Toronto striving for green spaces in a growing city

From tower renewal to laneway revitalization, City and community groups linking growing communities with green spaces.

Thestar.com
April 12, 2015
By Lauren Pelley

Living in the Bloor St. West and Ossington Ave. area means Kanishka Goonewardena has easy access to nearby Dufferin Grove Park - a five-hectare common space lined with large trees and featuring a sports field, picnic area and a playground for his kids.

“It’s a great place to hang out,” says the University of Toronto professor. “A nice neighbourhood feel to it.”

But Goonewardena, who teaches urban design, says not everyone in Toronto has his convenient level of access to green spaces, many of which are concentrated in the city’s central areas.

“When you go out to the outer suburbs, you don’t have the same kinds of green space amenities,” he notes.

While there’s no shortage of green space in the city as a whole, with over 1,600 parks covering about 13 per cent of Toronto’s land area, some experts say access to these spaces can be unbalanced. It’s based on factors like higher density in certain areas - think jam-packed concrete-tower communities - and decades-old city planning strategies that didn’t focus on livable, walkable outdoor spaces.

Kyle Baptista, manager of communications and events for Park People, a local group working to improve Toronto parks, says areas under development - including stretches of Eglinton Ave., Sheppard Ave., and neighbourhoods near main transit hubs - require creative solutions when it comes to finding access to green spaces, given their growing density.

“There are some good green park spaces, but it’s not there for everyone in Toronto, and that’s one of the major problems,” says Goonewardena.

The good news? The City, alongside various organizations including Park People and The Laneway Project, are developing strategies to solve this problem and increase access to green spaces throughout Toronto, in hopes of creating more livable communities.

One strategy, Baptista says, is linear parks, which “are becoming all the rage these days, with things like the High Line in New York and the underline in Miami ... and the 606 in Chicago,” he says.

These parks are far longer than they are wide, and offer an innovative way to develop green space in dense urban environments like Toronto.

Michelle Senayah, co-founder of laneway revitalization effort The Laneway Project, says with around 100,000 people coming to Toronto every year, most people don’t have access to their own outdoor space.

“It’s hard to acquire new land for parks and squares, but we have a massive untapped resource in the city,” she says, referring to the city’s laneways, which total more than 250 acres of space, and have potential to be beautified and used as places for kids to play and residents to gather.

Many of the city’s tower communities are also lacking green spaces by virtue of their decades-old designs. “Think of all the towers built along ravine systems - we haven’t build linkages between those tower communities and the ravine systems,” Baptista explains.
“We have big towers looking down on parks that aren’t being utilized.”

But Baptista says these areas of concrete towers present a “massive opportunity,” with sites that could be used for new outdoor spaces like community gardens.

Despite the challenges in certain areas, Baptista stresses that Toronto has a great green space system already. “Our work is to just grow on this amazing foundation,” he says.

What’s in the works?

Linear parks
Various initiatives throughout Toronto are steadily linking underutilized green spaces and connecting communities. Expansion options for the award-winning Junction-area West Toronto Railpath, a popular cycling corridor and green space that opened back in 2009, are still being explored, for example. And elsewhere in the city, a group of Toronto residents are pushing to transform the hydro corridor from Earlscourt Park to Spadina Rd. into a connected linear park called the Green Line, in hopes of connecting a range of neighbourhoods and nine city parks - some of which are in poor condition.

Tower renewal
As of January, tower renewal - an initiative to improve Toronto’s concrete towers and the surrounding neighbourhoods - is now a permanent City program run by a new Tower and Neighbourhood Revitalization Unit. Part of unit’s focus is creating attractive, livable communities in the towers’ neighbourhoods throughout the city. Take, for instance, the revitalization efforts in Regent Park and Lawrence Heights, and the intersection of tower renewal, GO expansion and live-work spaces for artists in Weston, projects which promise to beautify the area through developments like an open-air space for the neighbourhood’s farmer’s market. Meanwhile, in the Jane St. and Finch Ave. area, the Toronto Region Conservation Authority’s San Romanoway outdoor revitalization project is transforming the lawns around three apartment towers into community green space.

Laneway revitalization
Underwhelming laneways with untapped potential are the focus of Toronto not-for-profit The Laneway Project, which aims to improve the city’s laneways and increase walkability, develop new green spaces, and provide venues for community events. The group has several pilot projects in the works for 2015, including laneway improvements for Reggae Lane near Eglinton Ave. and Dufferin St., and transforming CCBG laneway in West Queen West into a “vibrant” community gathering place.