Conference Tours
The conference includes six optional tours of Toronto. The schedule begins with a pre-conference tour on Thursday, October 3, prior to the opening reception. It concludes with five simultaneous walking or bus tours on Sunday, October 6. See below for descriptions of each of the tours, including details on timing, location, means of travel, identity of the host, and associated fees. You may sign up for the tours through the conference registration portal.
Thursday, October 3, 1-5pm
Pre-Conference Tour: Revitalization in South-East Central Toronto
Sunday, October 6, 10am-1pm
The Sherbourne-Parliament Transect: (Un)planned Diversity
Planning, Unplanning, and the Regeneration of the East Downtown
The Agony and the Ecstasy: 50 years of Toronto Waterfront Replanning and Redevelopment
Hybrid Suburbanism: New Towns, Towers, and Subdivisions in Post-War Toronto
The Western Edge of Downtown, and a dozen different concepts of planning, urban life and development
Thursday, October 3, 1-5pm
Pre-Conference Tour: Revitalization in South-East Central Toronto
Toronto never experienced the inner-city decline that befell most American Great Lakes cities after the Second World War. It certainly faced challenges, with areas of poverty, dilapidated housing, and obsolescent industries. But a combination of fortunate circumstances, sound planning policies, wise political leadership, and astute entrepreneurship – where the balance rests among these is a matter of opinion – kept central Toronto reasonably alive and safe through the postwar decades. Since the 1980s the city’s central area has prospered. Its residential population and property values have steadily risen, making the inner city more attractive than ever for the middle-class but eroding the city’s remaining lower-income residential areas.
This growth pressure, combined with ongoing de-industrialization of the city’s waterfront and aging of its buildings, is prompting inner-city redevelopment and revitalization on a scale which, taken altogether, is quite extraordinary. Much of the central city is being transformed, more than many locals realize, as sites long used for industry or commerce are being converted to residential uses. Some projects involve demolition and rebuilding, while some are being built on re-purposed, largely vacant land. Some are private ventures, some are public-private partnerships, and some are purely public undertakings. They are producing housing with a range of tenures and building forms as well as public amenities of various types.
Taking advantage of the fact that several of the largest and most striking of these redevelopment sites are in the south-east quadrant of the central city, within a few miles of the SACRPH conference hotel, the local arrangements committee has organized a full-afternoon pre-conference tour of four such sites where participants will be given an orientation and brief tour by a working professional involved in its planning.
The four sites will be:
- Regent Park – Toronto’s first major public housing project, initially built in the late 1940s, is in the midst of a major reconstruction and revitalization that is bringing in a mix of incomes and uses.
- East Bayfront – This formerly industrial waterfront area is being redeveloped into a large residential, mixed-use area under the direction of Waterfront Toronto, an administrative body created by the municipal, provincial, and federal governments in 2001; much of the public infrastructure has been built in advance of the private-sector condominium developments planned for the area.
- West Donlands – This is another redevelopment area being overseen by Waterfront Toronto; it includes a public housing building, the athletes’ village for the 2015 Pan-Am Games, as well as two private-sector condominium projects.
- King/Parliament Redevelopment Area – This stretch of King Street East, on either side of Parliament Street, has seen a great boom in residential construction in recent years. Until the 1980s the area was a mix of low-income residences and light industries, in aging but still functional buildings, and some of this remains, but the area is in the process of complete transformation.
The tour will conclude in the nearby Distillery District, an extraordinary enclave of nineteenth-century industrial buildings. It was redeveloped in the 1990s into an arts and culture precinct, and now includes several new high-rise residential buildings.
Means of travel: Walking / Bus
Start/Finish: Courtyard Marriott Hotel (meet at hotel registration desk)
Co-hosts: Richard White and Paul Hess, Local Arrangements Committee
Cost: $35
Note: The bus will depart the Distillery District for the conference hotel at 4:45, concluding the tour (the trip should take less than 15 minutes). The Bousfield Lecture will begin at 6:00 at Victoria College, followed by a reception at 7:00.
Sunday, October 6, 10am-1pm (5 Options)
1. The Sherbourne-Parliament Transect: (Un)planned Diversity
Among Toronto’s distinctive features is its healthy and diverse inner city, and a telling illustration of this is the range of urban forms and socio-economic statuses on the eastern edge of its downtown, along Parliament and Sherbourne Streets. This axis includes a nineteenth-century garden suburb still filled with multi-million dollar homes, a sea of 1960s high-rise apartment buildings said to be among the highest density residential neighbourhoods in North America, an old working-class neighbourhood gentrified almost beyond recognition, an extensive 1940s public housing project now undergoing revitalization, and a 1960s high-rise public housing project as originally built. This diversity was not planned, overall, though each element of it was the product of planning policies in place at certain times. So the axis can serve as an urban transect of sorts, revealing not the gradation of densities or the transition from urban to rural but the impact of planning at different times in the city’s history.
This walking tour will explore the Sherbourne-Parliament axis, from Rosedale in the north to Moss Park in the south. It will begin and end with a ten-minute public transit trip and will require, all told, about three miles of walking.
Means of Travel: Public Transit & Walking (total walking distance ~3 miles)
Start/Finish: Courtyard Marriott Hotel (meet at hotel registration desk)
Host: Richard White, University of Toronto Mississauga
Cost: $10
Note: The tour will never be much more than a mile from the Marriott, so returning to the hotel early, by taxi or on foot, will be easily done.
2. Planning, Unplanning, and the Regeneration of the East Downtown
Once the site of the nineteenth-century colonial assembly, the eastern flank of the central business district was for most of the twentieth century a mix of industry and worker housing and had by the 1960s become dominated by brownfields and parking lots. Over the past four decades the area has been incrementally redeveloped, sometimes as a result of planning, sometimes in spite of planning, and sometimes as a result of “unplanning” — the relaxation of land use regulation. The tour moves through three areas that represent different modes of regeneration: the St. Lawrence neighbourhood, the King St. East condominium corridor, and Corktown. St. Lawrence was comprehensively redeveloped by government in the 1970s as a mixed-use, mid-rise residential neighbourhood of public, co-op, and market housing. The transformation since the 1990s of the King St. East corridor was enabled by the city’s deregulation of zoning. Corktown contains some of the oldest housing in Toronto, and is in the process of gentrification by individual homeowners. These areas exemplify the complex interplay of public- and private-sector-led regeneration in the context of inner-city deindustrialization. As such they embody the ambivalent nature of the Toronto’s post-1970 success story: an urban core that (unlike many North American cities) is densely populated and commercially and culturally vibrant, yet whose social mix is challenged by rapid social and economic change.
Means of Travel: Public transit and Walking (total walking distance ~1.5 miles (2 km)
Start/Finish: Courtyard Marriott Hotel (meet at hotel registration desk)
Host: Zack Taylor, University of Toronto Scarborough
Cost: $10
Note: The tour will never be more than 1 mile from the conference hotel, so returning to the hotel early, by taxi or on foot, will be easily done.
3. The Agony and the Ecstasy: 50 years of Toronto Waterfront Replanning and Redevelopment
Like many other cities, Toronto has seen a major transformation of its waterfront over the last half-century. An industrial port with expansive railway infrastructure has been transformed incrementally into an extension of the central business district, major new residential areas, parks, and other public facilities. The process is ongoing, with major redevelopment projects currently under construction, and planned. The process and results have been controversial and uneven, however, with a number of disappointments and changes of course along the way. This tour will visit the early hotel developments from the 1960s, the federal government’s Harbourfront development of the 1970s, the stadium development and condos of the 1980s, new parks and amenities of the 1990s, and the recent and ongoing high-rise condominium developments and public realm improvments of the 2000s to the present. We will return via the Spadina Avenue Streetcar through the King/Spadina redevelopment area and Chinatown back to the hotel.
Means of Travel: Public transit and Walking (total walking distance ~2 miles (3 km)
Start/Finish: Courtyard Marriott Hotel (meet at hotel registration desk)
Host: Andre Sorensen, University of Toronto Scarborough
Cost: $10
4. Hybrid Suburbanism: New Towns, Towers, and Subdivisions in Post-War Toronto
The transformation of Toronto from a compact city into a metropolitan region in the first decades after World-War Two created some of the mostly highly planned and fully realized modernist landscapes in North America. This tour visits three paradigmatic areas: Don Mills, Thorncliffe Park, and the Peanut. Designed as a master-planned new town in the early 1950’s, Don Mills became a model for Canadian suburban development. The tour will visit one of its neighborhood units along with its commercial centre, recently redesigned as a mixed-use “life style centre.” Thorncliffe Park was designed and built starting in the late 1950’s as a master-planned area with housing consisting almost entirely of high-rise modernist tower blocks arranged around a park, shopping centre and elementary school (the largest in North America). Featured in Doug Saunders’ Arrival City, more than two-thirds of the current population was born outside of Canada, with the majority arriving within the last 5 years. Finally, The Peanut represents the lessons of Don Mills and the Thorncliffe, as translated by the Metropolitan Municipality of Toronto and the City of North York in the mid-1960’s. Designed for a population of almost 100,000 people, the area is a hybrid of a low-rise subdivisions and an area composed of nearly three dozen high-rise tower blocks surrounding public facilities, all carried out, not as a private master plan, but within a coordinated, municipal planning framework. All three areas remain as remarkable expressions of mid-twentieth century modern planning ideas.
Means of Travel: Bus
Start/Finish: Courtyard Marriott Hotel (meet at hotel registration desk)
Hosts: Paul Hess, University of Toronto; Graeme Stewart, E.R.A. Architects
Cost: $35
5. The Western Edges of Development, and a dozen different concepts of planning, urban life and development
Districts west of and in downtown offer a cross-section of approaches used in urban development, planning, and living in the old City of Toronto from about 1850 to the near future. On this trip we will encounter, in this probable order:
- Pseudo City Beautiful planning of University Avenue
- Destination starchitecture by Frank Gehry and Bruce Allsop
- Fragments of late-19th century streetcar, neo-Gothic Toronto (the sort of unplanned city bits Jane Jacobs loved)
- Downtown Chinatown at its most intense
- Kensington Market, a former Jewish street market becoming urbanoid
- Alexandra Park, a 1960s urban renewal social housing project, now co-ops
- Spadina Avenue, former centre of the garment industry, gentrifying as creative class offices
- Queen Street West, main street retailing evolving from avant-garde to chain stores
- King Street West and the Entertainment District, the emerging epicentre of condolandia, the condominium boom that began in the 1990s with industrial dezoning
- Financial district at King and Bay, Canada’s equivalent to Wall Street
- The Path (retail tunnels beneath downtown) and the search for Google’s Canadian HQ
- Old and New City Hall, where the modernization of old Toronto began and I expect this trip to end (conveniently close to the Eaton Centre for souvenir shopping, lunch, the subway, streetcars, Yonge Street.
Means of Travel: Walking (total walking distance ~5 km)
Start/Finish: Starts on the west side of University Avenue at Dundas, about 10 mins walk west of the Courtyard Marriot (or take the subway to St. Patrick); ends at New City Hall
Host: Ted Relph, University of Toronto Scarborough
Cost: $10