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Blog Post The Star’s Big Idea Series: The Region’s Future is in its High-Rise Suburbs
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…
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Blog Post Chief Planner’s Rountable: Toronto’s Modern Suburbs
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…
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Blog Post Towers on the Ravine – 1967-2067: Student Design Charrette
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…
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About Tower Renewal News Articles
2022 06 23 – MIT Technology Review: The future of urban housing 2022 06 01 – Architectural Record: Housing and Climate 2022 05 17 – Lessons from Grenfell 2022 04 22 – Metropolis Magazine 2022 04 07 – Ken Soble Tower becomes world’s largest residential Passive House retrofit 2021 10 21 – Tall Stories 276: Ken Soble Tower: Monocle Radio – The Urbanist 2021 10 01 – Ken Soble Tower Raising the Bar – Canadian Architect 2021 09 29 – Hamilton’s…
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About Tower Renewal Videos
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…
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Research Report Toward Healthy Apartment Neighbourhoods: A Healthy Toronto by Design Report
This report was commissioned by Toronto Public Health in 2011 to examine design tools for improved community health outcomes in Toronto’s hundreds of apartment neighborhoods.
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Research Report APT Bulletin – Reassessing the Recent Past: Tower Neighborhood Renewal in Toronto
In 2008 the City of Toronto initiated its Tower Neighborhood Renewal program. Recognizing that such a large-scale renewal amounts to a 20-year program, this paper provides an update on current progress.
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Blog Post Video of Graeme Stewart at the Great Cities Institute
Following up our teaser blog to Graeme’s talk at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Great Cities Institute, we would like to share with you the link to the whole talk.
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Blog Post Arup’s Doggerel Covers Tower Renewal
Image by Jesse Colin Jackson Joshua Thorpe’s article, “How to rethink the suburbs: A lesson from Toronto,” in Arup’s Doggerel explores the new Residential Apartment Commerical (RAC) zone and the potential benefits it will bring to Toronto’s tower neighbourhoods. The article provides background information on the history of these tower neighbourhoods, the challenges they currently face, and how new zoning laws can help promote complete communities with access to business, health, and public engagement. Read the article here and learn more about the…
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Research Report The Suburban Slab: Retrofitting Our Concrete Legacy For A Sustainable Future
Featured in “GreenTOpia: Towards a Sustainable Toronto”, this article by Graeme Stewart, looks at the contentious relationship between Toronto and its postwar high-rise apartments.
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Research Report Concrete Toronto Excerpt – Concrete High-Rise
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…
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Blog Post Graeme Stewart to speak in Chicago, Apr. 9
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…
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Blog Post No Flat City exhibition: Documenting Toronto’s “Tower-in-the-Ravine”
Photograph by Chloë Ellingson On view now at Harbourfront Centre is a new exhibition of photos by six photographers, including ERA’s friend Chloë Ellingson. Citing the Tower Renewal Project as one of its inspirations, Chloë’s work documents the topography of Toronto’s inner suburbs from the vantage point of various tower apartment buildings. Chloë’s full set of photographs can be viewed here. Having grown up near the Don Valley, outside of Toronto’s downtown, Chloë has a personal interest in the image of the…
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Blog Post Charrette: Apartment Neighbourhoods and Healthy Corner Stores
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…
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Blog Post Graeme Stewart interviewed: Toronto Zoning
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…
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Blog Post New Report from CUG+R and Toronto Public Health: Toward Healthy Apartment Neighbourhoods
The Centre for Urban Growth and Renewal (CUG+R) and Toronto Public Health are pleased to release Toward Healthy Apartment Neighbourhoods: A Healthy Toronto by Design Report. Download the full report. As part of the ongoing work related to Tower Neighbourhood Renewal, this report was commissioned by Toronto Public Health in 2011 to examine design tools for improved community health outcomes in Toronto’s hundreds of apartment neighbourhoods. As has been demonstrated in numerous previous studies, growing poverty is linked to poor…
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Blog Post Miles Glendinning, Tower Blocks and Toronto
In May 2012, ERA hosted Miles Glendinning of the University of Edinburgh for a research tour of Toronto’s modern tower blocks and a public lecture at the Arts and Letters Club entitled “Hundred Year’s War: A Century of Mass Housing ‘Campaigns’ Around the World.” Miles is director of the Scottish Centre for Conservation Studies and chair of Docomomo International Committee on Urbanism. He is the author of several books including Architecture’s Evil Empire (Reaktion, 2010), a concise history of modern…
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Blog Post Apartment Infill in Toronto: A Ten Year Review
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…
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Blog Post Tower Neighbourhood Renewal in APT International
An article examining the development and progress of Tower Renewal can be found in the summer edition of the International Journal for the Association for Preservation Technology (APT). From the introduction: In 2008 the City of Toronto initiated its Tower Neighborhood Renewal program. The program looks at the significant impact of post–World War II construction in the city and proposes a plan for the rehabilitation of the many apartment towers that had been built during that period in the…
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Blog Post Neighbourhood Change
As a follow up to the release of last year’s Three Cities Within Toronto, the University of Toronto Cities Centre, St. Christopher House, and the CURA Network have launched the website “Neighbourhood Change: Building Inclusive Communities from Within,” as well as the new report: “Toronto’s Inner Suburbs: Investing in Social Capital in Scarborough“. The Three Cities Within Toronto research initiatives notes Tower Renewal as one of the key strategies to begin to reverse the trend of a divided city, and enable vibrant, engaged and…
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Blog Post Design Research: Mixed-Use Growth – Update
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…
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Blog Post highrise.nfb.ca Launches “Out My Window”
The National Film Board’s remarkable HIGHRISE project lauches its second major feature – the interactive online documentary Out My Window. As a follow up to the 1000th Tower – set in Toronto’s Kipling Towers neighbourhood in North Etobicoke, Out My Window takes a global perspective, documenting the lived experience of post-war highrise living in cities around the world. As described on the HIGHRISE website: HIGHRISE is a multi-year, multi-media, collaborative documentary project about the human experience in global vertical suburbs. Under the…
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Blog Post Walkability in Toronto’s Apartment Neighbourhoods:
Paul Hess, Department of Geography, University of Toronto and Jane Farrow, Executive Director, Jane’s Walk Building on the arguments Jane Jacobs espoused more than 40 years ago, the importance of creating good places for people to walk is now increasingly being recognized by transportation experts, health advocates and public officials. These discussions, however, are usually focused on downtown areas or new developments in the outer suburbs. This study is intended to put more focus on the many people living in…
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Blog Post Transit City and self-sufficient communities
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.
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Blog Post A productive landscape: permaculture and tower blocks
Toronto high-rises under construction in former farmers fields, early 1960’s The idea of the tower in a genuine ‘park’ or ‘landscape’ setting was a popular notion after the Second World War. As a result, during the post-war boom in Toronto, a minimum of 60% open space around multiple dwellings was promoted as a best practice. If developers wanted larger buildings, they were to provide a greater ratio of open space to building footprint. The results are the large towers and…
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Blog Post Toronto/Moscow: Comrades in towers
Comparison of tower districts in Moscow (top) and Toronto (bottom) Next time you are in Chicago or Philadelphia try looking for an apartment tower neighbourhood outside the city core – the kind we have throughout Toronto. They’re rare in North American cities but common in other Commonwealth countries, like Australia, and they are an even more significant force in many European cities, such as Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, and especially Moscow. Aspects of Toronto suburbs display a remarkable similarly of what…
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Blog Post Poverty and Aging Towers
Map 1: Toronto’s post-war apartment towers and rapid transit, overlaid with the wealthy ‘City #1’ (Grey) and intensification zones (Red). Map 2: Toronto’s post-war apartment towers and rapid transit, overlaid with the impoverished ‘City #3’ (Grey) and Priority Neighbourhoods (Dark Grey). Toronto is quickly becoming a polarized city. New research out of the Centre for Urban and Community Studies at the University of Toronto has revealed startling trends related to changing income distribution patterns across the city. Toronto in the…
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Blog Post Flemingdon Park: North America’s first high-rise newtown
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…