Within Toronto's urban structure you have regular streets and you have things known as "Avenues." (This is among a bunch of other stuff such as Centres and Employment Areas.) What this Avenue designation does is tell you that it may be a suitable location for a new mid-rise building, which is something that I have written a lot about on this blog. Here in Toronto, this means that you would then need to consult the "Mid-Rise Building Performance Standards." Indeed, if you dust off these standards and turn to the introduction, you'll find the following: "The Performance Standards are intended to provide simple, straightforward guidance for those seeking to develop midrise projects on the Avenues."
But if you want to find some of the most truly unremarkable streets in this city, you need to look at the arterial roads that didn't quite make the cut to be an Avenue. I don't want to generalize, but they are generally exceedingly ugly. You can't help but feel like Toronto has simply outgrown the low-rise building typologies that, in most cases, still remain on these streets. In some cases, they're also directly adjacent to a subway station, which is kind of like running a great big movie theater with only a handful of seats inside. Maybe one day they'll grow up to be Avenues. But don't hold your breath. So what's another possible solution? Toronto-based PHAEDRUS Studio has an idea. It's called the