TORONTO, CANADA

A plan to renaturalize a vital urban waterway will restore a river delta to its former pristine state — and create a new island in the process

The mouth of Toronto’s Don River, where the 38-kilometre waterway empties into Lake Ontario, was once a shaggy marshland. In the 1880s, however, developers began filling it in, transforming a porous ecosystem into a hard surface suitable for loading docks and power plants. The natural delta no longer exists. As it approaches its southern terminus, the Don now takes a hard westward turn into the Keating Channel, an artificial canal that flows into the lake. During rainy seasons, the water hits this right-angle juncture at high speeds, causing the river to back up — and effectively making the Port Lands where the Don meets the lake a flood plain, much of it unsuitable for housing.

In 2014, the city hired urban planner Melanie Hare, a partner at the consultancy Urban Strategies, to head up a design team for the unlikely landform that will result from a proposed renaturalization of the Don’s base: a new island. (“Right angles?” says Hare. “Rivers never do that.”) Under the renaturalization scheme, the Keating Channel will still exist, but the Don itself will travel south into a restored delta before meandering west to the lake. The banks of the new mouth will be soft, deep and grassy — designed to hold and absorb floodwaters. And the new waterway, when it’s completed in 2024, will carve out a chunk of land — 35-hectare Villiers Island — from the Toronto lakefront.

This is something novel: a whole new space, in crowded downtown Toronto, zoned for residential use and designed almost entirely from scratch. The island will have mixed-used amenities (making driving unnecessary) and a district energy source (specifically a power generator that serves multiple dwellings at once and is therefore more efficient than the one-furnace-per-household model). Its streetscape will be laid out like a theatre, with the highest seats in the back: Low-rise houses will absorb southern winter sun, while the taller buildings stand unobtrusively behind them.

Villiers Island will also have what Hare calls “a green skirt.” “Almost all the land on the periphery will be open park space,” she says. “This will give Torontonians a chance to reacquaint themselves with their harbourfront.” The original Port Lands were a reclamation — an attempt to snatch a parcel of land back from the lake. The new island will also be a reclamation, albeit of a different kind: It’ll transform a mere location into something more like a destination.

When Toronto’s Don River is rerouted into a natural channel after a century of industrial infill, 35-hectare Villiers Island will also spring into being. Zoned for residential use and hemmed by a “green skirt,” the new land mass will be bordered to the north by artificial Keating Channel and to the south by the meandering new waterway. The restored river’s deep, grassy banks will also make the area less susceptible to floods.