Governments — not profit-seeking corporations — should drive solutions to Toronto’s big post-pandemic challenges, say local graduate students who captured a prestigious international prize for urban thinking and design.
The five students from Ryerson University, York University and the University of Toronto recently beat more than 100 teams from the U.S., Canada and Singapore to win the Urban Land Institute’s Gerald D. Hines Student Urban Design Competition.
The Toronto-based students bested other finalists from Georgia, Texas, California, Pennsylvania and New York to clinch the $50,000 (U.S.) prize for best detailed redevelopment plan for a large-scale urban site.
Although they won for professionally presented solutions to housing affordability, equity, transportation, mobility, sustainability and resilience on a patch of central Kansas City — the organizers’ choice — the winners told the Star that the principles and solutions are just as applicable to Toronto.
“There are lots of similarities in what you’re striving for — affordable housing, expanding transit and active (non-motor) transportation, building and expanding the city in a sustainable manner,” said Leorah Klein, a Ryerson Urban Planning student and the only Toronto-raised member of the team.
“Those (issues) are key things Toronto needs to focus on but are also elements we incorporated into our proposal” for Kansas City’s East Village neighbourhood.
Organizers applauded the Toronto team’s “Fusion” concept that eschewed megaprojects, like a stadium or big tourist draw, for a “welcoming and affordable mixed-use development” with connectivity and environmental resilience.
Food is a major focus of their proposed redeveloped neighbourhood, based on the region’s agricultural heritage and the benefits of small-scale food production.
While the pandemic wasn’t strictly part of the competition, it was on everyone’s minds because it forced the finalists to remotely study the Missouri city and present their plans to judges from the Washington, D.C.-based institute.
The difficulty in planning and building a 21st-century hyper-connected sustainable community from the ground up will sound familiar to Torontonians, thanks to the failed Sidewalk Labs-Waterfront Toronto partnership on the east waterfront.
One lesson the Toronto students drew from those efforts to develop a “smart” neighbourhood/living laboratory, solving urban issues, was control.
Sidewalk Labs, a Manhattan sister company to online search giant Google, was originally the project’s “co-master developer.” Amid public angst over data privacy and more, governmental agency Waterfront Toronto belatedly named itself the lead partner.
Sidewalk Labs cancelled the venture one year ago, mid-pandemic. Waterfront Toronto is searching for a new development partner.
“The concept of needing to become its own insular place is a barrier in itself,” Klein said of the failed project during the Star’s interview with four of the five Toronto team members about possible solutions to Toronto’s many challenges.
Also, Sidewalk Labs had good ideas and solutions, she said, but “ultimately when it’s a revenue-generating organization, that’s driving decision-making.” Private firms offer valuable tools but it’s up to government to assess those tools and “take the driver’s seat when it comes to smart cities or city-building decision-making.”
Here are thoughts on key issues facing Toronto from Klein; Yanlin Zhou, who studies real estate and infrastructure at York; Chenyi Xu, a U of T architecture student; and Frances Grout-Brown, a Ryerson urban planning student.
The fifth winner, Ruotian Tan, a U of T urban design student, was not available.
Housing: Ensuring good, affordable shelter in a relative boom town like Toronto, with dramatic and growing income inequality, is the city’s most important and likely toughest challenge, they agreed. Relying only on private developers to increase supply and fill the gap isn’t enough.
“Upzoning” — changing rules to allow and encourage housing for duplexes, triplexes and other multi-family buildings over single-family homes — is one tool which can work with inclusionary zoning, where builders must include some affordable housing in their developments.
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Team members also said allowing rooming houses across Toronto will relieve pressure on low-income earners, as would governments encouraging the building of co-ops and other non-profit housing separate from strictly private- or government-built homes, and long-term leases of government sites to create affordable homes.
Governments, they say, need programs to preserve deeply affordable existing rental housing so organizations can acquire the units and keep them that way.
Toronto is doing better at affordable housing than his Chinese hometown but can learn lessons from Hong Kong, Xu said. Almost half of people in notoriously expensive Hong Kong live in heavily subsidized public housing.
Toronto’s sea of single-family homes could be transformed via “gentle density” — duplexes, triplexes and lowrise buildings with affordable and market-rate homes. The contrast in aerial photos is shocking, they said, between towers downtown and in line north surrounded by flat city.
Smart city technology: As with housing, ensuring government and not private business decides what works best for residents is key, the students agreed. But they have vastly different experiences of how much privacy people are willing to trade for the sake of convenience.
Zhou, from Shanghai, says she is used to the “Chinese perspective” where it’s understood the government is widely using facial recognition technology.
“On one hand I feel like it brings some privacy concerns,” Zhou says. “But it also brings a convenience because you could quickly access the airport or the train station with your face and ID, without an officer checking.”
Torontonians are understandably wary, she says, but that shouldn’t stop the government from consulting people on different technological solutions.
Grout-Brown spent time living in Berlin and says the tolerance there for surrendering digital privacy is much lower than in Canada.
Even the fact that the government can flash emergency alerts on your personal mobile phone here would shock Berliners, she said, adding “we need to have a lot more conversations around data privacy.”
Transportation: The teammates agreed Toronto has dramatically outgrown its transit network, something the Ontario government hopes to start to remedy with the Ontario Line expansion.
But the provincial and federal governments could move beyond just funding construction to help pay for the operation of mass transit in Canada’s biggest city.
Helping future citizens move around the city is more than just transit, they added, with increased focus on active transportations, such as walking and cycling, and also electric scooters and other “micromobility” solutions.
“I think it’s important for the network to be there, for there to be a lane there for bikes or scooters or whatever people choose,” Klein said, but “it’s less on the city to create the actual product and more to create the actual network that enables people to move around.”
Post-pandemic city: They agree COVID-19 will change Toronto’s trajectory in unpredictable ways. Many people will want to continue working remotely at least part of the time, they said, potentially freeing up space in office towers for businesses that normally couldn’t be downtown and also for housing.
The disruption presents an opportunity to really rethink and improve spaces where Torontonians live and work, Zhou says. “I think this is a really good chance for us to rethink how to make buildings more sustainable and good for people’s health.”
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