Urban Designers have been waiting for it for ages – and it’s finally here. Heightening. The continuing strength of Toronto’s main streets fuelled by a slowly crawling gentrification has led owners in some districts to realise the potential of their buildings themselves instead of selling out and moving on. The consequence is less main street blockbusting with 10 and 20 story condo monsters with underground parking and more renovations of main street buildings – part of which is heightening, adding a floor or two to your existing building.

Now if only the same attitude would become more pervasive amongst the reams of single family homes that make up the majority of Toronto’s neighbourhoods. Perhaps then we would see more liveable and comfortable apartment units instead of the endless stream of awkwardly renovated houses uncomfortably filling the gap between high rise condo and unattainable single family house.

The current heightening hotspot is College Street west of Ossington, which I believe is a largely Portuguese community but is definitely an emerging hotspot of activity, though less centred around the arts as Queen West West.

Enough said. At the corner of Barton and Albany in the Annex. The first one I saw is at Wells and Albany and is a better stencil than this one. Funny as hell. But I less appreciated the one further west on Barton that was stencilled with “eating animals” – less relevant to a stop sign somehow.

A couple of weeks ago I was walking through this railway underpass on Symington Avenue in Toronto’s west end, north of Dupont Street, when I happened to notice a blue spray-painted word on the concrete retaining wall at the side of the road. The word was “CRIPS”. Now I’m no expert on gang tags, but I do know there are Crips affiliate gangs in Toronto, and I know that their traditional colour is in fact blue. Given the concern in the city of late over a dramatic increase in gun violence, it’s not the most reassuring thing in the world to find a possible declaration of gang territory so close to home (read just around the corner).

The curious part is that the tag had appeared to have disappeared. I went through the underpass several times on my bicycle since first noticing the word and couldn’t find it again. I only rediscovered it about the third time I had walked through the underpass. The reason appeared to be that the blue paint was a little faded (whether because of an attempt to remove it or weathering, I don’t know), and that the difference in lighting underneath the underpass and the slowness of the eye to adapt had rendered it almost invisible to anyone not walking through the underpass on its opposite side.

I honestly don’t know what to think. I would like to tell myself that it’s just some wannabe kids acting up and playing cool. But I’m not sure if that reflects the reality of the gang situation in Toronto. At any rate, the initial almost irrational reaction of fear is I believe unjustified.

I can only think of poor old Tookie (Stanley Williams), co-founder of the original Crips gang in L.A. Tookie was executed by lethal injection in December after being in prison since 1979. Starting in the 1990’s Tookie became one of America’s best known crusaders against gangs and gang-culture, writing many well-respected children’s books on the subject and brokering a peace agreement called the Tookie Protocol for Peace. Sources indicate he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize five times and once for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Unfortunately for Tookie and the rest of us, the first part of his life may have had the more lasting effect on the world, and kids are still being drawn in to the web of violence and the gang life. And we are all the lesser for it. Perhaps one day soon I’ll once again walk up Symington and see nothing more than a benign railway underpass, having managed to keep my faith in this city.

John Barber had an amusing article in the Toronto section of the Globe and Mail today under the title “Dear worry warts: Stop fretting about our city” (see here, but it’s available online by subscription only) – for your pleasure here are excerpted from the article three things Toronto can stop worrying about that relate to urban planning and design:

“Urban living seems to promote a special susceptibility to profitless anxiety. So here are a few things not to worry about, no matter what they say.

“Parking. There is never enough of it and there never will be. But this is not a problem. Problems are things susceptible to solutions. Nobody complains about the ‘bread problem’ because bread isn’t free and some robbers charge $5 a loaf – parking is just another thing you have to pay for, subject to the usual laws of supply and demand. Not having enough of it is an existential urban condition. Ergo parking policy is pointless….

“Gridlock. No such thing has ever occurred in Toronto, a city in which travel of all kinds is still remarkably easy. With apologies to those commuters forced by bad luck, inadequate income or circumstance to travel expressways during rush hours – most commuters make the choice of where to live – there’s really not much to complain about. Indeed, there would be no traffic ‘problem’ at all if local expressways were priced like parking. Occasionally clogged but always free, they’re a bargain. GO Transit is also ludicrously cheap. And the TTC, the most businesslike of local transportation services, is extensive and brutally efficient. The only thing worse than chronic congestion is its absence, a condition known as ‘recession’.

“Advertising. I will never understand why it is considered wrong to stuff as much advertising as possible into the transit system. The ads are the most interesting things you can look at openly on the subway. You can’t see the ceilings of most Japanese subway cars for all the fluttering paper promoting racy tabloids. Streetcar ‘wraps’ are fantastic. The only thing wrong with the new televisions on subway platforms is that the screens are too small.”

I agree heartily with all three with the proviso that as I mentioned in an earlier post (A Little Request of the TTC) the television screens on subway platforms should display the time until the next train, and that I’m not sure if I would classify GO Transit as “ludicrously cheap” since it suffers terribly from having no reasonable integrated regional fare scheme.

Gridlock may in fact be an increasing issue in the 905 but whether or not it truly is a problem is an interesting question, since roads in the 905 will never be able to have the capacity to support the level of car dependency of the 905 in the long term. In that case, gridlock serves the purpose of driving home the point that transit is the only complete solution to mobility in a relatively dense urban area.

Certainly instead of spending so much time worrying about advertising on transit, we should be focussing all our energy towards making the best, most integrated transit system we can, amending the fare subsidy structure, procuring lasting and adequate commitments to transit funding and infrastructure improvements, improving routes and service levels, and experimenting with ways to address the real problems of providing transit in disparate, separated, car dependent suburban areas.

Faced with these concerns, you have to wonder what kind of people think too much advertising classifies as a transit problem in Toronto.

(with apologies to Matt Blackett, the TPSC, and Spacing – I keep picking on them and feel bad about it – they’re not such bad people, and I think Matt left a quite nice comment down on my A Little Request of the TTC post, so really I owe him one – we are all really interested in making the city a better place, we just don’t always agree on what’s wrong and how to fix it)

This might not seem like an urban moment – but since it’s but a few minutes walk from Bloor and Yonge in Toronto, it gives you an idea of the wealth that the ravines give this city. This is the Bloor-Danforth subway line as it crosses the Rosedale Ravine viewed from Bloor Street East. The Rosedale Valley Road can just be seen in the bottom of the photograph. Why we always put a road down the middle of a beautiful valley I don’t know, but it does make for one of the most beautiful roads in the city – it just happens to be mostly used as a shortcut to the Don Valley Parkway for vehicles and bicycles. Curiously enough, in almost every other direction you would see a variety of apartment buildings poking out of the foliage, but in this case we’re looking towards Rosedale itself, one of Canada’s most exclusive residential neighbourhoods.

I’ve seen this project variously named King Liberty, East Liberty Village and Inglis Lands. It is “a 45-acre brownfield site located in the King Street West / Strachan Avenue area, immediately west of downtown Toronto.” The Inglis plant had been on this site off Strachan Avenue since 1881, employing at its peak 17,800 people during the second world war. The company started out building equipment for grist and flour mills, then marine steam engines and waterworks pumping engines, guns for the war effort, then consumer products after the war, including house trailers, oil burner pumps and domestic heaters and stoves, finally adding home laundry products and other home appliances for which Inglis became well known. The closure of the Strachan Inglis plant (affecting 650 employees) was announced one month after the Canada-US Free Trade agreement came into effect in 1989, and 2 years after American giant Whirlpool took a controlling stake in the company.

“The redevelopment of this site is seen as a major opportunity to create a significant new residential neighbourhood and associated employment space providing important “live-work” opportunities. Situated in the northern portion of the Garrison Common area, immediately north of Exhibition Place, these lands will play a strategic role in achieving City of Toronto policies related to residential intensification as well as embracing various smart growth initiatives. Specifically, this mixed-use development will offer this growing community new retail, office and high-tech type users.” (from IBI Group promotional material)

Historic buildings that will remain are in Block 12 (the central park) and Block 8. Both have connections to the old Central Prison for Men which was on this site from 1873 to 1915. The building in the park (Block 12) contains the Chapel of the Prison, is historically listed, and will be preserved as part of the park – though that probably means having a Starbucks put in. The building on Block 8 is the Liberty Storage Warehouse also known as the A. R. Williams Machinery Building at 130 East Liberty Street. This building contains part of the paint shop of the prison dating from circa 1879 – however, despite being historically listed, with many of the features of the warehouse itself (which was completed in 1929) appearing in the listing, only the southern 28m of the building will be “saved” with a 52m tower allowed to occupy the rest of the building’s footprint. The northern portion of the site was a small railway freight yard (which can be seen in the top left of the 1935 aerial photo above – north is to the left with the Exhibition Place buildings to the extreme right). The photo below is from Strachan looking west with the Inglis Plant on the left, the freight yard beyond and the Massey-Harris complex to the right. Pretty much everything in this photo is gone today except for the main railway lines.

Phase 1 was the stacked townhouse development on Block 1 (that can be seen in the 2005 airphoto above) and which is now completed. These stacked towns are basically masquerading as live-work units – but whether any effort has been made to make them flexible enough to truly be live-work is questionable. I personally don’t believe this building type was appropriate; their tight ranking in rows along narrow private (sometimes pedestrian) “streets” does a poor job at promoting a good mixed-use urban image in the area and in really framing the street the way a mixed use apartment building can. To top it off, stacked townhouses in Toronto are just plain ugly most of the time – trying to look like a house but at the density of an apartment building. The marketing behind them is relatively straight-forward though – in Toronto, units with their own ground-level entrances will sell no matter where they are. Note how not a single front facade faces the small park/square on Block 1. This is not quality urban design – despite winning a Canadian Urban Institute “Brownie” award in 2005.

Phase 2 is currently under construction on Block 3 under the name “Liberty Towers” – a 24 storey building with 276 units – it’s a little unclear what else might be on that block though, so my figure of 325 units may or may not be more accurate.

Despite having a 35m height limit, Block 4 was immediately developed as a big-box Dominion supermarket with a large parking lot and a small strip mall – all one-storey. I’d classify that as embarrassing given the location, but I believe the zoning at that end precluded any residential units being built on Block 4.

We’ll see how this one pans out – there’s a chance that once the really dense buildings get in there, they’ll have found a way to save this thing. I’m worried about it though – especially from the perspective of connecivity. Directly to the north on the Massey-Harris lands there was a mixture of ugliness, misdirectedness, and beautiful moments – so lets hope some of these future phases save this area’s ass and that they do a good job on the central park and the rest of the buildings.

This image from IBI Group seems highly optimistic to me and possibly quite deceptive – I can only assume this is meant to be Block 7 looking east, but this building is now allowed to have a c. 4 storey (13m) podium and a c. 20 storey (61m) tower and will very doubtfully be such a “flatiron” signature building (it no longer appears to be so far forward on the block to create the wedge shape). The entire area is still very isolated, especially now that the Front Street Extension appears to be on hold yet again – and I haven’t found anything indicating concrete plans to improve this isolation. I also don’t think that there is enough real urban fabric here to make it a place that could stand on its own.

OK – sorry this took a couple of days – here are the election riding results for urban areas to compare with the pre-election situation of the last post. “Ring Around the Liberals, A Pocket full of Layton. Tories! Tories! We all fall down!” I’ll leave the analysis to the wogs. Well done Vancouver for the largest concentration of NDP seats seen in some time (5 contiguous seats!), and shame on you Alberta – the only province (well – apart from PEI which only has 4 seats) to elect candidates from only one party (boring for the map, no doubt boring in reality) – even the Quebecois have never done that! Kudos to Olivia Chow, Layton and Peggy Nash for stopping Toronto from becoming a big red rash on the country.

Canadian cities outside of Alberta have a little antipathy towards voting Conservative, though suburban areas get increasingly Conservative the further out you get. This all seems like common sense – but for your viewing pleasure (and oddly showing the hard time the NDP has had winning seats even in inner cities) here are maps of the major cities across the country showing the current seat distribution as we go into tomorrow’s election. I think you can figure the colour-coding out. Props to Elections Canada for the mapping.

For a while it’s seemed like Landscape Architects have been increasingly relegated to subservient roles in many areas of their work outside of their core discipline of designing and overseeing construction of built landscapes. Sometimes, hard as it can be to admit, willingness to accept these roles has become a justification for this trend – references to Landscape Architects as simply putting trees and green on plans are saddening largely because of how frequently they are true. However, recent events in the Railway Lands in Toronto have highlighted the ongoing battle over Landscape Architecture’s home turf.

In some ways the momentum of design initiative itself – particularly in the urban environment – has been slipping away from Landscape Architects for some time. Whether it’s because outsiders have much fresher perspectives on the issues of landscape architecture, or overly pragmatic professional associations solidifying mediocre standards and approaches as “best practices”, or a fault in landscape architectural design education, designers without an affiliation to landscape architecture have been successfully winning many large and significant projects within the core discipline of the landscape architecture profession.

From Downsview Park‘s winning design (by Bruce Mau and Rem Koolhaas) to Dundas Square‘s controversial slickness (by Brown + Storey), landscape architects are becoming simply a required member of a team led by an architecture firm for many of the biggest landscape architectural projects in Toronto.

And now, enter some new competition. Douglas Coupland, the author and artist who “coined the term ‘Generation X’ with his book of the same name” has been “hired to design a three-hectare park” in Toronto, according to press reports released last week. The park in question is the new community park required to supplement Concord Adex’s mammoth CityPlace development in the West and Central Railway Lands. The headlines were euphoric: “Impassioned Canadian artist, Douglas Coupland, commissioned to design eight-acre urban park at Concord CityPlace”, “Coupland’s Toboggan Vision”. The Globe and Mail was more realistic – “Author Coupland to help design park”.

Never mind that the press reports are slightly inaccurate. Never mind that Coupland is in effect the artist selected for the City’s public art requirement, was selected independently of the search for a landscape architecture team, and is intended to be “working in tandem with the landscape architect.” Never mind that as far as I can tell that means that the Landscape Architect will be designing the park – and that means Greg Smallenberg of well-regarded Vancouver firm Phillips Farevaag Smallenberg, aided in Toronto by David Leinster of The Planning Partnership.

Is there something about landscape architects that makes them so much more unglamorous than other potential designers? Is there something that makes them unworthy of having the headline even when it’s one of the most significant privately-funded landscape architecture projects in the city in decades? Maybe landscape architects these days lack the vision of other designers or don’t have the same authoritative way of capturing the imagination of the public. Is it landscape architects who have lost their imagination? Let’s face it – they must be doing something wrong if everyone accepts that an artist is needed to create a great park, or that a landscape architect can’t be trusted to come up with a fresh, imaginative and interesting concept.

While on one hand I’m hurt by this attitude towards landscape architects, part of me knows and admits that the profession in Canada does desperately need some freshening up – both in imagination and authority. There are landscape architects doing great, interesting work – from built to theoretical – but we must start to accept that we can no longer take for granted our role as key designers in our core discipline. Just as landscape architects need to fight for their roles at larger scales and at the periphery of the discipline by competition and equivalence with others working in those areas, so they must join the fight in defending their own backyard so to speak – the future of design seems to be the need of designers to prove both their role and their worth regardless of professional affiliation. And the kind of self-examination and re-examination of core principles that this would require may be just what the landscape architectural profession needs.

You do not want to know how long it took to get all this mapping and unit #s together. I’d call that an example of how useless the City is at presenting a comprehensive view of what’s going on. This map is from just east of Bathurst to just west of Dufferin, from the waterfront up to north of Queen. Click it to enlarge and see the number of units for many of the completed, under-construction and proposed developments in this very rapidly changing area. Some figures are estimates (with ? beside).