By Tracy Hanes
In search of pedestrian-friendly communities
In May, participants on an Ontario Home Builders’ Association four-day study tour visited Oslo, Norway, one of the world’s most sustainable cities. They saw a city increasingly putting pedestrians and cyclists before cars in its core, prioritizing connections to greenspaces and waterways, and transforming former industrial lands into vibrant, mixed-use neighbourhoods.
There are many examples of walkable, green neighbourhoods in Europe and North America. But this concept hasn’t caught on in a big way in Ontario. So what’s stopping the province’s municipalities, planners, designers, builders and developers?
“Europe’s history is that inner cores were built before cars, whereas in North America, neighbourhoods have been built around cars and trucks,” explains Leith Moore, co-founder of Assembly Corp., a Toronto company that provides sustainable prefabricated and modular laneway and mid-rise housing. Moore, who was on the Oslo tour, studied at the School of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Waterloo.
“In Europe, there is a lot more city ownership of development, a lot of experience and a clear vision of what the cities want built,” says Moore. “There are several large sites, with a lot of detail and information-sharing, and they do a good job densifying with a mix of uses. In North America, it’s every man for himself, every site for itself, and the guidelines and standards are interpreted differently by developers and architects, and thus aren’t cohesive.”
Not much prominence is given to the pedestrian realm here, as streets and sidewalks are not the developer’s responsibility, Moore adds. Trying to replicate those European models in Toronto is an issue because “we’re hamstrung by engineering standards, parking standards, garbage standards and turning radiuses.” He says Europe designs smaller, more efficient buildings, and even smaller equipment to do things such as collect garbage.
Also complicating the construction of small mid-rise buildings that would add human scale to urban neighbourhoods are Canadian fire standards. Implemented in 1941, the standards require that mid-rise buildings have two exit staircases connected by a long corridor. Single staircases are permitted in Europe (in Paris and Berlin, for example) and have been demonstrated to be just as safe. Amending the Canadian rule would allow for more compact mid-rise buildings to rise on small sites.
“There are a lot more fine-grain buildings in Europe, whereas here, there’s a lot of technical stuff that gets in the way of nailing it,” says Moore.
Our suburbs are equally problematic. Most are designed to put the car first and people second, with homes segregated from shopping, restaurants and other uses. Michael Collins-Williams, CEO of the West End HBA and a registered professional planner, is seeing a gradual shift.
“Many of Ontario’s larger cities are rapidly urbanizing, with a greater focus on transit-oriented development and human-scaled, mixed-use communities,” says Collins-Williams. “While we haven’t yet seen a huge uptake in Ontario on the scale occurring in Europe, you have to remember that these cities are hundreds of years old, with a much more established pedestrian and transit culture than here in North America.”
A concept emerging in the province is the 15-minute neighbourhood—compact and walkable with a mix of housing types, shops, amenities, parks and employment within a 15-minute walk. They are intended to be complete communities that support transit and reduce car dependency. The City of Ottawa is among the first in Canada to enshrine 15-minute neighbourhood principles into its Official Plan. The goal is to intensify existing neighbourhoods, encourage a move to sustainable modes of transportation such as walking, cycling or transit, and to create stronger, more diverse communities.
There are a few large GTA urban developments that Moore says reflect these principles. One is Toronto’s Canary District in the West Don Lands. Developed by Kilmer Group and Dream, this transformation of the 2015 Pan Am Games Athletes Village is walkable, with connections to Corktown, the Distillery District, downtown and the Don River trails. It comprises mainly mid-rise condos, and residents can stroll to cafes, retail, green spaces and community services. All its buildings target LEED Gold certification.
Another is Brightwater, which is being developed on remediated former Imperial Oil refinery lands in Port Credit. The 72-acre waterfront site aims to set a benchmark for waterfront community design. Its developers, Port Credit West Village Partners, include team members from Kilmer Group, DiamondCorp, Dream Unlimited and FRAM + Slokker. It will have 2,995 residential units, including condos and townhomes, and 150 affordable housing units. It will also feature 300,000 square feet of retail, restaurants and office space, as well as a new elementary school. Its second condo building is now occupied, and the first commercial tenants, Farm Boy and LCBO, are opening their doors this summer.
Brightwater, located on remediated Imperial Oil refinery lands, is a 72-acre mixed-use lakeside neighbourhood in Port Credit in Mississauga where residents can live, work and play. It promotes pedestrians over cars with multi-use pathways, narrow streets and shuttle service to the GO station. Most of the parking in the community will be underground and out of sight.
Brightwater’s 18 acres of new green spaces, including a nine-acre waterfront park, European-inspired promenades, pedestrian mews and public plazas, will integrate with the surrounding neighbourhood.
“Port Credit is already a walkable community, with a perfect combination of residences close to retail, amenities, a park network and the Waterfront Trail,” says Brightwater V.P. of Planning and Development Christina Giannone. To tie into that existing fabric, the development team listened to the community’s concerns about traffic and worked with the City of Mississauga to create new standards for right-of-ways, with narrower car lanes, wider sidewalks and protected bike paths.
“We will have at-grade, short-term parking, but 99% of commercial and residential vehicles will be parked below grade,” says Giannone. “It’s cleaner and easier to walk for residents and visitors.” Brightwater has a shuttle service to take residents to the Port Credit GO Station, and there are plans to bring a MiWay transit stop to one of the buildings. Car share will also be available.
Giannone says Brightwater is striving for LEED ND certification, including green roofs, an innovative bioswale stormwater management system and some mass timber buildings in the first phase.
Well Done
Adding to downtown Toronto’s pedestrian-oriented revitalization is The Well, one of the largest mixed-use developments in Canada. Similar in style to New York City’s Hudson Yards, its 7.7 acres is bordered by Spadina Ave., Front St., Draper St. and Wellington St. It includes 1.2 million square feet of office space and 320,000 square feet of retail, plus 1,700 condos and rental units in six residential buildings. The office building connects to the three-level retail, and there’s underground parking for 1,650 cars and 1,900 bikes, with EV charging spots and car-share stalls.
The Well has tranformed 7.8 acres in Toronto into a vehicle-free neighbourhood with seven buildings contraining offices, residences, retail, galleries, bars and restaurants.
The buildings are constructed to LEED Platinum standards. A massive underground cistern (‘The Well’) is part of the development’s heating/cooling system and extends Enwave Energy Corp.’s Deep Lake Water Cooling (DLWC) system.
The Well’s signature feature is the covered, shop-lined passageways under a glass canopy. At the same time, a new linear park along Wellington St. connects to Victoria Memorial Park to the west and Clarence Square to the east.
The Well is one of the largest mixed-use developments in Canada.
“Unlike some developments that are an oasis in an urban environment, we wanted to create a permeable environment that’s part of the community,” explains The Well’s general manager, Anthony Casalanguida. “It’s very European in terms of the assets, plaza and shopping environment. We wanted to make sure it was accessible to everyone. The grand vision is to augment the connection in the community and be a place for people to engage with one another.”
Casalanguida says the City of Toronto was “very amenable to the scale of what we were doing, very positive in terms of design.” The city wanted community enhancements, which the park will provide.
“The Well is a 12-minute walk from Union Station, there is a streetcar stop and a bike share,” Casalanguida adds. “There are many ways to get here.”
Where Can and Can’t it Work?
But can these neighbourhoods exist in car-dependent suburbs or towns where public transit is limited or nonexistent?
New Urbanism is an urban design movement that promotes environmentally friendly habits by creating walkable neighbourhoods containing a wide range of housing and job types. It ideally features a five-minute walk from centre to edge, on walkable streets, with proximity to shopping and public spaces. There are a handful of such developments in Ontario, most created in consultation with DPZ CoDesign, founded by Americans Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk—themselves founders of the Congress of New Urbanism. In the 1990s, Markham became one of the first GTA municipalities to incorporate New Urbanism principles into its planning with Cornell, one of Canada’s largest New Urbanism developments. A 2022 Urban Design Lab article, New Urbanism: Successes and Failures, notes that while Cornell has a mix of housing types on grid-arranged streets with wide sidewalks and rear-lane garages, it lacked a central public space, as well as amenities and services within walking distance.
Other New Urbanism developments in Ontario include The Village in Niagara-on-the-Lake, which has a village centre, and New Amherst in Cobourg, which is still a work in progress.
Sean McAdam is the founder and president of Landlab Inc., developers of Hendrick Farm in Chelsea, Quebec, a development that connects to the village of Chelsea and Gatineau Park, 15 minutes from downtown Ottawa. The community is designed with a Landlab-created concept called Adaptive Development, where plans are adapted to suit sites instead of based on standard zoning requirements. It shares some ideas with New Urbanism in rejecting the notion of car-dependent, cookie-cutter suburbs and embracing traditional design. But there are key differences. In New Urbanism, there’s a rural-to-urban transect, a system that puts all elements of the land design in order from most urban to most rural. Streets are more urban than roads, for example, and brick walls are more urban than wooden fences. This approach makes housing less dense as you get father from the core.
Hendrick Farm in Chelsea, Quebec, just 15 minutes from downtown Ottawa (top), and the proposed Lakeport Beach in Northumberland County are projects from Landlab. Both will follow Adaptive Development planning principles, which balance design, urban planning, environmental stewardship and economics.
“We believe you need multiple cores and deliberate injection of cores within neighbourhoods, in terms of density and architectural and spatial differences,” McAdam says. “It makes a neighbourhood more interesting. That’s why at Hendrick Farm there are clusters of brick townhomes amid single-family homes, plus smaller homes.”
Garages and parking spaces are detached from homes and located at the rear to create more attractive streetscapes. Acres of on-site forest have been preserved, and trails have been added for residents and the public, connecting previously unwalkable areas of Chelsea.
With Hendrick Farm in its final phase, Landlab is planning Lakeport Beach, a development similar in look and feel, in Alnwick-Haldimand Township in Northumberland County. DPZ has also partnered to develop the master plan for the 200-acre rural site with 1.3 kilometres of Lake Ontario pebble beach. The development would have 700 to 800 homes, ranging from single-family to townhomes and small cottages, with ground-floor units for seniors. Like Hendrick Farm, there would be extensive green space and homes with front porches and picket fences to separate private and public spaces.
“When you’re doing a project like Hendrick Farm or Lakeport Beach, because they don’t fit into a regulatory box, you politely ask government bureaucrats to suspend all of their rules,” says McAdam. He says having a 20- to 25-metre road allowance is “excellent if you want to land a Boeing 747, but bad if you want people to walk safely.” With Hendrick Farm, Landlab made the case for an eight-metre, double-lane road allowance, thus allowing for wider sidewalks and pulling houses closer to the road. Instead of big front lawns, they have large front porches, and having smaller lots overall allowed for more green space in the community, even though it went against zoning regulations.
Not that it has all been, well, a walk in the park. It took McAdam 15 years to get permission for Hendrik Farm in Quebec, and he’s finding the process even tougher here. “In Ontario, there’s a significant reticence by the province to tell the municipalities their job is to manage their municipality, and that when landowners have ideas for creating more housing, you’ve got to have an open door. In Quebec, municipalities have the legal responsibility to accept an application. Ontario is more bureaucratic. I have an Ontario planner on payroll and a municipal lawyer on payroll, and both come with teams. There are layers of regulations.”
Base31 Didn’t Need to Go to War
The developers of Base31, one of the largest revitalization projects in Canada, unfolding on more than 700 acres in Picton, have found the Prince Edward County community and local municipality much more accommodating. Situated on the former site of a World War II air training base, Base31 is owned and operated by PEC Community Partners Inc., which includes Tercot Communities, DECO Communities, PEC Placemaking and Rockport Group.
“When we purchased the site (in 2021), we were coming into a rural, tight-knit community, so we did a lot of local engagement to understand what was needed to have the community’s buy-in,” says Alexandra De Gasperis, V.P. of DECO Communities. “The place had a rich history that drew our partnership to the property. We looked at how we could build on what the County already has—food, arts, culture and tourism—and how we could leverage that to create a year-round destination with year-round jobs and new industries. Everyone sees this as an opportunity for the County to flourish, and we are not getting the typical NIMBYism.”
Instead of first looking at housing, the partners decided to animate the site to create year-round activity and forge local partnerships. Historic buildings have been revitalized with galleries, public art, an escape room, an open-air food and drink market, walking and golf cart/bike tours, a sensory garden and concerts.
When it comes to housing, “we want it to be for everyone, and we need to be able to house a vast majority of incomes, ages and workers,” says DeGasperis. “One of our first efforts will be purpose-built rentals, as Prince Edward County has a vacancy rate of zero.”
Boston-based Sasaki created the master plan with the Revitalization District. The historic buildings will serve as the hub for activities and events, while a central park will be reached by interconnected greenways known as ‘green fingers.’
“Prince Edward County is made up of little villages, and in keeping with that culture, there will be individual villages here, each with a unique personality,” says DeGasperis. “When you’re in one village, you won’t see the next. The green fingers will have a trail system for walking and cycling, and you’ll be able to go to the Revitalization District without having to cross a road.”
While there are no homes yet, a pilot project funded by the partners has a bus route coming through the site. And additional automobiles will invariably follow. In a rural county, with a site that hosts tourists, concerts and future homes, going carless isn’t feasible, admits DeGasperis.
“We need to be realistic about the use of cars, but we don’t want a lot of forward-facing garages, so we’ll look at street and rear parking,” she says.
Charting a Path to the Future
How can some roadblocks to creating more pedestrian-oriented, green developments in Ontario be addressed? “I’m thrilled that politicians are seeing we need more housing, but they haven’t grasped the stranglehold municipalities have and how ridiculously entangled regulations are,” says McAdam. “The whole system needs to be reassessed.”
Moore says there should be more information-sharing between jurisdictions. “Cities tend to hire consultants to do the work, but that doesn’t tend to produce the best results on bigger sites. It’s been spotty.”
Moore would like to see municipal staff travel to Europe, not just for a brief conference or a single trip, but to learn from experienced European counterparts. He says the idea that every edge or corner of the street has to have a commercial use is a stumbling block too. “The thinking is you need office or retail to fill those spaces. There’s not enough retail to fill them, and residential at grade is helpful to animate a street.”
Collins-Williams says OHBA’s international tours are helpful for professional development, but need support from government.
“It requires a shared vision by both the municipality and the developer, or a group of builders and developers, working in the same community. It’s going to take vision, collaboration, an appetite to take on some risk, and attention to urban design details in terms of execution.”
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