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Yesterday afternoon and evening was a series of interesting discussions about city building in Toronto. First, I met with Jeff Ranson of Northcrest Developments for a tour of YZD. This is the 370-acre former Downsview Airport lands that is now the biggest urban redevelopment project in North America.
The tour also involved the two of us e-scootering around the property, which was timely given yesterday's post about not hating on them so much. Jeff is up next on Globizen's Global City Builder series, so stay tuned for that.
After that I was on Ben Myers' Toronto Under Construction podcast. After 80+ episodes, he finally invited me to join (wink wink). It was a great discussion with Rob Spanier of the Spanier Group and Ilana Altman of The Bentway. When the link comes out, I'll be sure to share it on the blog.
But one of the common threads across both discussions, that I'm now thinking about, is about how city builders can better provision for flexibility in new urban projects. Flexibility is an important feature because cities need to be able to grow and adapt over time.
Consider some of the older main streets in Toronto where it's very clear that the shop or restaurant you're in used to be someone's home that has now been converted. This is a very good outcome. It's the city iterating.
But this isn't always possible with newer developments. Condominium corporations, land use restrictions, and a variety of other factors can make this largely impossible. It's for this reason that I'm always drawn to things like live/work suites. They already contemplate a greater degree of flexibility.
Two specific examples that come to mind are the live/work suites fronting onto Fort York Boulevard (in CityPlace), which have over time become more retail oriented, and loft buildings like 90 Sumach Street, which is known for housing a lot of creative professionals.
Cities are at their best when they are able to change and adapt. So I think it behooves us to spend more time thinking about how we can encourage greater flexibility through different design approaches, flexible land use permissions, legal carveouts, and whatever else might be necessary to fully unlock the potential of our cities.
In my recent post about "takeaways from Japan" I spoke about a willingness to experiment and be playful with the built environment. I said that quite often people design homes around what they want, as opposed to what they think might broadly appeal to the market. So today, let's look at an example. Below is a site on the outskirts of Tokyo, about an hour from the center of the city. The architect — Kamakura Studio — describes it as being situated in a "new town" where about 75% of the residents have moved in within the past decade. And like Japan as a whole, problems of aging and population decline are expected in the future.
I am really drawn to live/work spaces like these ones here in Oklahoma City's new Wheeler District. (Additional project info can be found over here.) We have some examples of this in Toronto, but I wouldn't say it's commonly done. And oftentimes they don't work at all. More often than not, these spaces seem to just get used as strictly residential (which is okay).
But there are some arguably successful examples that we can point to. CityPlace is maybe one. When the area was first getting developed, retail would have been an extremely difficult use to underwrite. It was a development island. And so live/work suites were introduced at grade along much of the area's main artery.
The area did eventually get new dedicated retail, but its live/work suites also started taking on more "work" as demand in the area grew. Today, nobody is going to confuse it with Bloor Street, but importantly, the ground floor was able to change and adapt. And this is one of the great benefits, or at least promises, of live/work: you get additional flexibility.
Personally, I would love to have a live/work space. I'd use it to incubate new ideas and sell random stuff. And I have a feeling that, given the opportunity, many others would do the same. So I plan to spend some more time thinking and writing about this topic. If any of you have shining examples of live/work successes, please share them in the comment section below.
Yesterday afternoon and evening was a series of interesting discussions about city building in Toronto. First, I met with Jeff Ranson of Northcrest Developments for a tour of YZD. This is the 370-acre former Downsview Airport lands that is now the biggest urban redevelopment project in North America.
The tour also involved the two of us e-scootering around the property, which was timely given yesterday's post about not hating on them so much. Jeff is up next on Globizen's Global City Builder series, so stay tuned for that.
After that I was on Ben Myers' Toronto Under Construction podcast. After 80+ episodes, he finally invited me to join (wink wink). It was a great discussion with Rob Spanier of the Spanier Group and Ilana Altman of The Bentway. When the link comes out, I'll be sure to share it on the blog.
But one of the common threads across both discussions, that I'm now thinking about, is about how city builders can better provision for flexibility in new urban projects. Flexibility is an important feature because cities need to be able to grow and adapt over time.
Consider some of the older main streets in Toronto where it's very clear that the shop or restaurant you're in used to be someone's home that has now been converted. This is a very good outcome. It's the city iterating.
But this isn't always possible with newer developments. Condominium corporations, land use restrictions, and a variety of other factors can make this largely impossible. It's for this reason that I'm always drawn to things like live/work suites. They already contemplate a greater degree of flexibility.
Two specific examples that come to mind are the live/work suites fronting onto Fort York Boulevard (in CityPlace), which have over time become more retail oriented, and loft buildings like 90 Sumach Street, which is known for housing a lot of creative professionals.
Cities are at their best when they are able to change and adapt. So I think it behooves us to spend more time thinking about how we can encourage greater flexibility through different design approaches, flexible land use permissions, legal carveouts, and whatever else might be necessary to fully unlock the potential of our cities.
In my recent post about "takeaways from Japan" I spoke about a willingness to experiment and be playful with the built environment. I said that quite often people design homes around what they want, as opposed to what they think might broadly appeal to the market. So today, let's look at an example. Below is a site on the outskirts of Tokyo, about an hour from the center of the city. The architect — Kamakura Studio — describes it as being situated in a "new town" where about 75% of the residents have moved in within the past decade. And like Japan as a whole, problems of aging and population decline are expected in the future.
I am really drawn to live/work spaces like these ones here in Oklahoma City's new Wheeler District. (Additional project info can be found over here.) We have some examples of this in Toronto, but I wouldn't say it's commonly done. And oftentimes they don't work at all. More often than not, these spaces seem to just get used as strictly residential (which is okay).
But there are some arguably successful examples that we can point to. CityPlace is maybe one. When the area was first getting developed, retail would have been an extremely difficult use to underwrite. It was a development island. And so live/work suites were introduced at grade along much of the area's main artery.
The area did eventually get new dedicated retail, but its live/work suites also started taking on more "work" as demand in the area grew. Today, nobody is going to confuse it with Bloor Street, but importantly, the ground floor was able to change and adapt. And this is one of the great benefits, or at least promises, of live/work: you get additional flexibility.
Personally, I would love to have a live/work space. I'd use it to incubate new ideas and sell random stuff. And I have a feeling that, given the opportunity, many others would do the same. So I plan to spend some more time thinking and writing about this topic. If any of you have shining examples of live/work successes, please share them in the comment section below.
Using Google Maps to get rough dimensions, the site looks to be somewhere around 8m wide by 11m deep. So this is not a huge site compared to what you might find in the suburbs of other cities, but it's certainly a very workable set of dimensions. Also noteworthy is the fact that the area has no sidewalks. This is common throughout Tokyo. Ordinarily, this would imply a suburban mental model. But in practice, Tokyo's streets actually feel very pedestrian-friendly. And that's because they tend to be narrow and the entire city is oriented mostly around rail.
What was ultimately developed on the site is this (House F):
Totalling 169 m2, the first floor of the house serves as an office for the architect and as an open space for the local community. The firm opens up the space to people who may want to stop in for coffee (or just hang out) and for movie nights. There's even a "plant-sharing network" on the terrace where dozens of households supposedly contribute and participate. On the second and third floor of the house are the domestic quarters. Here there are two generous bedrooms, study spaces, and multiple balconies, one of which provides access to a rooftop terrace.
It's a highly livable house, but it's also designed to meet a particular set of ambitions. I mean, look at the above coffee window. And this is one of the really cool things about domestic architecture in Japan. (If any of you are familiar with how the zoning would work for a site like this, I'd love to understand that.)
Project images via Kamakura Studio
Using Google Maps to get rough dimensions, the site looks to be somewhere around 8m wide by 11m deep. So this is not a huge site compared to what you might find in the suburbs of other cities, but it's certainly a very workable set of dimensions. Also noteworthy is the fact that the area has no sidewalks. This is common throughout Tokyo. Ordinarily, this would imply a suburban mental model. But in practice, Tokyo's streets actually feel very pedestrian-friendly. And that's because they tend to be narrow and the entire city is oriented mostly around rail.
What was ultimately developed on the site is this (House F):
Totalling 169 m2, the first floor of the house serves as an office for the architect and as an open space for the local community. The firm opens up the space to people who may want to stop in for coffee (or just hang out) and for movie nights. There's even a "plant-sharing network" on the terrace where dozens of households supposedly contribute and participate. On the second and third floor of the house are the domestic quarters. Here there are two generous bedrooms, study spaces, and multiple balconies, one of which provides access to a rooftop terrace.
It's a highly livable house, but it's also designed to meet a particular set of ambitions. I mean, look at the above coffee window. And this is one of the really cool things about domestic architecture in Japan. (If any of you are familiar with how the zoning would work for a site like this, I'd love to understand that.)
Project images via Kamakura Studio
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