Paul Bedford isn't just a man with a plan — he wrote the plan. And Toronto's former chief planner doesn't blink an eye when I ask if he eats, breathes and sleeps urban planning.
Mr. Bedford and his staff were behind the city's new official plan, a blueprint containing many bold initiatives that was unveiled in 2002 and finally approved by the Ontario Municipal Board in 2006 after years of appeals.
A few hours before the rhetorical question was posed, the 60-year-old self-described "urban mentor" was seated beside me — a sheaf of maps, schematics and conceptual illustrations on his lap. He was tracing the route of our automobile "architour," which would illustrate how the seeds of his plan have become residential sprouts all over town. They'll fully flower, it's hoped, by 2031 when the city's population is expected to have grown by more than 500,000 people, and perhaps by as many as 800,000.
On paper, urban planning is a discipline that looks a lot like Grade 10 geography homework. For those who might be turned off by this, it would be worth remembering Mr. Bedford's suggestion that "everyone's daily life cycle in the city is absolutely connected to planning." It's the ideas behind the charts and graphs that are important, and since retiring in 2004 after 31 years with the city, he's been imparting them to students at York University and the University of Toronto. (He will do the same at Ryerson University this autumn.)
Paul Bedford, the former chief planner for Toronto, top, wrote the city’s new official plan. In it, he identifies potential mixed use sites such as the industrial “shoulders” at King Street and Spadina Avenue, centre. The townhouse building at Queen Street and Glen Manor Drive, bottom, shows the potential of main streets, he says. (PHOTOS BY DAVE LEBLANC)
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One of Mr. Bedford's biggest ideas is that Toronto can accommodate all of these new people without paving over another acre of farmland, since there's plenty of space in the old city of Toronto and the inner-ring suburbs of Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough.
Ideal Condominiums at College and Markham streets (Context Development Inc.), a medium-rise building sitting on the formerly underutilized site of Ideal Restaurant Supplies, is a good example. On College, it steps back after the fifth storey to relate to other commercial buildings on the strip. On Markham, it steps back after the third storey to create a dialogue with its residential neighbours.
"It's hard to do for people, but if you can envision Kingston Road and The Queensway having buildings kind of like this — with pedestrians and a streetcar down the middle — it's a better street," he explains.
He's talking about "soft sites": large, easily developed lots — occupied by, say, a car-rental place or an aging strip mall — where residential units can be built. Collectively, they could set off a housing explosion in the future. His so-called "Avenues" plan has identified 1,443 soft sites along Toronto's 160 kilometres of mixed-use (retail/residential) corridors, where six-storey buildings could fit easily into the streetscape and provide approximately 124,000 units of housing above ground-floor retail. At an average of two people a unit, that's a quarter of a million, "and that's what blows people away," he says.
As we drive up Ossington Avenue toward Bloor, admiring the stately red brick homes that line both sides of the street, he assures me that areas zoned 100 per cent residential aren't on the radar. "We don't even think of this stuff."
Thoroughfares such as Bloor or Dundas Street, however, are peppered with dinky, suburban-style one-storey structures fronted by moats of asphalt. They're the unfortunate result of the relaxed planning principles in place up until the 1970s (when Mr. Bedford began his planning career under mayor David Crombie). But their untapped potential is enormous.
Higher towers are to be located only in the pre-approved "centres": downtown, of course, and the former city centres of Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough. "We had seven official plans that were all [done at] different points in time," he explains, "and what I did is provide a unified vision for the whole new amalgamated city."
Our next stop shows that he did more than that. It's his "big experiment" at King and Spadina, of which he's justifiably proud. By the early 1990s, the area — along with the other industrial "shoulder" at King and Parliament streets — saw most of its gorgeous heritage buildings in decay since manufacturing had gone elsewhere, so Mr. Bedford opened up the zoning "for a wide range of uses" in order to "preserve and reuse them." Endorsed by the late urban activist Jane Jacobs, the "radical" plan proved wildly successful. "It didn't cost a penny; it was a policy change," he explains. "[There's] been no looking back ever since. ... This is a corridor that's red hot for architects, advertising, media."
On Queen Street, we pull up to a non-descript townhouse building at Glen Manor Drive that Mr. Bedford thinks is notable because the builders "took advantage of a grade differential behind." On the street, the building has three storeys, with retail space on the ground floor, but around back where the homeowner's front doors are, they're two-storey townhouses. "This isn't a new idea," he says, "[but] what it shows is the potential of main streets."
Our last stop is near Yonge Street and Blythwood Road, where two medium-size residential buildings face each other across the street. It's not the architecture he emphasizes, but rather the idea, again, that a medium-rise building on a major, mixed-use street can turn the corner and step down in height as it meets single-family dwellings on a side street. "People fight the buildings ... and then often what you find is people from the very neighbourhood sell and move into it," he adds.
Everywhere we drive, there are places where the dense street-wall opens up like a gap-toothed smile for a one-storey convenience store that could just as easily occupy the ground floor of a multi-storey building. It's encouraging, though, to see some areas where smaller, multi-storey infill residential buildings are filling in those gaps, and larger, six- to 10-storey buildings are clustered around major intersections served by transit. It's almost as if, emboldened by one pioneering development in an up-and-coming area, other buildings pop up like mushrooms around it. (A good example of this can be found at King and Strachan Avenue.)
While Mr. Bedford hopes to see these ideas sprout in suburban areas a lot sooner than 2031, he's far too busy with teaching, writing and speaking engagements to do very much about it, other than to suggest that the city provide the zoning to developers "up front" to streamline the process.
"It's not up to me any more," he says. Maybe not, but if we're lucky, the man who wrote the plan will continue to teach us at least until it's time to write a new one.
Dave LeBlanc hosts The Architourist on CFRB Wednesdays during Toronto at Noon and Sunday mornings. Send inquiries to dave.leblanc@globeandmail.com.
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