If Toronto can’t imagine its future, Doug Ford will

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If you leave a vacuum, something will fill it. Toronto has left exactly such a gap at Exhibition Place, 78 hectares in the heart of the city, where Premier Doug Ford confirmed Friday he is considering building convention centre space.

Is there any evidence that this is the best way to spend multibillions on tourism? Of course not. But the bigger question is whether Toronto can articulate a clear vision for its future. Exhibition Place is symptomatic of a larger lack of ideas. For decades, it has limped along, building windowless sheds and maintaining an ocean of parking lots. The city has offered no sense of what this historic site could mean for residents, visitors or locals.

Toronto’s government is generally incapable of imagining transformation. Planning exercises for Exhibition Place and Toronto Island Park over the past decade have been embarrassingly timid: blobs on maps, calls to maintain the status quo. Nothing to stir the blood.

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Mr. Ford has ideas. Unfortunately, they are terrible. A massive convention facility – like cities such as Cincinnati and Milwaukee. An artificial island. (One expert called it “insane.”) Jets at Billy Bishop Airport, too, a facility handling less than 5 per cent of city air traffic. The government leaked these ideas through a friendly journalist, presumably to stir the mud before this year’s municipal election.

Their vision would add up to a dystopian mess on the waterfront. Pummel Ontario Place with a waterpark, parking garage and a diminished Science Centre. Eat up the Exhibition with a shed for visiting dentists. Now: Fill in the harbour for runways and pump fumes over the harbour. Mr. Ford’s big-box waterfront is poison to the carefully derived planning of the past 50 years. It would be a miserable place.

And what does City Hall offer in response? Nothing. No drawings of great parks, no dream of a lively neighbourhood. Eighteen months ago, I asked the landscape architects PUBLIC WORK to reimagine the Island airport as park space. They envisioned lagoons, beaches, and cultural spaces in the old buildings, all within walking distance of the core. Something like this worked in Chicago. It would work here.

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That is the energy Exhibition Place needs. For now, the site remains an easy target. Managed by an arm’s-length agency, it is a place of sports, conventions, rubber-chicken galas, and the CNE for 2½ fleeting weeks a year. New buildings of the past 20 years rise like fortresses, defensive and forgettable. No one, despite the site’s long and colourful history, cares about it much.

That is inexcusable. A subway station is coming. Liberty Village presses against its northern edge. Exhibition Place must engage the city: active public space, restaurants and retail that locals want, and some housing to bring people year round.

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Don Boyle, Exhibition Place CEO, says his team is working on a “concept plan” with landscape architects Studio TLA. One idea: opening the Food Building, currently closed 347 days a year, as a year-round food hall. A good start. But it’s not enough, and why is this being drawn by an undistinguished design firm in a corner of the bureaucracy?

Ford and the city have a better option. Waterfront Toronto – the joint city-provincial-federal agency – has for 25 years been the city’s only consistent source of fresh ideas and vibrant public spaces. They should rethink Exhibition Place, the Island, and what remains of Ontario Place. That organization can bring a key insight: Toronto’s future depends on understanding that this is not blank space but a city. No jets, no sheds, and build it better.