So far, the rollout of Waterfront Toronto's $17-billion renovation of Lake Ontario's urban shoreline has been an interesting adventure of the mind and spirit. The public corporation's plans are very ambitious. And if not exactly thrilling, they are, by and large, credible expressions of the best contemporary thinking about the reclamation of brownfields.
There appears to be agreement among planners, for example, about the kinds of commercial spaces and market-rate housing that should be provided in this vast undertaking. Waterfront Toronto president John Campbell told me not long ago that he hoped Toronto's overhauled docklands would become home bases for "the intelligent technology community — e-health, e-learning, e-commerce." That strikes me as an effective, appropriate scenario for a city that's on the verge (for better or worse) of turning into a home for information-industry proletarians.
Last week, however, I heard a criticism of Mr. Campbell's vision that deserves an airing. It came from Jason LeBlanc, who has just finished his professional degree in architecture at the University of Toronto, and whose final school project takes aim at the white-collar formula now being advanced for the old industrial lands along the harbourfront.
"When [Waterfront Toronto] talks about employment, there's this sanitized nature in what they're proposing," Mr. LeBlanc said. "Information technology is a very clean, office-tower, sterile kind of employment. It's not addressing the hands-on, gritty nature of a lot of other businesses and cultural pursuits. I think fundamentally they are not incorporating a large chunk of the employable programs that exist in a city like Toronto. How are you going to back up your flat-bed truck and load up your custom-built windows?"
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Mr. LeBlanc has a list of small non-IT businesses that he believes should be knit into Waterfront Toronto's new commercial and residential landscape. The city will always need leather and automobile repair shops in the inner city, for example, and downtown spaces suitable for artists, jewellers and other craftspeople, as well as areas for custom metal, wood and stonework — and for making those custom-built windows. With old warehouses and factory buildings being transformed into condominiums across the city, Toronto is in danger of losing a great deal of good floor space appropriate for these necessary small companies.
But Mr. LeBlanc's thesis is not merely a critique of what's going on down at the water's edge. He also has positive ideas about the kind of development he would like to see brought about, not merely on the lands supervised by Waterfront Toronto but in all the old industrial districts scattered here and there across the city.
In his theoretical project, Mr. LeBlanc focuses on the residential and former industrial neighbourhood now known as the Studio District because of its large number of television and film production facilities. Zooming in, we find the exact site Mr. LeBlanc is interested in: a small campus of small buildings once devoted to metalworking.
His imaginary refiguring of this place starts with the good foundations and walls of the factory structures. Building upon these existing features — an important point, in this conservation-minded scheme — Mr. LeBlanc adds a compact and handsome superstructure of residential and commercial spaces. On the lowest level, a machine shop and similar enterprises are in operation. On the level above that are the leather workers and perhaps a bakery, art gallery or some other small business.
Minus the machine shop, and plus a microbrewery or two, Mr. LeBlanc's design so far resembles the Distillery District, Toronto's most striking example of recycled industrial architecture.
But in the Studio District scheme, the parts of the building that house businesses would also be blended immediately into townhouses and a seven-storey stack of apartments facing a beautiful glassed-in street. The result: a building that adds desirable density to a part of the city that needs it, and that integrates living and various modes of working on a tight site. (For the record, the Distillery District is shortly to get on-site residences. The present condo towers are off-site.)
While I admire the motives informing it, Mr. LeBlanc's project leaves some crucial issues unresolved. The whole setup is funky, but who would want to live in a building with a machine shop on the bottom floor? Also, on the practical side, how could the work suites be kept affordable (without public subsidies) for the low-end companies Mr. LeBlanc would like to see installed there?
But never mind: Jason LeBlanc's plan, as it stands, is a welcome contribution to the ongoing discussion about what kind of new cityscape we want Waterfront Toronto to deliver, and a lively, engaging proposal for joining life and work in the post-industrial city.
