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Last month's City of Toronto Design Review Panel (DRP) session included a review of plans for Wellesley-Parliament Square, a thorough development proposal prepared for a substantial portion of the high-rise St James Town neighbourhood. The proposal plans for the site’s revitalization by Greatwise Developments—with consultants IBI Group, Bousfields Planning, and NAK Design Group—include improving the network of public streets to better connect with the surrounding city blocks, redesigning the public realm to provide a range of open green spaces, and creating new housing options with the development of new infill buildings.
The enormous and somewhat overwhelming grey and white slabs of St James Town were a once considered by many a progressive example of urban renewal in the city when they were first constructed in the mid-1960s, inspired by Le Corbusier’s 'Towers in the Park' planning concept of the time. Five of these residential towers in a rectangular area at the southeast corner of St James Town comprise what is called ‘Wellesley-Parliament Square.’ They were a first of their kind in Toronto, set to replace the familiar urban fabric of the city, comprised as it was mostly by low-rise homes on straight public streets.
The idea for the Towers in the Park was simple: create new housing options for younger, middle class professionals living Downtown, with the allure of ‘living in the sky’, with parks and green spaces below. The problem: the concrete base and underground parking facilities that effectively spanned the entire area didn’t really allow the park to grow at all, and the buildings typically lacked retail and were too far apart to create street life. As the rest of the downtown urban landscape changed with new growth, residents, and architecture, the towers of St James Town didn’t, becoming relics of a time passed, and an urban vision that ultimately failed.
Today, the St James Town neighbourhood and the Wellesley-Parliament area in particular, is a melting pot of many of Toronto’s new Canadians and is one of the City’s most diverse communities. With Rosedale to the north, Cabbagetown to the south, and Upper Jarvis to the west, the site falls amongst some bustling and more mixed-income neighborhoods. Unlike them, Wellesley-Parliament Square is largely comprised of low-income households, and to some extent, much of the public realm in the neighborhood has not invited the public activity that street-oriented neighbourhoods enjoy. Comprised largely of paved concrete, passive open space, surface parking areas, ramps to underground parking, and scatterings of fenced-off above-ground garbage and loading areas, the park element of the site seems like a forgotten space. The developer noted to the DRP members that the ‘challenges within St. James Town are reinforced by a built form context that undermines opportunities for interaction and integration’.
The project, while still in its very early stages, can be said to hinge on three major development focus’:
- Public Realm - including the development of parks, public squares and Privately-Owned-Publicly-accessible-Spaces (POPS).
- Connectivity - creating, reorienting, and planning new routes in and around the site for pedestrians, cyclists, and vehicles.
- Built form - developing new buildings, including residential buildings, as well as the development of a new food store and a large fitness facility.
Public Realm
The Wellesley-Parliament Square site is bounded by Wellesley Street to the south, Parliament Street to the east, St James Avenue to the north, and Ontario Street to the west. Rose Avenue, primarily serving as a vehicular route for the towers’ residents to access their respective buildings’ parking, runs north-south, intersecting the site through the middle.
The site is asphalt heavy, predominantly catering to the cars, which pedestrians share the road with along narrow sidewalks. The sidewalks run through the site and lead up to the various building entrances, although residents are seemingly required to cross over open paved spaces that cars drive on to travel throughout the site.
At the DRP, the developers commented that what was significantly lacking in the area was a sense of ‘place’, and that their thought to address this was to create a series of connected parks, open green spaces, plazas, and POPS space spanning over 5000 square meters. This, they offered, should lend towards public comfort and connectivity, by providing places for residents and members of the extended community to meet and gather in, thereby animating the neighbourhood. Adding landscaping throughout the site, including street tree planting, year-long garden spaces, and street furniture, were included as ways to have the site "reading as being accessible" and inviting.
Connectivity
An extensive plan to rebuild and reconnect the space in between the buildings of Wellesley-Parliament Square will include wide walking paths for pedestrians and additional lanes for cyclists. Their design and orientation will focus on creating permeable connections to the roads that bound the Square, and lead the public throughout the site’s various buildings, parks, open spaces. A new vehicular road will be made from Rose Avenue, with connections to Wellesley Street and St James Street.
Built Form
Currently, there are four high-rise buildings on-site, ranging between 18 and 32 storeys tall, that house approximately 2,000 units. The developer’s proposal includes plans to construct an additional 900 dwelling units for the area in a range of forms.
The developer has proposed a series of urban townhouses with frontages that face the park on both the east and west sides of the site. In the centre of the site, the plan is for Rose Avenue to serve as a kind of ‘active spine’ that weaves through the Square. A mid-rise building will be constructed in the centre of the site, which would front onto Rose Avenue. Where Wellesley Street East meets Rose Avenue, a 51-storey condominium building is being proposed.
A range of other built elements are included in the proposal, intended to create more uses for residents and residents of the area. Along Wellesley, infill for the public realm is being proposed to bring retail activity, such as cafes and shops to the area. A small office building is proposed in the southeast corner of the site. A large food store with a fitness facility on its second storey is being envisioned in the southwest. While also accommodating the influx of new residents for the immediate Wellesley-Parliament area, the intention for these developments is to bring in members of nearby communities to the area, and to socially integrate St James Town with its surrounding context.
Members of the DRP were generally interested and favourable towards the proposal, albeit in its very early stages. There was tentative support for it, while some members emphasized the need for cautious and extremely invested public consultation with the community to ensure the proposals were fitting and acceptable to the area's diverse residents. Being such a young project, the developers had only had a few meetings with the public to present their plans, and one DRP member commented that St James Town in fact represents the densest neighborhood in the country. With this in mind, a number of other members reiterated the need to thoroughly understand the civic context of the area, with reference to the neighborhoods beyond the site. While the site represents somewhat of an untapped space amidst so many other quickly intensifying parts of the city, the need to ‘do it right’ was perhaps the most blunt, yet most pertinent comment of the DRP members.
There will be lots more information and updates on this proposal to come, and we’ll be covering them as they occur. For the time being, you can see more images in our database file for the project, linked below, get in on the conversation in our associated Forum thread, or add your comments on this article in the space provided on this page.
| Related Companies: | Arcadis, Bousfields, Counterpoint Engineering, NAK Design Group, RWDI Climate and Performance Engineering |
