Breathing new life into Don River

[Spiel]

Breathing new life into Don River

 

 

May 8th, 2009

Christopher Hume / The Toronto Star

 

 

In its plans for a restored Lower Don Lands, Waterfront Toronto envisions a public promenade along the water.

 

 

Like time, the Don flows slowly on Toronto’s waterfront.

 

But plans revealed yesterday by Waterfront Toronto outline a large, multi-use community along the edges of a restored Don River and its mouth between Keating Channel and Lake Ontario.

 

The concrete channel was completed in the 1920s, during an era when man’s job was to “improve” nature by obliterating it.

 

Now, the task has shifted to restoration. In its new configuration, the Don will flow south before jogging to the west and the lake. A naturalized spillover will be built to direct flood waters into the Shipping Channel when that’s needed. The Keating will remain, but with more of the feel of a canal, hugged by a public promenade and new housing and mixed-use development.

 

Keep in mind that Waterfront Toronto expects that this precinct – the Lower Don Lands – will eventually be home to 25,000 residents as well as thousands of workers and visitors.

 

“We want to make the river front and centre,” explains Waterfront Toronto’s vice-president of development, Christopher Glaisek. “We hope to bring all the development processes together into one.”

 

Therein lies the key to success; Glaisek’s task is to co-ordinate the efforts of dozens of agencies, each of which considers its needs paramount. To manage all this and pull off the high-quality public realm designers long for will be a Herculean task.

 

New York-based landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh, whose firm has devoted nearly three years to the Toronto waterfront, calls it “ecological urbanism.” The idea is to assemble a “huge team of experts,” including some very sophisticated computer modellers, that can recreate nature as it might have existed.

 

The other big move is to use infrastructural engineering – berms, flood water protection and the like – as the starting point for public realm improvements. The earthmoving now going on to flood-proof the west side of the Don, for example, will become the foundation of a new neighbourhood park.

 

Rather than divide these projects into a series of smaller tasks, each assigned to an expert; the concept here is that each contributes to the larger whole.

 

“We’ve learned a hell of a lot more about the technical systems,” says Toronto planner Ken Greenberg. “And we’ve taken a more integrated approach than I’ve ever seen before.”

 

As Greenberg points out, the design team includes planners and landscape architects as well as hydrologists and biologists. This kind of all-encompassing approach is critical if waterfront revitalization is to avoid the fate of sameness.

 

Underlying this is the corporation’s stated goal of carbon neutrality. Streets will be designed to allow maximum sunshine. There will also be solar panels, wind turbines and geothermal heating. But as Van Valkenburgh also notes, “We no longer have normal weather patterns; that means more extreme storm events in the future.”

 

The team must anticipate and prepare for a Hurricane Hazel-type disaster of the sort that ripped through Toronto in 1954. Back then, vast areas of the lower city were buried under two metres of water. As much as anything, renaturalizing the mouth of the Don will be one of the most effective means of dealing with such a possibility.

 

But nothing will happen overnight. Construction won’t start for at least two years, and will last another five. It will be a quarter of a century before anyone can move in. Patience is a virtue, of course, but in Toronto, it’s also a necessity.