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Redeveloping Toronto
Covering the whole waterfront
Mar 30th 2006 | TORONTO
From The Economist print edition
At last, three governments wield the sledgehammer in unison
DRIVE into the centre of Toronto from the airport, and the sight that greets you is a mess. What ought to be an attractive asset for Canada's largest city, its 29-mile (46km) waterfront along Lake Ontario, is blocked off by a tangle of 19th-century railway lines, an ugly elevated motorway dating from the 1950s, and a line of tower blocks. Arguments have raged for decades over how to redevelop the lakefront. The one insurmountable obstacle has been the rivalry between city, provincial and federal governments.
Toronto has seen pockets of successful redevelopment, such as the Distillery district, with trendy shops, art galleries and cobbled lanes, or a former cold store at Queen's Quay Terminal, which houses offices, flats, and restaurants. But they fall far short of the wholesale revamping of harbour areas in cities as varied as Barcelona, Vancouver, London and Chicago.
So it looked like progress when on March 27th representatives from all three governments donned hard hats and picked up sledgehammers to launch the West Don Lands project, the first step in a plan to reclaim the 800-hectare (2,000 acres) waterfront for the city over the next 30 years. “One big happy family,†quipped John Baird, the treasury minister in the Conservative federal government, as he put his arm around David Caplan, the infrastructure minister in Ontario's Liberal provincial government, while the mayor, David Miller, a New Democrat, looked on.
More than bonhomie may be needed. For almost a century, commissions, governments and civic groups have expounded their vision for the waterfront. Each plan foundered on the twin shoals of physical obstacles and the dispersion of political authority.
The physical obstacles, except the tower blocks, can now be tackled. Much of the railway traffic has been re-routed north of the city. A team of engineers at the University of Toronto has worked out a way to bury the motorway, as Boston did with its cross-harbour expressway. What has been lacking is money and political will.
A bid for the 2008 Olympic games briefly injected urgency. The three tiers of government, which each control key chunks of harbour land, united behind a redevelopment scheme and pledged C$500m (then $330m) apiece. A new body, the Toronto Waterfront Revitalisation Corporation, was created to oversee the work. But the games went to Beijing.
Mr Miller was elected in 2003 in part on a promise to tackle the waterfront. Infighting continued: last year, the corporation and a municipal agency each hired a different architect to design a development on the same patch of land. The city has sparred with the federal government over an airport on an island in the harbour. The mayor wants to close it. A federal agency signed a new contract with an airline.
If peace has finally broken out it may be because of public pressure. That has been stimulated partly by the recent completion of several buildings by well-known international architects, such as an art-gallery addition by Frank Gehry.
The key step is that the city and province have signed agreements giving overall control to the Revitalisation Corporation. That is similar to the model London used to regenerate its docklands in the 1980s. The federal government, and its airport, are still a problem. Last month Mr Miller asked the federal transport minister to transfer the airport's land to the city. All that Leslie Woo, who advises the mayor on the waterfront, would say is that the minister “didn't dismiss the possibilityâ€.
Covering the whole waterfront
Mar 30th 2006 | TORONTO
From The Economist print edition
At last, three governments wield the sledgehammer in unison
DRIVE into the centre of Toronto from the airport, and the sight that greets you is a mess. What ought to be an attractive asset for Canada's largest city, its 29-mile (46km) waterfront along Lake Ontario, is blocked off by a tangle of 19th-century railway lines, an ugly elevated motorway dating from the 1950s, and a line of tower blocks. Arguments have raged for decades over how to redevelop the lakefront. The one insurmountable obstacle has been the rivalry between city, provincial and federal governments.
Toronto has seen pockets of successful redevelopment, such as the Distillery district, with trendy shops, art galleries and cobbled lanes, or a former cold store at Queen's Quay Terminal, which houses offices, flats, and restaurants. But they fall far short of the wholesale revamping of harbour areas in cities as varied as Barcelona, Vancouver, London and Chicago.
So it looked like progress when on March 27th representatives from all three governments donned hard hats and picked up sledgehammers to launch the West Don Lands project, the first step in a plan to reclaim the 800-hectare (2,000 acres) waterfront for the city over the next 30 years. “One big happy family,†quipped John Baird, the treasury minister in the Conservative federal government, as he put his arm around David Caplan, the infrastructure minister in Ontario's Liberal provincial government, while the mayor, David Miller, a New Democrat, looked on.
More than bonhomie may be needed. For almost a century, commissions, governments and civic groups have expounded their vision for the waterfront. Each plan foundered on the twin shoals of physical obstacles and the dispersion of political authority.
The physical obstacles, except the tower blocks, can now be tackled. Much of the railway traffic has been re-routed north of the city. A team of engineers at the University of Toronto has worked out a way to bury the motorway, as Boston did with its cross-harbour expressway. What has been lacking is money and political will.
A bid for the 2008 Olympic games briefly injected urgency. The three tiers of government, which each control key chunks of harbour land, united behind a redevelopment scheme and pledged C$500m (then $330m) apiece. A new body, the Toronto Waterfront Revitalisation Corporation, was created to oversee the work. But the games went to Beijing.
Mr Miller was elected in 2003 in part on a promise to tackle the waterfront. Infighting continued: last year, the corporation and a municipal agency each hired a different architect to design a development on the same patch of land. The city has sparred with the federal government over an airport on an island in the harbour. The mayor wants to close it. A federal agency signed a new contract with an airline.
If peace has finally broken out it may be because of public pressure. That has been stimulated partly by the recent completion of several buildings by well-known international architects, such as an art-gallery addition by Frank Gehry.
The key step is that the city and province have signed agreements giving overall control to the Revitalisation Corporation. That is similar to the model London used to regenerate its docklands in the 1980s. The federal government, and its airport, are still a problem. Last month Mr Miller asked the federal transport minister to transfer the airport's land to the city. All that Leslie Woo, who advises the mayor on the waterfront, would say is that the minister “didn't dismiss the possibilityâ€.