Lakeside vision a triumph of urbane planning

Tomorrow belongs to the waterfront. Sometime tomorrow at city hall, the much discussed East Bayfront Precinct Plan will finally go before the policy and finance committee. This is the first step in a process that could result in the transformation of downtown Toronto. If the committee accepts the plan, which it should, the next step is council, which has the final say. The plan, two years in the making, proposes a vision of the waterfront as a place where people live, play and work. The newly formed neighbourhood would accommodate 8,000 workers along with 10,000 residents. Though this mix is a critical element of the scheme, the talk so far has been focused on urban planning issues such as the location of parks and proper width of lakeside promenades. These are important questions — get them wrong and the chance of success will be severely hampered — but what has been overlooked in all the shouting and screaming is the idea that the East Bayfront could serve as a template for 21st- century urban redevelopment. The Toronto of the future will consist of compact, high- density, transit-based neighbourhoods where traditional distinctions of residential and commercial are blurred. The plan, which covers the area bounded by Jarvis St., Cherry St., the Gardiner Expressway and Lake Ontario, lays out in detail what this crucial section of the central waterfront could be in 10 or 15 years. Prepared by Boston- based Koetter Kim, the proposal was commissioned by the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corp. Set up four years ago by the three levels of government, the TWRC has not had an easy time of it. Beset by bureaucratic bickering, political indifference and public cynicism, it’s still waiting for the powers needed to do its job.

Despite all this, the TWRC has managed, almost miraculously, to nudge the city to the point where it now finds itself on the verge of doing something radical in its intelligence. Not surprisingly, people and politicians are uncomfortable with this; their normal preference is for the dumb, thoughtless and counterproductive.

Although there have been battles over competing visions, there have been none of the neighbourhood wars that have become such a predictable and distressing feature of development in Toronto. Presumably, this is partly due to the fact that most of the waterfront is empty. The opportunities for NIMBYism and political posturing are almost non- existent. The essence of Koetter Kim’s plan is to ensure the waterfront becomes fully accessible and publicly oriented. A 19-metre walkway will extend along the shoreline, Lake Ontario on one side, shops, restaurants, offices and residences on the other.

Also important is the need to reinforce the north- south connections between the East Bayfront and the rest of downtown. For decades, it has been cut off by the Gardiner and the railway embankment. The strategy is to make the bottom of Jarvis, Sherbourne and Parliament streets into major destinations. That means parks as well as amenities and cultural institutions. Though the plan doesn’t rely on the dismantling of the Gardiner, it anticipates that.

Regardless, the new district will be organized around public transit, most notably a new streetcar line extending east along Queens Quay to Cherry St. Then there’s the waterfront design review panel, which is ready to go. It will examine all proposals to ensure they meet the highest possible standards of architecture and urbanity. The point of all this is that Toronto has a chance to do something on the waterfront that could transform the way we think of the city and how we inhabit it. A moment like this comes along once a generation, if that. It’s a project that could continue the momentum started by the cultural rebuilding campaign and catapult Toronto onto the world stage. And it could all start tomorrow. Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca