Toronto, and more specifically the office of Brook McIlroy Planning, has won an award for a plan to build reasonably sized buildings and strengthen our avenues.
Lorna Day, project manager for the
Avenues and Mid-Rise Study, which won the award, says she hopes the recognition will help fuel other cities' efforts at increasing density without having to resort to exclusively high-profit, high-rise structures. Toronto's avenues add up to about 324 kilometres of main-street property frontage; about 200 kilometres of that could be redeveloped as mid-rise built form, according to the report. No taller than the width of the street, mid-rise buildings can provide increased density without changing the character of a neighbourhood as dramatically as high-rise buildings.
"I presented this work at the conference," Day says of the
Ontario Professional Planners Institute event in Ottawa at which the award was presented, "and the audience was planners, public sector planners from other major cities in Ontario. Some of them would like to start implementing the performance standards themselves." She says she also presented the report at the Canadian Institute of Planners conference in St. John's in June.
The importance of the study, according to Day, lies in its guidelines that go beyond individual developers' usual concerns.
"The development industry in Toronto has figured out a couple of formulas that have worked for them in the past," Day says. "One is high-rises, the other is houses."
Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Lorna Day
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