A rendering of the development plan for Ookwemin Minising (formerly Villiers Island), in Toronto.Waterfront Toronto
Rasmus Astrup has a promise about Ookwemin Minising, the island that will be Toronto’s next waterfront neighbourhood. It will be weird.
“This island is a place like nowhere else,” the Danish landscape architect said this week. “The design has to be special; it has to be a little quirky.”
Quirkiness isn’t Toronto’s default setting, but Mr. Astrup and his practice SLA will get to bring some. They’ve been hired on a team to rework Ookwemin (formerly Villiers Island), the 40-hectare new district on Toronto’s port lands framed by the Don River. This year they’ll deliver a design for the streets and parks; they will also review the plan to find room for more housing.
This is more than a procedural next step. It suggests a potential pivot in how Toronto imagines itself. The design team includes Allies & Morrison, the London practice behind the transformation of King’s Cross; Indigenous-led Trophic Design; global engineering firm GHD; the German climate engineers at Transsolar; accessibility consultants Level Playing Field; and community engagement by Monumental Projects. In this group, SLA and Allies are the insurgents. Their projects are messy, green and intensely human – reflecting the beautiful chaos of a piecemeal city and the hidden order of an ecosystem.
“We wanted to signal that this is not a typical city project,” Toronto Chief Planner Jason Thorne said this week at a meeting on the island. “That’s why we brought in an international design team.” And, he added, this new effort “is not just a planning exercise. We’re all committed to seeing this realized.”
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Already this part of the city has seen ambitious design. The Port Lands Flood Protection Project, nearly complete, rearranged the mouth of the Don River and created this new island; the river now frames the east and south side of Ookwemin Minising, while the old Keating Channel flows past the northern edge into Lake Ontario. The river scheme is an extraordinary project led by landscape architects Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates. What was a barren industrial zone is now the river’s new mouth: a snaking channel surrounded by exciting parks and wetlands that look like they’ve been there forever.
Next door, the Ookwemin plan didn’t measure up. Of the island’s 40 hectares, 22 per cent is devoted to streets and sidewalks. As I wrote last year, this reflected the dubious ideas of the city’s Urban Design staff: Massively wide streets. Buildings with bulky “podium” bases and skinny towers above. Parks that are large, surrounded by roads and relentlessly sunny. This dogma has never produced a nice place, but it persists.
Sankt Kjeld's Square and Bryggervangen in Copenhagen, a nature-based urban development project completed in 2019 by SLA.Supplied
Rendering of Beltline Yards in Toronto, a mixed-use urban development project led by Allies & Morrison.Hullmark
SLA, Allies & Morrison and colleagues will challenge it. Allies & Morrison’s urban design team is best known for designing the King’s Cross neighbourhood in London; there, and in two large new projects in Toronto, they like to weave together buildings and open space to create “a push and pull,” as Alfredo Caraballo of Allies & Morrison says, “a blurring between urban blocks and open spaces.”
“The public realm isn’t just parks,” Mr. Caraballo adds. “It’s the spaces in between buildings, streets that feel welcoming, places for children to play. Density matters, but so does intimacy and scale. We’re asking: What makes a good life in a city? How can we design for that?”
The answer includes thinking deeply about water. GHD, the infrastructure firm working alongside SLA, will thread hydrology into every part of the design. Their task is to make rainwater visible, catching it with carefully designed landscapes full of Indigenous plants. As Mr. Astrup puts it, “We want the landscape to work like a sponge.” That means wetlands, permeable surfaces, and moments of encounter – an engineered ecology that supports both resilience and delight. Their work shows deep technical understanding as well as an intuitive sense of what makes a great urban space: lots of people, lots of variety of spaces, activities and atmospheres, and a strong dash of green.
That ecological ambition pairs with a cultural one. Trophic Design, the Indigenous-led firm on the team, will bring a different way of seeing. Their presence affirms the need to honour the Don’s history as a gathering place, a site of nourishment and meaning for millennia. “They’re not consultants,” Mr. Astrup says. “They are co-designers.”
How far will this rethink go? Usually, redesigning blocks and street layouts once they’ve been drafted would be heresy. But Toronto – for once – seems to be giving this team creative licence. Chris Glaisek, chief planning and design officer at Waterfront Toronto, is clear: “We were looking for a team that would challenge the status quo.” They’ve found one. Now the test is whether the city will let them deliver a new kind of place.
(June 10, 2025) An updated rendering of the Beltline Yards was added to this article.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to list Monumental Projects, which will handle community engagement, among the design team.