SHELLEY WHITE
There was a time when no one wanted to end up in Toronto’s Liberty Village.
More than a century before the name was coined, the area between King Street West and the Gardiner Expressway (bordered by Dufferin Street to the west and Strachan Avenue to the east) was home to a men’s prison and a reformatory for women convicted of crimes like “sexual precociousness” and “incorrigibility.” More recently, it was a desolate collection of abandoned factories and empty warehouse buildings – but now, Liberty Village is one of Toronto’s most vibrant and fastest growing downtown neighbourhoods.
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It’s an example of an urban neighbourhood built from scratch – an essential part of modern city building, as tens of thousands of people flood into the downtown core each year. Clearly, Toronto needs somewhere for these people to live, but how do you make sure these newborn neighbourhoods thrive?
Liberty Village is a sort of test bed for the type of development that creates successful, high-density downtown nodes, said Ken Greenberg, an architect, urban planner and author of Walking Home.
“Liberty Village is kind of the ugly duckling that I like,” said Mr. Greenberg. “Designers look down their noses at it because it’s clumsy and not very beautiful, but it has all the ingredients of a successful neighbourhood.”
In his view, creating a successful neighbourhood from scratch is all about the mix.
Firstly, said Mr. Greenberg, communities require diverse housing options to accommodate singles, couples, families, retirees and low-income students. “The idea is being able to age in place, to go from one stage to another in the same neighbourhood, so you can put down roots,” he said.
Neighbourhoods also need a mix of housing and retail to create the crucial element of “walkability,” Mr. Greenberg says. It’s a move away from old-school city planning, which tended to separate the different aspects of daily life.
“Where are the grocery stores, the hardware store? Where are the daily life needs that you can walk to?” he said. “Very often the developers that are doing the condominiums don’t know anything about retail and don’t care, because their objective is to sell the condo units and get out. But they’re increasingly learning that there’s an opportunity there, and teaming up with experts in retail.
“If you extend that beyond shopping, if you want families to be there, where’s the daycare? Where are the playgrounds? Where are the schools? You have to think about it in a different way.”
The best new neighbourhoods combine the four pillars of good planning, said Gordon Stratford, design director at the architectural firm HOK Canada and chair of Toronto’s Design Review Panel. These pillars are financial (affordable housing), environmental (natural elements, like trees and parks), social (places where people can work, shop and interact) and cultural (a place with a defined culture, either through historical preservation or created by the community itself).
“Think about the perfect place you want to live in – I can live here, I can work close at hand, I can go to the park, I can get a library book, my kids can go to school here,” he said. “People are taking to heart the idea that if I don’t have to take hours and hours to commute from where I live to where I work, if I don’t have to go so far to get my food, if all these things can be in such close proximity, it can really work.”
In his view, the march of technology has created a need for people to be able to live in a neighbourhood that has a small-town feel.
“With the Internet and social networking, you can reach anyone in the world,” he said. “I think that as a counterbalance, people really are even more interested in having great neighbourhoods.”