For the longest time, Toronto had been accused of turning its back on the waterfront. The hulking Gardiner Expressway cut the downtown core off from Lake Ontario, and the surrounding port lands were mostly relegated to industrial uses. But over the past 25 years, slowly but surely, the landscape has changed, and landscape architecture and ecological engineering were in fact the driving forces behind all the new development — commercial, residential and park space — that has not only remade the waterfront into a thriving urban ecosystem but also reshaped the city. Where Toronto’s waterfront was once compared negatively to Chicago’s, the two are more evenly matched today: We don’t have The Bean, but we do have a growing network of inspiring parks and public spaces, from the Bentway beneath the Gardiner to the WaveDecks on Queens Quay Boulevard, from Sugar Beach across from the Redpath Sugar Refinery to Corktown Common in the West Don Lands. We can even marvel at the rerouting of the Don River and how that massive undertaking has unfurled new landscapes like Biidaasige Park and the Ookwemin Minnising development to come.
The 25th anniversary of Waterfront Toronto, an agency formed by all three levels of government to steer the revitalization, is an auspicious moment for discussion and debate. “Leading With Landscape,” a conference and exhibition taking place from October 1 to 3, brings together the main players in this ongoing project. It includes Waterfront Toronto’s Chris Glaisek and Pina Mallozzi alongside longtime ecology advocates like Ken Greenberg and Nina-Marie Lister; the landscape architects and urbanists, like Adriaan Geuze and Shelley Long of West 8 and Michael Van Valkenburgh of MVVA, who have been involved from the beginning, as well as those who will shape the next phases, like Rasmus Astrup of SLA, and Angie Jim Osman and Alfredo Caraballo of Allies and Morrison; the cultural leaders who have animating the spaces in and around the Gardiner, like the Bentway’s Ilana Altman; and the Indigenous practitioners, like Matthew Hickey of Two Row, who have guided new connections to place rooted in Indigenous ways of knowing. The event kicks off with the book launch of How to Build a River by Ryan Walker and Vid Ingelevics, who have documented the Don River’s transformation up to the present moment. (You can see the full program here: leadingwithlandscape.daniels.utoronto.ca/program)
Fadi Masoud, director of the Master of Landscape Architecture program at U of T’s Daniels Faculty, and the main organizer of the conference, explains that the organizing structure of the event follows the narrative landscape of the waterfront itself: “a tapestry of transformational, regenerative, and socio-culturally resonant landscapes. The exhibition [in Larry Wayne Richards Gallery at One Spadina Crescent] showcases Toronto’s waterfront parks and public realm projects in thematic and typological clusters, communicating the value of these investments to the public.”
We chatted with Masoud about how the conference presents the waterfront’s transformation as an ongoing endeavour that is increasingly centring climate change adaptation and Indigineity alongside economic regeneration. And, of course, the development of new residential neighbourhoods in places where they were previously impossible to imagine.
“You’re starting to see, in very visible terms, how the academic theories around all of this landscape urbanism and landscape thinking are manifesting physically and spatially,” says Fasoud. “It’s a moment to celebrate that, and to celebrate it in the academic context so that we can discuss it on its merits — not just from a political point of view, but how did it all come to be? In the places where the parks opened first, like Corktown Common and Sugar Beach, it’s visible just how much the public realm had shaped the success of these neighbourhoods. And now that they’re moving on to the next phase of the Port Lands and Ookwemin Minising, the biggest scale of them all, it feels like a nice moment between the past and the future to talk about this work. It’s a celebration, a retrospective, and then looking forward to what worked and what lessons could still be learned, not just for the waterfront but for the city as a whole.”
The title of the conference, “Leading With Landscape,” reflects the ethos and raison d’etre of Waterfront Toronto, which was to make landscape the foundation of city building. New green spaces, spongey and resilient, could be cultivated on former brownfields to make formerly flood-prone industrial lands more amenable to urban planning and landscapes would provide the vital infrastructure for new commercial and residential developments. Masoud points to the early example of Corktown Common: “These are parks that, if they were not built, we couldn’t build anything else. They are critical. Corktown Common is a large flood-protection landform that then allowed the Canary District to be built, and the same is now happening towards the whole east end of the waterfront. It’s essentially using the parks as infrastructure for enabling the city to develop those lands while creating cultural value.”
“Leading With Landscape” also delves into what has gone into cultivating all of the pieces that have coalesced into the bigger vision for the waterfront, from design competitions and design panel deliberations to the multidisciplinary teams and resources needed to realize new urban amenities. Good things do indeed take time. “Maybe unlike architecture in Toronto, landscape architecture — at least especially on the waterfront — has been really good, and it can become a model for the rest of the city when it comes to thinking about public realm investments, streetscapes and climate.”
And just as the waterfront has evolved, so has our thinking about landscape. Most important, our understanding of Indigenous ways of knowing has informed the latest projects along the lake even if they weren’t included in the beginning phases. “Inherent to landscape is how it connects to reconciliation,” says Masoud. “Revitalizing the mouth of the Don and bringing it back is a form of reconciliation because it has also started to bring back fish and wildlife and other beings. And then we all have to figure out how to spell Biidaasige Park and pronounce Ookwemin Minising until we learn it, and that’s a form of reconciliation. That’s what a lot of our Indigenous colleagues will tell us, even though [the development] is still embedded in colonial land.”
While the waterfront project continues apace, as new parks and neighbourhoods are still burgeoning (and some promised features, like a new ferry terminal, remain undelivered), one of the most important future considerations is care: “It’s really important to think about the long-term maintenance and management of these parks,” says Masoud. “It’s not enough to just make them and leave them. We don’t have a vision for that care, the stewardship, the long-term thinking of how does design and maintenance come together — and again, that’s a problem of Toronto at large. How do we quantify the value of what is generated by these parks? How do we capture the value? These parks are the reason why development will happen. So, how does the development then continue to pay for the maintenance?”
Revisit AZURE’s past coverage on Toronto’s waterfront here:
On Biidaasige Park
Everyone Say Biidaasige: Toronto’s Marvellous Park Is Just the Beginning for a New Port Lands and Biidaasige Park Raises the Bar for Toronto’s Public Realm
On Ookwemin Minising
Toronto’s Next Waterfront Development Promises to Put the Pedestrian Experience First
On Canary District
Instant City: What the Pan Am Village Means for Toronto’s Waterfront and Instant City: 12 New Developments on Toronto’s Waterfront
On Queens Quay
Toronto’s Beautiful New Waterfront Boulevard
On Future Waterfront Visions – Then and Now
5 Brilliant Proposals for Toronto’s New Ferry Terminal
Life After Sidewalk: A Beautiful Vision for Toronto’s Quayside
The post “Leading With Landscape” Charts 25 City-Shaping Years of Waterfront Toronto appeared first on Azure Magazine.
