When Franco Vaccarino became principal of the University of Toronto Scarborough three years ago, he kept hearing a back-handed compliment about his new campus.
“This place,” people would say, “is a hidden gem.”
Shrouded by trees and invisible from the nearest major streets, UTSC is more like a covert campus. In his careful academic way, Prof. Vaccarino concedes the school needs to blow its own cover.
“I like the ‘gem’ part,” Prof. Vaccarino said. “I’m not so sure about the ‘hidden’ part.”
Now UTSC is on its way to becoming a much more visible treasure, thanks to an international sporting extravaganza bigger than the Winter Olympics.
The 2015 Pan Am Games and a new $170-million aquatic centre for UTSC are propelling an extreme campus makeover that could include a hotel and convention centre, a performing arts centre, a new pedestrian thoroughfare lined with restaurants and cafés, and new residences and academic buildings.
The games are also providing fresh hope that UTSC will score a light-rail link before 2015; right now the school is on an unfunded line that exists only on paper.
While some of the expansion plans were in the works before Toronto landed the games, Pan Am has turned the ideas from vague wishes to concrete possibilities – for instance, the UTSC has commissioned a business case study for a hotel and convention centre that wouldn’t make sense without the national and international sporting meets that’ll follow the games.
By transforming 50 hectares north of the existing campus, the expansion could do for southeast Scarborough what Ryerson is doing for Yonge Street and George Brown College is expected to do for Toronto’s waterfront: Improve the neighbourhood. The spillover effect is especially important at UTSC, where the poor – and poorly served – pockets of Kingston-Galloway and Malvern are a few kilometres away.
“There’s a lot of pride in the area, but there’s very few opportunities to express the pride,” said Andrew Arifuzzaman
Furthermore, the expansion would give U of T’s poor suburban sister an identity of her own, along with a leg-up on her fierce competition for the Greater Toronto Area’s commuter students.
The expansion will entrench UTSC firmly in the ranks of Ontario’s mid-sized universities, creating essentially another full-service post-secondary commuter school for the city.
There’s little risk the school’s growth will exceed demand from the largely first- and second-generation Canadian families who live in Scarborough, York and Durham Regions, from which UTSC draws 80 per cent of its students. The campus is already over capacity, squeezing in more than 10,000 students, forcing some to study in hallway cubbies at exam time.
It was the threat of overcrowding at U of T’s downtown St. George campus that gave rise to UTSC in the first place.
In the late 1950s, when the University of Toronto foresaw an oncoming deluge of baby boomers, the school established suburban satellites in Mississauga and Scarborough, where the first classes were held in a local high school in 1964.
U of T hired Australian architect John Andrews – who would go on to help design the CN Tower – to sculpt a reinforced concrete mega-structure in the woods of the Highland Creek valley in southeast Scarborough.
Futuristic outside and in, Scarborough College, as it was then called, was wired for TV teaching in every classroom and its design attracted international plaudits.
“I think one can argue that maybe the two most famous Canadian buildings from the second half of the 20th century were Habitat at Expo 67 in Montreal and Scarborough College,” said Larry Richards, professor emeritus of architecture at U of T and author of a book about the institution’s architectural history.
Design buffs may have fawned over the building, but locals were mostly unimpressed or unaware of the college.
