The rising full moon and Toronto skyline are lit by the setting sun on Feb. 1.Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press
What will Toronto look like in the future? Does anyone know? If so, it’s the city’s director of Urban Design, an obscure job within City Planning that is also incredibly important. Soon it will open up when the incumbent, Emilia Floro, retires after five years in the job.
This is a rare chance to rethink how Toronto will evolve. The city cannot afford to waste it.
Chief planner Jason Thorne, a recent arrival to the department himself, will choose a replacement. “Toronto is a world-class city and we are going to be looking for world-class talent,” he said this week. “This is an opportunity that I am sure is going to attract interest locally and from around the world.”
That sounds like a call for fresh ideas and fresh voices. The new head should be hired immediately and must be an outsider to City Hall. Two pressing tasks for the director stand out: simplify a design agenda that focuses on the streetscape, and raise the quality of the city’s own public projects.
Waterfront Toronto goes big on housing and urban design with new development
Let’s be honest. Things are not going well with Toronto urbanism. While the city is thriving in many ways, nobody likes its new buildings. When a tower or townhouse is finished, locals of every stripe (including designers) usually join together in complaining.
They often have a point. The new buildings are mostly towers. They look alike, and they are often made of glass. The ground floor will hold a nail salon and a Shoppers Drug Mart. Yes, yes and yes.
If anything is responsible for this – albeit not entirely – it is the city’s urban design apparatus. Located within City Planning, urban designers set policy for public space and the buildings around it. Their policies date back as much as three decades.
Much of their work is reactive, attempting to massage development proposals from the private sector. That process is murky and mostly happens behind closed doors. It is rarely clear who made which call or why.
But when you see a tall tower with a chunky base, you are seeing a “tower and podium,” an idea borrowed from Vancouver and written into the Tall Building Design Guidelines (2013). It probably has “stepbacks” at the top to reduce its bulk. If the tower has 4.5-metre-high windows along the street, this too reflects policy. If those windows are obscured by vinyl advertising, something has gone wrong. This happens a lot.
Urban design is an in-between profession, practised by architects and landscape architects and occasionally people from neither camp. It relies on judgment and collaboration. In the Toronto of the past 20 years, it has not fared well. Development has boomed, welcomed by provincial policy; yet City Hall has blocked growth in most of the city. Lawyers and planners sort out the mess. Only a few design ideas, such as tower-and-podium, survive the negotiations.
Meanwhile, public space – the zone that city government actually controls – has been neglected. City planning can’t imagine any new ideas for sites such as Exhibition Place. New parks are acreages of vagueness. Recreation centres are bloated big boxes surrounded by parking lots. Nobody is thinking deeply about what a park or a public building should be for.
All this can be repaired. But it demands hard questions: Are we making good places? What is the recipe and how do we get everyone to understand it? An honest assessment will show that this beautiful, frustrating, fascinating city is not as good as it could be. Bring on a new director.