I was out on College Street this week for our team Christmas dinner, and on my way to the restaurant I passed the southeast corner of College and Euclid. Specifically, 533 College Street, pictured above. And as I was passing by, I immediately thought to myself, "my god, this is a really beautiful corner and building."
Now, I know the building. I've been in it before. It's about 3,500 m2. And in 2022, WZMH Architects (who is also the Architect of Record for One Delisle) completed a renovation of it for Akelius. But it was looking particularly beautiful the other night.
Liu Loqum Atelier (a Turkish bakery) is now in the ground floor retail space and they did a wonderful job with their fit out. The entire space was glowing and the ground floor felt grand.
The building itself is also just a bit taller than what you typically find on Toronto's main streets, and that gives the entire street a more urban feel. I'd argue that it's not tall enough, but still, it gives you the feeling of an urban fabric with a bit more grandeur.
So in the end, I came away thinking about how much better Toronto will be once we have more buildings akin to this one, all across the city. Add in some more floors (with no stepbacks, of course) and you have a tried-and-true urban formula that is hard to beat.
Photos via WZMH
Just over a year ago, Toronto's former chief planner, Gregg Lintern, announced that he would be retiring at the end of 2023. Here's the post I wrote thanking him for everything he had done for our city. He was a positive force in so many ways and I remember feeling sad at the time.
Following the announcement, nobody knew who would replace him. But I remember thinking to myself, "you know who would be fantastic for this position, Jason Thorne." Jason and I met when Slate first started investing in Hamilton (he was the general manager of planning and economic development). I then became an avid follower of him on Twitter, which is the case for many people in our industry.
In 2018, we even got a few planners together for a bike ride around downtown Toronto to look at some new city building initiatives. In a nod to Jerry Seinfeld, we called it "planners on bikes getting coffee." We really should reignite this meetup.
Fast forward six years and this week it was announced that on December 30, 2024, Jason will assume the role of Toronto's chief planner. This is great news for our city. He is a true city builder and he understands the task at hand. Toronto is one of the fastest growing global cities in the world and yet we are battling with the transition from a car-oriented suburban region to a multi-modal urban center.
This is why traffic is so crippling and housing is so expensive. We haven't fully embraced this future urban state. But real progress is being made, and I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who cares more about cities and who spends as much as time as he does thinking through the ingredients that make them great places to live, work, play, and invest.
Congratulations on the new role, Jason!
If you'd like to follow Jason,
I was out on College Street this week for our team Christmas dinner, and on my way to the restaurant I passed the southeast corner of College and Euclid. Specifically, 533 College Street, pictured above. And as I was passing by, I immediately thought to myself, "my god, this is a really beautiful corner and building."
Now, I know the building. I've been in it before. It's about 3,500 m2. And in 2022, WZMH Architects (who is also the Architect of Record for One Delisle) completed a renovation of it for Akelius. But it was looking particularly beautiful the other night.
Liu Loqum Atelier (a Turkish bakery) is now in the ground floor retail space and they did a wonderful job with their fit out. The entire space was glowing and the ground floor felt grand.
The building itself is also just a bit taller than what you typically find on Toronto's main streets, and that gives the entire street a more urban feel. I'd argue that it's not tall enough, but still, it gives you the feeling of an urban fabric with a bit more grandeur.
So in the end, I came away thinking about how much better Toronto will be once we have more buildings akin to this one, all across the city. Add in some more floors (with no stepbacks, of course) and you have a tried-and-true urban formula that is hard to beat.
Photos via WZMH
Just over a year ago, Toronto's former chief planner, Gregg Lintern, announced that he would be retiring at the end of 2023. Here's the post I wrote thanking him for everything he had done for our city. He was a positive force in so many ways and I remember feeling sad at the time.
Following the announcement, nobody knew who would replace him. But I remember thinking to myself, "you know who would be fantastic for this position, Jason Thorne." Jason and I met when Slate first started investing in Hamilton (he was the general manager of planning and economic development). I then became an avid follower of him on Twitter, which is the case for many people in our industry.
In 2018, we even got a few planners together for a bike ride around downtown Toronto to look at some new city building initiatives. In a nod to Jerry Seinfeld, we called it "planners on bikes getting coffee." We really should reignite this meetup.
Fast forward six years and this week it was announced that on December 30, 2024, Jason will assume the role of Toronto's chief planner. This is great news for our city. He is a true city builder and he understands the task at hand. Toronto is one of the fastest growing global cities in the world and yet we are battling with the transition from a car-oriented suburban region to a multi-modal urban center.
This is why traffic is so crippling and housing is so expensive. We haven't fully embraced this future urban state. But real progress is being made, and I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who cares more about cities and who spends as much as time as he does thinking through the ingredients that make them great places to live, work, play, and invest.
Congratulations on the new role, Jason!
If you'd like to follow Jason,
Cover photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash
Many of you probably didn't click through on this link in yesterday's post, but it was a link to a book called Emergent Tokyo -- Designing the Spontaneous City. What this book is largely about is the idea that Tokyo -- usually considered to be the largest urban region in the world -- is more the result of bottom-up actions than top-down actions. In other words, it is a kind of complex and self-organizing system.
Some of you may be reading this and thinking that the result would be chaos. But the opposite is, in fact, true. Despite being the largest urban agglomeration in the world, Tokyo is consistently viewed as one of the most livable big cities in the world. How is that possible?
One topic that we've been talking about on this blog recently is the planning approach of mandating ground-floor retail in new developments. While certainly good intentioned, this is one example of top-down planning. We are saying, "retail needs to go here because."
The problem, as we have talked about, is that the market may not want it. It may not actually be viable or desirable. Of course, it is a delicate situation. Because if you don't provision for it, then you might block it from ever being possible on sites where it clearly makes sense. (We spoke specifically about this, here.)
There is also the opposite question of: where are we not allowing retail?
Maybe there are places where retail activity would be viable today, except it's currently not permitted. One concrete example of this is Toronto's laneways. Right now, we only allow residential (throughout our "Neighbourhoods"). But there many people, including myself and planner Blair Scorgie, who have been arguing that they should be mixed-use:
Would office and retail uses actually work in Toronto's residential laneways? I frankly don't know. Because they're not allowed today, it's largely impossible to know. If we allowed these uses and nothing happened, then we'd have a better idea that there's little demand for it. (I say a better idea because there still could be other obstacles in the way.)
On the other hand if we decided to mandate non-residential uses in our laneways and nobody did anything, two things might then happen. One, we'd be similarly led to believe that there's little to no demand. And two, we'd probably be sacrificing the residential use, for which we can say today there is clear demand.
There are also the considerations that demand will almost certainly change over time and be inconsistent across different locations. For instance, maybe retail doesn't work in this laneway, but it will work in that laneway. Can we actually plan for this?
Top-down approaches generally assume that we know all or many of the answers. It presumes that we know that this street should have ground-floor retail and this street should not. It's also about control. More bottom-up approaches admit that it's impossible to plan for everything and that there could be latent potential that we're not even thinking about.
Of course, there is something naturally unsettling about this approach because it is, by definition, unknowable. And it relinquishes a certain amount of control. Maybe a restaurant will appear here or maybe it won't. Maybe someone will open a small office in this laneway or maybe they won't. Either way, the potential for change exists.
But I think this should be seen as empowering, transparent, and highly efficient. It is a way of reducing the barriers to entry and allowing more urban creativity and ambition to shrine through. I believe, for example, that if we made it easier, cheaper, and possible to open a small restaurant (perhaps in a laneway), we would have more and overall better restaurants in the city.
And as we have seen in the case of Tokyo, the result of more flexibility is not necessarily chaos. It can be a highly livable city that has people wondering, "how did they manage to plan such a large city so well?"
Photo by Kentaro Toma on Unsplash
Cover photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash
Many of you probably didn't click through on this link in yesterday's post, but it was a link to a book called Emergent Tokyo -- Designing the Spontaneous City. What this book is largely about is the idea that Tokyo -- usually considered to be the largest urban region in the world -- is more the result of bottom-up actions than top-down actions. In other words, it is a kind of complex and self-organizing system.
Some of you may be reading this and thinking that the result would be chaos. But the opposite is, in fact, true. Despite being the largest urban agglomeration in the world, Tokyo is consistently viewed as one of the most livable big cities in the world. How is that possible?
One topic that we've been talking about on this blog recently is the planning approach of mandating ground-floor retail in new developments. While certainly good intentioned, this is one example of top-down planning. We are saying, "retail needs to go here because."
The problem, as we have talked about, is that the market may not want it. It may not actually be viable or desirable. Of course, it is a delicate situation. Because if you don't provision for it, then you might block it from ever being possible on sites where it clearly makes sense. (We spoke specifically about this, here.)
There is also the opposite question of: where are we not allowing retail?
Maybe there are places where retail activity would be viable today, except it's currently not permitted. One concrete example of this is Toronto's laneways. Right now, we only allow residential (throughout our "Neighbourhoods"). But there many people, including myself and planner Blair Scorgie, who have been arguing that they should be mixed-use:
Would office and retail uses actually work in Toronto's residential laneways? I frankly don't know. Because they're not allowed today, it's largely impossible to know. If we allowed these uses and nothing happened, then we'd have a better idea that there's little demand for it. (I say a better idea because there still could be other obstacles in the way.)
On the other hand if we decided to mandate non-residential uses in our laneways and nobody did anything, two things might then happen. One, we'd be similarly led to believe that there's little to no demand. And two, we'd probably be sacrificing the residential use, for which we can say today there is clear demand.
There are also the considerations that demand will almost certainly change over time and be inconsistent across different locations. For instance, maybe retail doesn't work in this laneway, but it will work in that laneway. Can we actually plan for this?
Top-down approaches generally assume that we know all or many of the answers. It presumes that we know that this street should have ground-floor retail and this street should not. It's also about control. More bottom-up approaches admit that it's impossible to plan for everything and that there could be latent potential that we're not even thinking about.
Of course, there is something naturally unsettling about this approach because it is, by definition, unknowable. And it relinquishes a certain amount of control. Maybe a restaurant will appear here or maybe it won't. Maybe someone will open a small office in this laneway or maybe they won't. Either way, the potential for change exists.
But I think this should be seen as empowering, transparent, and highly efficient. It is a way of reducing the barriers to entry and allowing more urban creativity and ambition to shrine through. I believe, for example, that if we made it easier, cheaper, and possible to open a small restaurant (perhaps in a laneway), we would have more and overall better restaurants in the city.
And as we have seen in the case of Tokyo, the result of more flexibility is not necessarily chaos. It can be a highly livable city that has people wondering, "how did they manage to plan such a large city so well?"
Photo by Kentaro Toma on Unsplash
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
