One of the most exciting city building projects going on in Toronto right now is the revitalization of the 715-acre Port Lands area (here's a map if you'd like to get situated). Despite its massive scale, it doesn't seem to be receiving a lot of attention. And that's probably because, at this stage, it's mostly infrastructure work. It's just a lot of soil being moved around.

But it's of course important work. The mouth of the Don River (where it meets Lake Ontario) was never properly engineered for resiliency, and so the entire area is at risk of flooding. That's why this $1.25 billion effort to re-naturalize its interface is currently underway. The above video does a good job explaining just what that entails.

At the same time, it is creating a wonderful city building opportunity -- new parks for the illegal drinking of craft beers, new wildlife habitat, new meandering rivers for kayaking, and of course new housing and new jobs. But when you look at what's planned, it's hard not to feel like we're missing the mark in terms of density.

The plan for Villiers Island calls for some 4,900 homes (according to this Globe and Mail article). And the plan for the entire area calls for only about 20,000 homes (according to this recent Bloomberg article). Surely there's room for at least a few more -- especially if we're hoping to support a new LRT line to the area.

My good friends over at Urban Capital recently released a short film about the making of their River City project here in Toronto. (If you can't see the embedded video above, click here.)

For those of you who aren't familiar, River City is a 4-phase development on the east side of downtown that was really the first project in what was known as the West Don Lands area. Urban Capital secured the right to develop the then government-owned lands in 2008 through a public tender process that was run by Waterfront Toronto.

It's a tricky and unobvious kind of site in that it's surrounded by infrastructure and it came with a whole host of development challenges, including flood risk. But the team figured it out and River City has gone on to win a number of awards including the Ontario Association of Architect's Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Design Excellence.

River City is an important project for Toronto in that it dared to be different. It's like no other project in the city, and I'm not just saying this because they're my friends. I'm saying it because I want our city to be a global leader in architecture, design, and development, and to continue to push the envelope.

River City did exactly that.

Real estate, as they say, is a local business. Every market has its local nuances. For example, once of the first things that Studio Gang asked us when we started working together was, "does Toronto do PT?" What they were referring to was post-tensioned concrete and our answer was, "not really." There are certainly examples of localized applications within buildings (such as for a specific transfer slab) and there are examples of buildings that have used it throughout (see Pier 27 Tower below -- it's how they managed to get such deep balconies). But for the most part, it's not widely used and it's certainly not as common as it is in markets such as New York. This subtle difference has an impact on how you design, which is why Studio Gang asked it from the outset.

Despite some of these local differences, there is a criticism out there that we have descended upon a kind of bland global design sensibility. No matter where you're building, every building now looks the same, which, at the end of the day, was kind of the point of the International Style of architecture. One design approach applied universally. This recent article by Edwin Heathcote takes things even further by saying that our interiors have also been sterilized to look more or less the same as a result of "digital aesthetic seepage." The article is called, "The curse of the Airbnb aesthetic."

One the one hand, there is something inevitable about this outcome. We -- including our supply chains -- have become more interconnected than ever. And because of the high cost of labor, the way we build today is centered around as much factory automation as possible. Minimize what needs to be done on site. And given that I would expect more, rather than less, automation going forward, one has to assume that this trend is destined to continue. At the same time, local places matter and one of the reasons why so many of us love to travel is that we want to see places that are different than our own. I for one don't want that to change.