Graeme Stewart’s article on the RAC Zone tells the context of the new zone and its possibilities for changing the tower landscape, removing barriers and steps towards more complete, resilient communities across Toronto.

  The  RAC Zone, a partnership between ERA Architects, the Centre for Urban Growth and Renewal, United Way Toronto & York Region, Toronto Public Health and the City of Toronto, has this week been honoured with an OPPI Award of Excellence. Through research, advocacy, and collaboration, this new zoning framework has been developed and is poised for implementation in hundreds of Toronto’s vertical neighbourhoods, that will remove barriers for a range of exciting small-scale businesses and community services. A City-wide zoning…

Elise Hug (Tower Renewal Office, City of Toronto), Jason Thorne (CUG+R, planningAlliance), and ERA’s Graeme Stewart explore the opportunities of the proposed zoning framework, next steps for implementation, and research and policy initiatives moving forward.

The newly proposed ‘Apartment Residential Commercial Zoning’, developed by the Centre for Urban Growth and Renewal, City of Toronto, United Way and other partners features as the cover story in the January / February 2013 issue of the Ontario Planning Journal. Article authors, Elise Hug (Tower Renewal Office, City of Toronto), Jason Thorne (CUG+R, planningAlliance), and ERA’s Graeme Stewart explore the opportunities of the proposed zoning framework, next steps for implementation, and further research and policy initiatives moving forward. The…

Join Graeme Stewart and Ya’el Santopinto as they discuss the Ken Soble Tower retrofit and Tower Renewal Partnership. In the March, Graeme Stewart and Ya’el Santopinto, ERA Architects, sat down with Passive House Canada to discuss the Ken Soble Tower retrofit and Tower Renewal Project. Watch here. “Ultra-low energy retrofits that maintain affordability are not only possible, but critical to preserving and enhancing housing across the country. ” –Graeme Stewart, ERA Architects. Built in 1967, the Ken Soble Tower is…

The Ken Soble Tower Transformation will modernize 146 units of affordable seniors’ housing, while reinvigorating community spaces and outdoor gathering areas, planning for aging-in-place and barrier-free living, and a changing climate. One of the first Passive House retrofits in North America, at 18 storeys and more than 80,000 sqft, the Ken Soble Tower will be one of the largest EnerPHit-certified projects in the world. Slated for completion in 2021, the project will provide residents with improved comfort and control of…

The Tower Renewal Partnership and the City of Toronto recently partnered with the Urban Land Institute (ULI) to bring experts to Toronto for a weeklong visit to explore one of the biggest resilience challenges facing Toronto: retrofitting our aging apartment towers. Experts from across North America formed an Advisory Panel and visited Toronto during the week of February 24 to learn about Toronto’s challenges, meet with leaders on this topic, and make recommendations.  Watch the Advisory Panel’s presentation See the…

The Tower Renewal Partnership (TRP) has received CMHC support to kick-start a research program with two new research projects: ‘Advancing Building Retrofits’ and ‘Enabling Complete Communities’. In April, the Federal Government of Canada and the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation announced funding for a TRP research program that includes two research projects. The TRP’s research program will be funded by the Federal Government’s National Housing Strategy, which includes $241 million over 10 years to support research and data on housing…

Calling All Architects: New Approaches to Old Housing For the past decade, Tower Renewal has been defined by research, policy design and action. Through multi-sectoral partnerships, best-practice and primary research, our work has evolved into program design, capacity building, and on-the-ground project implementation with a wide range of stakeholders.      This ongoing program of ‘research to action’ was featured in Architectural Design Magazine special issue: Calling All Architects: New Approaches to Old Housing. The issue showcases international leaders in rethinking…

The Tower Renewal strategy has had significant impact over the past year. Across all levels of government, there is a growing consensus: Tower Renewal can have a scalable impact nation-wide as a means to meet climate change, affordable housing, poverty reduction, smart growth, and economic development objectives. Some highlights include:   1. Announcement of $15.9B Co-Investment Fund, committing to the rehabilitation of 240,000 units of existing affordable housing as part of Canada’s landmark National Housing Strategy.   2. $350M allocated towards apartment…

The Tower Renewal Action Forum took place on October 5, 2017 at the Evergreen Brick Works. The event assembled international experts and local city-builders to explore innovative strategies for transitioning aging tower neighbourhoods to meet the demands of our 21st century cities. With over 150 stakeholders in attendance, there was representation from government, nonprofit, private, public and community associations. Workshops and panel discussions showcased best practices at home and abroad, to focus on housing resilience and rehabilitation, neighbourhood transformation, and the maintenance of affordability in…

  Postwar apartment towers are the backbone of Canada’s purpose-built rental stock, and provide affordable housing to millions of Canadians. Our recent map, accessed here, showcases the extent of towers across the nation. As Canada faces a growing housing affordability crisis, now is the time for coordinated action to build a future around more complete, resilient, and affordable cities. Tower Renewal is a strategy for realizing this change. The Tower Renewal Action Forum took place on October 5, 2017 at the…

Findings have been published in various formats including the research brief ‘Tower Neighbourhood Renewal International Best Practice’

The Intermunicipal Tower Platform brings together Ontario’s four largest cities, including Toronto, Ottawa, Mississauga, and Hamilton, to secure the future resilience of Ontario’s tower neighbourhoods.

On Wednesday, July 19th, leaders in the development of Toronto’s Residential Apartment Commercial (RAC) Zoning by-law gathered at York University to celebrate and explore challenges and next steps in empowering communities to utilize Toronto’s newest zone. The esteemed panel had representation from property owners, entrepreneurs, community members, academics and city builders with Graeme Stewart, Principal at ERA Architect and the Centre for Urban Growth and Renewal as the Panel Moderator. Panelists included:      Michael Mizzi Director, Zoning and Secretary-Treasurer Committee of…

A key research stream of the Tower Renewal Partnership has been understanding the tower landscape in shaping our cities. How many towers are there? Where are they located? What is the resulting urban form? How do key relate to investments in transit and growth planning? How can they be better connected to the City at large? Our study, with the Ontario Growth Secretariat, creates a comprehensive inventory for the Greater Golden Horseshoe, which for the first time quantified this region as…

  Property owners, entrepreneurs, community members, academics and city builders will gather at York University in celebration of Toronto’s newest zone: the Residential Apartment Commercial (RAC) (www.raczone.ca). Moderated by Graeme Stewart, Principal of ERA and the Centre for Urban Growth and Renewal, this event hosted by the City of Toronto will centre discussions on the zone’s implementation as well as its economic and social opportunities. Topics will touch on: Where does the zone apply? What new things can be done…

How can postwar tower neighbourhoods, built 50 years ago, transition into more ecologically- and socially-sustainable places? As we look ahead to the next 50 years, how can we plan for more resilient relationships in the between our city and its remarkable ravine network? In May 2017, the Ontario Climate Consortium (including Toronto and Region Conservation and York University’s Faculty of Environmental Studies), the University of Toronto John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, Parallel 52, and the Centre…

View videos, CUG+R TALKS, the  GALLERY and NEWS sections for more content.     Pechakucha: Tower Renewal 101 A crash course in Tower Renewal by Graeme Stewart.                     Tower, Slab, Superblock: Social Housing Legacies and Futures A conference hosted by the Architectural League of New York that examined the history, current status, and prospects of high-rise and superblock residential development. Experts discussed the potential for redevelopment from design and public policy perspectives. The Life- Sized…

  “A new platform by which designers of these two great cities may share innovations and best practices with the common goal of enhancing the build environment.”- Mary Rusz This September, at the invitation of the AIA New York Housing and Planning and Urban Design Committees, ERA’s Michael McClelland, Graeme Stewart and Ya’el Santopinto participated in a panel in New York on Toronto’s modern heritage and Tower Renewal. The panel discussion took place at the Centre for Architecture in as…

Analysis of this housing resource and examination of its future role in our growing region.

What is Tower Renewal? Tower Renewal is a strategy that promotes, supports and directs enhancement and reinvestment in Canada’s affordable apartment tower stock. During the boom years of the 1960s and 70s, Canada built a significant volume of modern apartment towers in response to rapid urbanization. Predominantly privately developed, but supported by public planning policy and incentives, these towers shape the urban and suburban landscape cross county – with at least 750,000 Canadian households calling them home.  Half a century…

The Tower Renewal Partnership is a multisectoral initiative led by the Centre for Urban Growth + Renewal, and made up of Evergreen, United Way Toronto & York Region, Maytree, and DKGI. We work alongside a broad network of nonprofit, governmental, industry, and academic partners. Project Lead Core Partners           Advisory Network                                                    …

Transforming isolated tower neighbourhoods into more convenient, livable and resilient vertical villages: Over past decades, Canada’s Apartment Neighbourhoods have emerged as the Nation’s most diverse localities, acting as our ‘Arrival Cities’. While the communities in these towers have changed to reflect modern Canada, their physical forms remain largely stuck in 1960s ideas planning focused on single-use zoning, separated uses and a heavy reliance on the automobile.  As a result, they lack key features that many neighbourhoods take for granted: convenient…

Provincial growth targets may be met in apartment tower neighborhoods, while delivering new infrastructure and resources to these growing communities.

    The Tower Renewal Partnership is an initiative working to transform Southern Ontario’s remarkable stock of post-war apartment towers into more complete communities, resilient housing stock and healthy places, fully integrated into our growing cities. Nearly one million people in the Greater Toronto Area live in approximately 2,000 concrete residential tower blocks which were built between 1945 and 1984. These towers were originally intended to promote social progress, alleviate pressures on infrastructure and services in crowded downtown cores, and…

How do zoning laws contribute to – or prevent – the creation of complete communities? The Cities Alive podcast episode, Zoning Out! Part 1 addresses issues surrounding this question. Hosts Ross Soward and Danielle Davis invite guest speakers to talk about new trends in zoning that are allowing the formation of vibrant neighbourhoods. Today there is a rethink in how zoning works – from once rigid and separated into fixed single uses – to more flexible and mixed. Desire for zoning reform…

Though the vastness of Toronto’s suburbs is often bemoaned as unplanned sprawl, their shape tells a different story. Containing extensive parks and protected natural systems, transit infrastructure, industrial zones, cultural and community facilities, universities, modern planned communities and, perhaps most noteworthy, hundreds upon hundreds of high-density concrete high-rise apartment buildings, Toronto’s ‘metro’ suburbs showcase a process of metropolitan growth highly affected by regional and modern planning. Financed by the economic boom of the ’60s and ’70s, these expansive areas of…

  This past Saturday, September 26th, the Third Not-So-Annual Harvest Festival took place in Thorncliffe Park. Hosted by not-for-profit Diasporic Genius (DG), the festival featured a pop-up Women’s Cultural Café, an initiative of the Thorncliffe Action Group (TAG). Diasporic Genius, TAG, and ERA Architects collaborated to design, build, and run this dynamic pop-up café.   Thorncliffe Action Group (TAG) members at the Cultural Café. Background mural designed by TAG and Diasporic Genius.   Over the course of four meetings, ERA…

As part of ongoing research related to the Tower Renewal project, ERA’s Graeme Stewart and Michael McClelland, with project partners Evergreen Cityworks and planningAlliance, recently toured the Netherlands and Germany. Touring built projects, construction sites, and meeting with planners, engineers, architects, city administrators, and even a Dutch Senator, the team witnessed Europe’s cutting edge in tower refurbishment and neighbourhood design. Moreover, they met with new project partner Transsolar, global experts in technical solutions for the low energy retrofit who are bringing…

  On April 9, ERA’s Graeme Stewart will be speaking at the Great Cities Institute, Chicago. The talk, entitled “Tower Blocks, Modern Suburbs, and 21st Century Urbanism in Toronto,” will review recent developments in Toronto’s Tower Neighbourhood Renewal initiative. With its thousands of residential towers, Toronto has an urban form unique in North America. In fact, Toronto has a denser metropolitan area than Chicago, Los Angeles, or even Greater New York City. This is not the result of the city core, but…

ERA’s Graeme Stewart and Sabina Ali of the Thorncliffe Park Women’s Committee are featured in a terrific new video by Spacing. The video, which also includes interviews with ERA’s Michael McClelland, is entitled “Powers of Towers,” and profiles the efforts of Graeme and Sabina to transform Toronto’s aging suburban high-rise neighbourhoods into livable communities that work. Graeme and Sabina were jointly awarded the 2014 Jane Jacobs Prize, also presented by Spacing magazine. For several years, Graeme has been leading big-picture…

ERA’s Graeme Stewart is pleased to be participating in the Active Neighbourhoods Canada project taking place in Toronto’s Thorncliffe Park and Flemingdon Park, Wed., March 25. The project uses participatory planning to help communities across Canada create green, active and healthy neighbourhoods. These neighbourhoods celebrate the active use of shared public space; they support walking and cycling for everyone through safe and welcoming urban design based on the community’s vision.

Recently ERA’s Graeme Stewart and Evergreen Cityworks‘ John Brodhead presented a webinar on Tower Renewal in partnership with the Social Innovation Generation and Cities for People. The webinar presents an impressive picture of the last eight years of Tower Renewal efforts, and includes discussion of Toronto’s unique built form in relation to other cities, its history of progressive modern planning, the challenges and opportunities faced today by its aging tower neighbourhoods, and exciting new developments in City zoning and Tower…

ERA friend and collaborator Jesse Colin Jackson launches his new exhibition at Pari Nadimi Gallery, at 254 Niagara Street, Toronto. The show, entitled Radiant City, runs Sept. 18th, 6-8 p.m. and runs to Nov. 1st. Radiant City considers the evolving presence and status of Toronto’s tower neighbourhoods. The product of optimistic and progressive planning ideologies of post-war Canada, Toronto’s tower neighbourhoods were built as car-centric modernist enclaves for the middle class. Today have evolved into complex urban environments that are important arrival destinations…

    As announced recently in the Evergreen CityWorks’ Intersection Magazine, the Centre for Urban Growth and Renewal is teaming up with Evergreen CityWorks and Derek Ballantyne (CEO, Community Forward Fund) to engage in new initiatives in Tower Renewal. The purpose of this Tower Partnership will be to develop feasible funding and implementation strategies for a series of Tower Renewal sites in the GTA, working with project partners City of Toronto, United Way, Metcalf Foundation, Toronto Atmospheric Fund and more. The ultimate goal…

Image: Toronto Star Throughout the first part of 2014, the Toronto Star is running a series called “Big Ideas“,  asking Torontonians to think big about the future of the region. What type of Toronto do we want to create in the years to come? For our contribution to this series, we discuss Tower Renewal as the key to realizing the region’s potential. The piece can be found at Here at thestar.com, or below:   The GTA can evolve into a…

  On Saturday January 18, The East Scarborough Storefront hosted a public design charrette with partners United Way Toronto, Toronto Public Health (TPH), Sustainable TO, Architext, and ERA. Saturday’s discussion focused on TPH’s new program “Healthy Corner Stores,” a project that proposes to give suburban communities better access to fresh produce, and other healthy food options, through convenience stores. Healthy Corner Stores is part of the growing Tower Renewal initiative, which aims to bring new amenities, healthy choices, and life…

Chief Planner Jennifer Keesmaat, Councillor Peter Milczyn, and panel participants. Photo by Garry Weiler, City of Toronto On Sept. 30, 2013, ERA’s Graeme Stewart participated in a City of Toronto Chief Planner’s Roundtable, hosted by Jennifer Keesmaat. The Roundtable, entitled “The Shape of Toronto’s Suburbs,” is the first of three sessions devoted to critical thinking about the history, evolution, and future of the GTA’s suburbs. Participants included John van Nostrand, Leo deSorcy, Pamela Blais, Laurie Payne, and Leona Savoie. The…

We are pleased to announce that the Canadian Institute of Planners (CIP) has awarded the Planning Excellence Merit Award for New and Emerging Planning Initiatives to a collection of strategic studies that form part of the Tower Neighbourhood Renewal initiative. Since 2007, the Tower Neighbourhood Renewal initiative has been working to tackle one of the most pressing planning challenges of our times – the renewal and revitalization of Toronto’s post-war Apartment Tower Neighbourhoods. ERA Architects, planningAlliance and the Centre for Urban Growth and Renewal (CUG+R), have been…

As part of the Tower Neighbourhood Renewal project, the Centre for Urban Growth and Renewal (CUG+R) continues to work with United Way Toronto, the City of Toronto, and key stakeholders to establish a new approach to zoning that will enable Toronto’s hundreds of Apartment Neighbourhoods to emerge as more complete, better-served communities. Recently, Canadian Apartment Magazine interviewed ERA’s Graeme Stewart, as well as Aird & Berlis LLP partner Tom Halinski, on exciting changes coming to Toronto’s zoning laws. Play the…

As part of ongoing work on Tower Neighbourhood Renewal, the Centre for Urban Growth and Renewal (CUG+R) has been working with partners United Way Toronto and the City of Toronto to establish a new approach to zoning that will enable Toronto’s hundreds of Apartment Neighbourhoods to emerge as more complete and better-served communities. This work has recently taken a significant step forward, as Toronto’s Planning and Growth Management Committee has endorsed a new zoning category: the “Apartment Residential Commercial” Zone…

As a follow up to the findings of Poverty by Postal Code 2: Vertical Poverty, the Centre for Urban Growth and Renewal (CUG+R) and United Way Toronto are pleased to release a new report entitled Strong Neighbourhoods and Complete Communities: A New Approach to Zoning for Apartment Neighbourhoods. Download the full report. The aim of this report is to identify existing policy barriers and consider policy alternatives to enable Toronto’s hundreds of apartment neighbourhoods to reach their potential as healthy,…

  Over the past couple of years, ERA has been working with The East Scarborough Storefront (ESS) on the Community Design Initiative (CDI), where Scarborough youth are educated in architecture and design by mentors from ERA, Sustainable.TO, and ArchiTEXT. In the current phase, we are working to bring more shade and plant life to the site. This will include several garden and landscape features, a pergola structure for grapevines, and a green-roof pavilion known as the Sky-o-swale. Beginning earlier in July, five youth from…

  On Thursday, June 21, ERA’s Graeme Stewart addresses a crowd of 400 community leaders as keynote speaker at the United Way’s 2012 AGM. In 2010, ERA and CUG+R published Tower Neighbourhood Renewal in the Greater Golden Horseshoe, which looks at a broad range of historical trends, planning issues, sustainability concerns, social needs, and opportunity for renewal in and around Toronto’s tower block neighbourhoods. In 2011, United Way published Vertical Poverty, which focuses much-needed attention on poverty, equity, and quality-of-life…

Map displaying location of infill development within Apartment Tower properties (red); additional Apartment Tower properties (blue); existing and planned rapid transit; and CMHC rent zones (shades of grey).   In March 2012, the City of Toronto released the report Apartment Infill in Toronto: A Ten Year Review. This study examines Apartment Tower sites where new residential and mixed-use development has taken place, or is planned to take place, within their properties. The report has found 39 such examples across the…

In July, ERA got into the building spirit as part of the Tower Renewal project at the Kipling Towers in North Etobicoke. Kipling Towers is one of the City’s great apartment neighbourhoods, with a cluster of nineteen towers perched along the western bank of the Humber River. Previous posts with more information about the neighbourhood can be found here. ERA has been involved in the neighborhood since 2007 in partnership with the City of Toronto, Jane’s Walk , the National…

The second Tower Neighbourhood Renewal symposium, presented by ERA Architects, the University of Toronto Cities Centre, and the Tower Renewal Office, was held in May 2011, in conjunction with the annual Toronto the Good party. The symposium featured a broad range of international and local speakers, a panel discussion and a poster expo that continued into the party. The following post outlines the day’s events, and provides links to download much of the presented material. The aim of the symposium…

This Option Studio focused on a site at Sheppard and Don Mills, typical of Toronto’s inner suburbs, with its distinctive clusters of high-rise residential buildings erected in the period of the 1950’s through the 1970’s. The goal of this studio was to investigate the potential of apartment tower sites to emerge as more liveable and sustainable communities, with a specific emphasis on built form. For more information on the site please see our previous post on the studio. The studio…

  Cities Centre, ERA Architects and the City of Toronto Tower Renewal Office are hosting the second Tower Neighbourhood Renewal Symposium on May 12, 2011 from 1- 5pm at U of T’s Hart House. The Symposium is being held in conjunction with the annual Toronto the Good Party, which will begin immediately following the symposium. The second symposium will consist of a plenary session with international and local speakers, a panel discussion and a poster expo in the Great Hall…

  In February 10th and 11th, 2011, the Civic Action Summit assembled over one thousand civic leaders from Greater Toronto to discuss the future of the city reigon. Topics ranged from Arts and Culture, to Transportation, to Sustainability. ERA actively participated in the planning and organizing of discussions related to housing and complete neighbourhoods – particularly how these broader themes intersected with the opportunities of Tower Neighbourhood Renewal, and complete and livable communities in general. A key output has been…

In fall 2010, Dean Emeritus George Baird and Graeme Stewart of ERA, conducted an architectural design studio at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, exploring the potential for mixed-use growth in one of the Toronto’s Region’s many post-war Apartment Neighbourhoods. The studio focused on one of the largest opportunities of Tower Neighbourhood Renewal: mixed-use growth within a large cluster of existing post-war Apartment Towers.   The site chosen was the North East corner of Sheppard and Don Mills…

The United Way released the Vertical Poverty report today, outlining the current state of apartment – tower living in the GTA. The report’s finding are based on several thousand interviews with tower residents, and contains important recommendations to improve the livability of apartment neighbourhoods. These findings and recommendations complement those found in Tower Neighbourhood Renewal in the Greater Golden Horseshoe, released in late 2010 and prepared by ERA and planningAlliance for the Government of Ontario. ERA participated in the United…

Tower Neighbourhood Renewal in the Greater Golden Horseshoe available here for download. The Greater Golden Horseshoe is unique globally for its pattern of urbanization due to the proliferation of post-war apartment towers throughout the region. In 2009 the government of Ontario’s Growth Secretariat enlisted ERA Architects and planningAlliance (the founding partners of the not for profit research organization CUG+R) as well as the Cities Centre at the University of Toronto, to analyze this housing resource, and examine its future role…

ERA Architects and planningAlliance launch the Centre for Urban Growth and Renewal (CUG+R). CUG+R is a non-profit research organization formed in 2009 to conduct cross-disciplinary research to further knowledge about the creation and renewal of sustainable urban, suburban and rural environments in Canada and elsewhere. CUG+R’s objective is to develop research to enhance public policy and promote private initiatives that foster City Regions and local communities that are: well planned and designed, economically vibrant, socially diverse, culturally integrated and environmentally…

The Greater Toronto Area contains a heritage of nearly 2,000 post-war concrete residential tower blocks located throughout the region.  The presence of this remarkable collection of modern housing represents an architectural, planning and construction legacy unique to North America. (For more on the history, visit here). This inheritance of high density neighbourhoods provide significant opportunities to create a sustainable, prosperous and connected region, able to meet the challenges of the 21st Century; accommodate growth, alleviate poverty and help grow the…

For well over a decade, Europe’s extensive heritage of tower block communities have experienced extensive renewal and neighbourhood reinvestment. A key aspect of this has been to provide tower neighbourhoods with the diversity and activity of a vibrant neighbourhood found in the city centre. Two key strategies in this regard have been the introduction of commerce as well as public space into areas previously conceived of as primarily residential. The following photo collection, taken in 2006, documents a series of…

  This past spring, the Design Exchange hosted Carrot City; an exhibition examining the potentials of achieving future food security, sustainable food networks and engaged communities through urban agriculture. Tower Renewal participated in this project, contributing research related to the potential for urban agriculture within Toronto’s post-war tower block communities. The following is a review of the exhibition by Canadian Architect:

Day: May 3rd Time: 11am Start Location: North Kipling Community Centre, at 2 Rowntree Rd, Kipling and Rowntree Rd, North of Finch. End Location: Albion Centre Food Court A NOW Magazine article on the walk can be found here. Photos from the walk by Jesse Colin Jackson Perhaps the two physical features that distinguish Toronto are it’s extensive ravine system flowing throughout the city, and it’s heritage of nearly 1000 high-rise ‘tower in the park’ apartments found throughout the region.…

“..In Toronto…the continent’s private enterprise-dominated housing system, when coupled with a structure of strong regional planning  dedicated to the fostering of high-density ‘hot spots’ in the centre and periphery, succeeded in generating a landscape of massed towers and slabs in open space, almost rivaling the USSR in consistency and grandeur ”._ Miles Glendinning Introduction to the Docomomo Journal 39 The Docomomo Journal’s 39th issue is dedicated to post-war mass housing. From the Docomomo lens of ‘documentation’ and ‘conservation’, the issue…

High-rise apartmens at Kipling and Steeles in north Etobicoke, overlooking the Humber Valley Written by Dale Duncan. This article first appeared in Eye Weekly, April 17th, 2008 Take a stroll down Kipling Avenue, just south of Steeles, and you’ll see a row of grand towers overlooking the Humber Valley that house the equivalent of half the population of Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood within a few blocks. A total of 19 towers in all are home to roughly 13,000 people in this…

Map 1: Toronto’s modern apartments with existing rapid transit Map 2: Toronto’s modern apartments with the proposed rapid transit of ‘Transit City’   The legacy of modern planning has left us with a stock of high density housing and adjacent open space nearby to existing transit. As compared with the low-density suburbs with typify North America, this is an advantageous starting point for the creation of a connected and sustainable region.

Bathurst and Steeles, late 1960s. In the 1960’s, Steeles Avenue was the end of Metropolitan Toronto’s servicing area; the northern boundary of the region’s planned urbanization. North of Steeles, the rolling pastures were to remain as the area’s green belt, while in contrast, dense, mixed-use post-war communities emerged to the south. Bathurst and Steeles emerged as a dense community containing nearly forty modern residential high-rises. Incorporated with the ravine, neighbourhood parks, elementary and secondary schools, churches and synagogues, shopping plazas…

  The Bijlmermeer under construction, late 1960’s / Ongoing renewal, since early 2000s Toronto can learn how its apartment neighbourhoods could evolve by looking at the successes of other cities. Take the Bijlmermeer for instance, a large tower block district outside of Amsterdam, reminiscent in certain respects to modern communities in Toronto. Begun in 1966, the Bijlmermeer was an ambitious housing experiment built in vacant farmland south-east of the city. It was envisioned as a secondary centre for the region,…

  In the 1960’s, high-rise towers were thought to be the best solution to meet the growing need for rental units, while efficiently organizing new housing with services. The resulting apartment neighbourhoods help us recognize how quickly the city evolves, and how each generation tries in different ways to address the challenges of growth, social and community needs. Take Crescent Town near Dawes Road and the Danforth. In 1900, this was the site of Walter Massey’s experimental farm which he…

For Toronto, the most significant planning question may not be the form and placement of new density, but how to turn our enormous pockets of inherited high density into genuinely sustainable and complete communities. The density of Toronto’s apartment neighbourhoods makes this city unique. In fact, surprisingly, Toronto has a denser metropolitan area than Chicago, Los Angeles, or even Greater New York City. Counter to popular belief, this is not the result of the city core, but rather thanks to…

Flemingdon Park master plan, including housing, community facilities, commerce, employment and natural space, 1958 Toronto’s aging apartment neighbourhoods are not all the same. They are predominantly based on the idea of the tower-in-the-park; they have large simple tower blocks placed in abundant open space. But after that common denominator there are plenty of differences which provide each of these neighbourhoods with their own individual character. The arrangement and location of apartment neighbourhoods throughout Toronto gives them a loose taxonomy. These…

Uno Prii Towers amid post-war bungalow, Jane Street, North of 401, late 1960s What makes Toronto unique? One of the least recognized answers to that question is that Toronto has more high-rise buildings than any other city in North America, outside New York. The majority of these are concrete modern residential towers, built in the post-war boom of the 1960s and 70s. Following the war, when most North America cities began sprawling without order, Toronto’s Metropolitan Government implemented a regional…