Last month, I wrote about Toronto's proposal to add additional "Avenues" to its urban structure. ("Avenues" is a defined term that I touch on in last month's post). Well, this week the new Avenues Policy went to City Council for debate and approval. You can read all the back and forth via Matt Elliott on X. Not surprisingly, some Councillors were/are opposed to it, fearing it will create some sort of dystopian future for Toronto. An attempt was made to send it back for further study and consultation, which is the typical delay tactic. Comments were made that people in multi-family buildings are lonely because they don't know their neighbors. And it was argued that Kipling Avenue should not be a designated "Avenue", even though it's already called one. (Toronto street suffixes can be weird sometimes.) Thankfully, the new Avenues passed. And this is a big deal for Toronto. Over time, this expanded Avenue network is going to create new housing and employment opportunities, and make transit and other forms of mobility far more viable all across the city. As I said last month, I think it's going to be foundational in helping us move away from the outdated model of the monocentric North American city. Slowly but surely we are laying the groundwork for an urban structure that is actually, and more uniformly, urban.

This is Map 2 from Toronto's Official Plan, dated January 2024. It shows the city's "urban structure", and one of the main things it tells us is where the city is anticipating growth. You have the downtown and central waterfront, urban "Centres", and then "Avenues." All three of these colored areas are where growth and intensification are encouraged. The problem, however, is that it still resembles a mono-centric city, with a dominant core and then mostly low-rise housing surrounding it. The Centres in the inner suburbs are relatively small and many of the Avenues are broken up without a lot of connectivity back to the rest of the city's grid. It sets us up for a divided city -- core versus the rest -- because different built forms naturally create different political priorities.

Now let's look at what Toronto has just proposed in terms of new Avenues (shown above in purple). This is the kind of thing that immediately gets me excited because, as proposed, it implies a significant upzoning for a large portion of the city and it creates a much more uniform urban structure. Here, we have a blanket of intersecting Avenues, which will open up a ton of new housing opportunities and make it far more feasible to build efficient transit and other mobility solutions across the city. In fact, I'd argue that this is one of the most important land use discussions taking place in Toronto today. It's foundational to moving us away from the anachronistic model of the car-oriented North American city.

Now we just need to make it happen, and then empower developers and builders of all scales to build housing and a mix of uses all along these purple lines. For more on this, check out the City of Toronto's Housing Action Plan.

Cover photo by Adam Vradenburg on Unsplash

Dezeen recently featured the above project in Philadelphia by Interface Studio Architects. It’s called Powerhouse and the goal was to provide a variety of different housing typologies and tenures within a dense infill project that, at the same time, remains in keeping with its context.

The full block complex contains 31 residential units, which are a mixture of apartments, duplexes (stacked towns), live/work units, and single-family townhouses. There’s also a corner retail space. 10 of the units are rental and the balance are for sale. The development also incorporates 3 existing rowhouses on the block. (Were these the holdouts?)

Here is a diagram from ISA to give you a sense of how these different housing types come together:

The project feels germane to Philly’s urban fabric and it is certainly interesting in its own right. But for those of us from Toronto, it’s perhaps even more interesting because it’s a scale of infill development that we don’t see very often in this city: low-rise intensification. (Also commonly referred to as “The Missing Middle”.)

Recently I’ve been speaking with a number of people about whether or not Toronto should be thinking differently about its low-rise neighborhoods. Because as it stands today, even this sort of gentle density can cause quite a stir. 

Two thoughts immediately come to mind – one of which will not surprise anyone who reads this blog. Firstly, I see laneway housing as an elegant way to intensify low-rise neighborhoods without changing their character. That’s why I’m proposing this house.

Secondly, I have long felt that we should rethink how we treat arterial roads that are not designated as “Avenues.” That is, we should encourage greater densities. An “Avenue” designation signals mid-rise. But absent this, our policies are frankly retrograde, given the way some of these arterial streets have evolved over the years.

What are your thoughts about this scale of infill?

Images: ISA