Pickering 603-699 Kingston Road | ?m | 42s | Sorbara | Graziani + Corazza

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Director Industrial Holdings Limited (Sorbara Group)

www.pickering.ca www.pickering.ca

The client (Sorbara Group) is seeking to redevelop the subject lands to accommodate a master planned mixed-use community development consisting of 6 high-rise and 2 mid-rise towers across 5 podiums, and 4 townhouse blocks of 4 storeys. The proposed residential Gross Floor Area provides for 236,128 square metres of residential uses inclusive of 2,884 dwelling units in addition to 2,232 square metres of retail uses and 4,448 square metres of office uses, and landscaped open space consisting of 3 parks and a gateway plaza. In order to facilitate the proposed phased development project, Official Plan Amendment and Zoning Bylaw Amendment applications are submitted to the City of Pickering

The proposed development includes a range of building typologies. Six (6) residential towers, with respective heights of 24, 29, 29, 32, 36, and 42 storeys are distributed across three 4-storey podiums containing a mix of office, retail and residential uses. Fronting onto Kingston Road are two 18-storey tall mid-rise buildings and four blocks of 4-storey stacked townhouse dwellings. The south and east portion of the site accommodates a 14.0-metre setback to the Highway 401 right-of-way. The five (5) tallest of the proposed towers (tower heights of 29, 29, 32, 36 and 42 storeys), inclusive of two (2) 4-storey podiums, are proposed to be oriented along the south portion of the 14.0 metre setback. These podiums are proposed to be above-grade parking structures separated by a park. In the northeast portion of the site, at the corner of Kingston Road and Whites Road, a 24-storey mixed-use building is proposed, inclusive of a 4-storey podium. This building is flanked by a proposed gateway plaza feature and park to the east and west, respectively. To the west, along the balance of the Kingston Road frontage, a configuration of 4-storey stacked townhouses and two (2) 18-storey mid-rise mixed-use buildings, inclusive of 6-storey podiums are proposed. The 6-storey podiums frame the primary access driveway.

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First major proposal for the Dunbarton area of Pickering, and it is a major one at that. This is inclusive of 8 (eight!) residential towers.

At this rate, Pickering will have 4 height peaks. Dunbarton, Pickering City Centre, Brock & Kingston, and Durham Live.
 

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The townhouses coming out to Kingston Rd in a perpendicular arrangement seem odd to me.

This is clearly a retail main street type area.

I would prefer to see continuous retail facing Kingston Rd, unless interrupted for a park/public square etc.

If one was put anything like a townhouse form here, I would expect a live/work designation and an intensified town house form to create a lively street edge.

Appears to require some re-thinking.
 
Northern Light said:
The townhouses coming out to Kingston Rd in a perpendicular arrangement seem odd to me.

This is clearly a retail main street type area.

I would prefer to see continuous retail facing Kingston Rd, unless interrupted for a park/public square etc.

If one was put anything like a townhouse form here, I would expect a live/work designation and an intensified town house form to create a lively street edge.

Appears to require some re-thinking.
Click to expand...
Transitioning to the kind of culture you're advocating is not simple. This site is surrounded by strip plazas that all have their own parking. There is zero pedestrian shopping culture here. None. Zilch. Ningun. If one were to line Kingston Road with street level retail, then shoppers might be tempted to park in adjacent private lots and walk (but probably not far). Adjacent landowners would not want their parking lots filling up with cars from people shopping on adjacent sites. This development would be able to support some small amount of convenience retail without parking, but that's about it. If parking were supplied underground for street shops here, locals are unlikely to want to park underground, and would be more likely to patronize other nearby shopping with surface parking. When you have wide roads that accommodate vehicles wizzing by at 60 km/h or higher, you're fighting quite the uphill battle to attract sidewalk shopping alongside it.

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interchange42 said:
Transitioning to the kind of culture you're advocating is not simple. This site is surrounded by strip plazas that all have their own parking. There is zero pedestrian shopping culture here. None. Zilch. Ningun. If one were to line Kingston Road with street level retail, then shoppers might be tempted to park in adjacent private lots and walk (but probably not far). Adjacent landowners would not want their parking lots filling up with cars from people shopping on adjacent sites. This development would be able to support some small amount of convenience retail without parking, but that's about it. If parking were supplied underground for street shops here, locals are unlikely to want to park underground, and would be more likely to patronize other nearby shopping with surface parking. When you have wide roads that accommodate vehicles wizzing by at 60 km/h or higher, you're fighting quite the uphill battle to attract sidewalk shopping alongside it.

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Click to expand...

I don't disagree.

I am, however, making the assumption that if this is being proposed, more is coming; and those strip plazas aren't long for this world.

I want to ensure we build something for the future (hence why I suggested live/work townhomes as an option), those can convert to retail in many cases.

Running the townhomes perpedicular to the street is not a good design feature and limits future repurposing.

We don't want to replicate the existing culture/design flaws at 10x the density.

I realize there's a chicken/egg problem here.

I'm very open to finessing the design to deal realistically with things as they are today.

But I do want to see us build how we want this community to turn out in 30 years, more than accommodate its many current negatives.
 
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I'm not a fan of this concept design either at this point… but neither do I believe that all arterial roads can be turned into attractive shopping streets, nor that shops would be viable along their entire lengths anyway. I think that further through the transition to new building forms on this stretch it's possible that the area would be ready to support pedestrian-oriented retail, whether that's on an adjacent lot, or the one adjacent to that.

Finally, this is another attempt to line a freeway with residential. It will be years before there are enough electric vehicles on the roads to drop the emissions to safe levels to live beside (and theoretically cut down on some noise too). As it's viable commercial and light industrial there now, this seems premature to me.

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