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The first round of the application process is almost over for a City-initiated design competition for a new public park in the heart of Downtown Toronto’s Entertainment District. The project would see the transformation of 229 Richmond Street West from a vacant concrete lot to a thoughtfully designed and programmed greenspace, with a budget of $10 million secured to facilitate the delivery of 2,600m² of public space in the densely populated mixed-use community.
News of the competition broke at the end of January, when the City published a formal Request For Supplier Qualifications (RFSQ) detailing the opportunity and the expectations for participating teams. Now, with the deadline approaching for eligible candidates to enter, the second stage will be getting underway in the coming weeks.
The site for the new park is on the south side of Richmond Street West, midway between Duncan and John Streets, and is particularly poised for a transformation due to its unencumbered nature, as the land has never been developed with built structures. Since the 1980s, the lot has been paved, offering surface parking programming until the start of the pandemic, when the space was leased by the neighbouring restaurants to become a shared patio and event space. The site was acquired by CreateTO in 2019 in a transaction that represented the largest Toronto parks acquisition in decades.
To establish the goals for the design of the new park, the City conducted a public and stakeholder consultation process that included an online survey with over 3,000 participants, engagement with community groups and Councillors, and meetings with internal stakeholders. Ultimately, a set of guiding principles were developed to inform the design process, asserting that the park should be: a place of culture; a reflection of the neighbourhood; a green oasis; informed by indigenous knowledge; endowed with public art; a display of design excellence; exemplary of new sustainability standards; and welcoming for a diverse community of users.
Before any designs are delivered, however, the City first wants to identify a shortlist of teams based on another specific set of criteria. In order for a team to be eligible for the shortlist, they must: be led by a landscape architect (with membership in the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects); feature an architectural firm (in good standing with the Ontario Association of Architects); include a professional artist; and include a design partner with experience in Indigenous Placekeeping.
Teams with this specific composition are invited to respond to the RFSQ until the deadline of March 23rd, at which time the City will come back with a shortlist of five teams who will be asked to deliver a conceptual design based on a more detailed project brief. After these five designs have been presented, a winner will be selected by a jury decision.
The project will address a critical gap in public greenspace in the Downtown Core, which suffers from one of the lowest provision rates of parkland per capita in the City, at a mark of just 1.8m² per resident and employee. With 16,000 residents and another 52,000 people employed within a 500m radius of the site, parkland is high on the priority list in order to improve quality of life in the urban community.
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