A rendering shows the plan for the Downsview Airport lands, which will be made into a new district called YZD.Supplied
Too much empty space is bad for a city. Urbanism thrives on tight corners and complex juxtapositions. An airport runway is the opposite of that: a mile of nothing. How then do you turn a strip of asphalt built for takeoffs and landings into a humming public place, and 370 acres of airfields and factories into a city? That is the question now facing Toronto.
Northcrest Developments is remaking the Downsview Airport lands into a new district called YZD, converting the remnants of aviation into a framework for civic life.
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This matters to the city and the country because the site is large and unusual enough to play a major cultural role. Today, the project takes a crucial step: Northcrest has named the American landscape architects Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA) to lead the next stage of the transformation.
In a recent interview, MVVA partners Gullivar Shepard and Emily Mueller De Celis sounded humble. “The best places in the world grow organically over time,” Shepard said. “You can’t just open the gates, have a ribbon cutting and hope it’s a great place. It doesn’t work that way.”
The runway at Downsview Airport in 2019.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
The firm’s goal is to create “urban landscapes” that also deliver “an immersive experience of nature in the city,” Mueller De Celis explained. Some of the runway will be planted; other parts will remain paved for arts, sports, markets and festivals. MVVA’s guidelines will set the ground rules for how buildings meet the land, how tarmac dissolves into parks and how people inhabit the void – while leaving room “to discover how this place wants to evolve.”
Northcrest, owned by public-sector pension funds, plans to stay invested in the site indefinitely. It purchased the airfield, nearly a century old, from Bombardier Aerospace in 2018. Since then, it has hired many consultants, some local and some international, in a sort of rolling think tank on urbanism.
There is a high-level landscape vision from Danish landscape architects SLA, and now a road map, which will give way to detailed design over the next decades. “This is going to take a long time,” Mueller De Celis said bluntly. “You can’t get into too much detail, because you can’t be sure where you’ll end up in 20 years.”
MVVA, based in New York and Boston, is among the world’s top landscape architectural firms. It has a strong local presence thanks to its work for Waterfront Toronto, including the Port Lands Flood Protection Project and the newly opened Biidaasige Park.
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MVVA came out on top in a private design competition that also included Montreal’s CCXA; SLA, from Denmark; and fellow American firms Sasaki and Field Operations.
This list captures some of the world’s best firms, and firms that have rarely been hired by the City of Toronto. This, too, could be good news, bringing a well-funded and ambitious landscape architecture studio to figure out what public places in the city could become.
Some of the runway will be planted, while others will be paved for arts, sports, markets and festivals.Supplied
MMVA’s design team also includes, among others, Montreal firm Belleville Placemaking, which specializes in programming and management of public spaces. Everyone involved at YZD seems to understand that keeping a place vibrant requires inviting the public in and giving them a reason to come. Northcrest hired cultural producer Mitchell Marcus in 2022 to lead such efforts, and they have drawn thousands for skating, movies and to “play on the runway.”
Meanwhile, the development has been quietly moving ahead. Derek Goring, chief executive officer of Northcrest, says it aims to complete one neighbourhood, dubbed the Hangar District, by 2030. The second, the Wilson District, will see a plan (by Field Operations and architects SOM) submitted to the city in early 2026.
The site includes 1.6 million square feet of existing buildings; in addition to homes, Northcrest is now focusing on tenants in life sciences, clean tech and advanced manufacturing, as well as homes and the neighbourhood businesses that will serve them. “We believe design is a differentiator,” Goring says. “It’s one thing that is going to make this place special. And the runway is the most important thing to get right.”
The asphalt that once dictated the movement of planes will now guide the slow incubation of new urban life.