The Roncesvalles neighbourhood where the Wabash Community Recreation Centre is meant to be built.Glenn Lowson/The Globe and Mail
The process began more than a decade ago. In 2016, Toronto’s parks department announced a recreation centre in the gentrified Roncesvalles area. The plan sounded straightforward: a new pool-and-gym complex, budgeted at $40-million, opening around 2023.
Then the city asked the neighbours for their thoughts.
Today, the project, now called the Wabash Community Recreation Centre, has not yet begun construction. Its opening has slipped to 2029. Its cost has climbed to roughly $113-million, nearly triple the original estimate.
What happened at Wabash is not a one-off. It is an unusually clear example of how public projects across Canada grow slower, more expensive and more compromised. Instead of results, we privilege endless process; the results often are neither good nor cheap.
Community engagement is central to contemporary planning. It emerged, reasonably, as a corrective to the aggressive urban renewal of the mid-20th century. Toronto’s parks and recreation division has embraced this ethos with particular enthusiasm; it has about a dozen consultation specialists on staff and private consultants on call.
This work is valuable within limits. But it can go too far, so that when architects and landscape architects are finally hired – the people trained to deal with space, structure and budgets – key decisions have been made, sometimes badly.
That is what happened at Wabash, where long delays and an open-ended process led to an unnecessarily complex and costly design.
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When the city opened Sorauren Park in 1995, local volunteers played a strong role. Local group Friends of Sorauren Park included architects and other professionals and their advocacy got results from the city. It renovated an old office building for park use and built a “town square” that hosts markets and movie nights. Volunteers brought the place to life.
But in 2016, after sustained effort from the Friends, the city agreed to build a new “community centre” to serve the local area. In Toronto that now means a big athletic facility and the process grew baroque. The initial plan was sensible, with a two-storey, gym-and-pool building incorporating the mill. But some Friends and others objected that the new construction would erase the new town square.
In 2018, the building was paused. What followed: More process, consultation and conceptual design about the shape of the building. In the private sector, such a design process might take three weeks. Here it took three years, from 2020 to 2023. Meanwhile construction costs rose sharply.
Architects Diamond Schmitt were asked to produce five options for the building’s configuration. (Their fees tripled, too.) Locals were asked to vote, and – informed perhaps by a Friends flyer campaign – picked a scheme called “the Angler.” Instead of two storeys, the building rises to four; instead of a simple box, it takes the form of a long, contorted bar hanging over the existing mill building.
Any building professional knows at a glance that such a building will be costly. Voila: $113-million, before construction even starts.
Is it worth it? Daniel Fusca, the parks department’s energetic manager of public consultation, has presented this project in talks and online as a model of community-led design.
It is not. Rather, it shows what happens when there are too many cooks in the community kitchen. The building is shaping up as a gawky monolith. Stacking the gym on the third floor has added extra hallways and stairs; meanwhile the lobby, which should anchor public life, seems cramped. Drawings suggest the interiors will feature the antiseptic corporate modernism of so many Canadian public buildings.
Instead, the city could have followed the example of jurisdictions such as Montreal, run a tight design competition, and hired exceptional architects and landscape architects. Neighbours could have participated alongside experts, asking deeper questions: What should a community building do and how can it be easily adapted over the 75 years of its life?
Imagine a two-storey centre of the highest quality, an efficient building with the best equipment and fixtures. Surround it with lush, well-maintained gardens full of seating and shade trees. Add a café to reinforce the community spirit that has been built here and provide a place to simply hang out.
This could have been open years ago, with $40-million left for other priorities. What would the neighbours have thought of that?