distillery district isn't leaving its industrial heritage entirely behind it.

The big building currently going up on Parliament just north of Mill – five storeys, 125,000 square feet, no windows – will be a data centre.

"The building houses mainly computer racks for storing data," says architect Nicola Casciato with WZMH.

In a quickly developing part of town that includes not only the Distillery District, but the new Canary District, Bayside and the rest of the burgeoning East Port Lands, a windowless building filled with machinery could really weigh the place down.

"The architectural challenge was to design a building located within a rich architectural neighbourhood that has no windows," Casciato says. "Architects typically use windows to provide urban animation, in this case, the animation was provided through a richly detailed terra cotta façade system that recalls early computer punch card technology and responds to the local brick environment."

Urbacon, the Toronto- and Montreal-based construction and development company in charge of the project, did not want to discuss the building.

The data centre is being built in two sections, and what's visible now are three of the first five floors of the first section.

Construction began in March, 2013 and is scheduled for completion by the end of the year.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Nicola Casciato

Alongside the new condos going into the old Royal Connaught Hotel in Hamilton, an entirely new Gore Park will start to emerge this summer in a roughly $7-million, three-phase project the city hopes will give Hamilton that post-Steeltown boost it's been trying to achieve for the past decade or so.

Born of a transportation study of an adjacent portion of King Street, the Gore Park revitalization process blossomed into a project of its own, the details of which were hashed out over several years of public meetings.

"This space is as old as Hamilton itself," says Le'Ann Seely, supervisor of park planning and development for the city, "and the people of Hamilton care deeply about how it is handled."

The project's first phase will include some pedestrianization from James to Catherine Street along the park's north edge, as well as along King Street on the south border, refurbishing the cenotaph, the construction of one large and several smaller memorial walls to recognize Hamilton's veterans, relocating the statue of Sir John Macdonald, and the planting of trees.

"We hope it will achieve a high-quality downtown area that is representative of the economic strength and civic pride of Hamilton," Seely says of the entire project, which includes two as yet unfunded phases. "The economics of place-making suggest that public realm improvements that are pedestrian-focused are good for the economics of a city. Pedestrianization connects people with a place, making the place feel important and a destination, versus a space they rushed past on their way somewhere else. People therefore become more aware of a space and what is in it, and near it, which is good for business."

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Le'Ann Seely