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With the Council for Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH), now renamed the Council on Vertical Urbanism (CVU) in Toronto this week for their annual international conference — the world headquarters for this arbiter of everything tall is located in Chicago — we thought it would be fun to run a short series of articles looking at the similarities and differences of the two cities. Today we start with how the two cities are built out.
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A lot of comparisons can be made between Toronto and our sister city of Chicago. The two are of similar population; while the Chicagoland metro area still has more people than the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), the City of Toronto passed the City of Chicago in recent years to become the fourth most populous municipality in North America. Both are Great Lakes cities, with post-industrial waterfronts and strong urban cores on the lake. Both cities began their rapid development as port cities and important industrial and economic centres that fuelled their respective countries. And both are defined by iconic skylines, Chicago with its collection of architectural landmarks and Toronto with the CN Tower instantly recognizable above a forest of glass-clad towers.
Something interesting is in the works that in the coming years will bump Toronto ahead of its sister city in another category: with the current pace of development, Toronto is projected to surpass Chicago in total number of skyscrapers within the next decade or so. After New York with 308, Chicago — widely recognized as the birthplace of the skyscraper — has the second-most number of buildings 150m or higher on the continent with 140, followed by Toronto in third at 108. However, Toronto currently has 23 skyscrapers under construction (32 if you include the whole of the GTA) with a whopping 306 skyscrapers proposed in the pipeline. Chicago, on the other hand, only has one skyscraper under construction and a mere 10 new ones proposed (and no more under construction or proposed in Chicagoland). Of course, not all those proposed will be built and their heights may change, but even with Toronto's current housing market struggles and continued population pressures, it is safe to say that we will see a good number of these constructed.
For all of our height enthusiasts, this is exciting news. Toronto is solidifying itself as a skyscraper city, rising the global ranks day by day as development continues across the city. But the quantity of skyscrapers only tells part of the story. Where do we build this density, and why? For most of us who live here, we do not necessarily see Toronto as a skyscraper city. The majority of our urban fabric is swaths of low-rise, detached homes in quiet residential neighbourhoods. Chicago has a similar urban fabric, where outside of the downtown core the majority of the city is comprised of low-rise, low density neighbourhoods. A closer look at our density distribution reveals that while we are similar, there's also some important differences between us that drive development in our cities.
Before digging into distribution, there are different ways to talk about density. Population density does not necessarily correlate with building density. Montreal is an excellent example, whose Plateau neighbourhood is one of the densest areas in Canada by population, but where the vast majority of buildings do not exceed three storeys in height. Many of Toronto's older homes in the inner city are divided into multiple apartment units, meaning these low-rise neighbourhoods have a higher population density than those outside the inner city. For the purpose of this article, we will be looking at units per area rather than population, as this most accurately represents building height; we are talking about skyscrapers after all!
First off, one obvious similarity is that both cities contain a high-density cluster of skyscrapers in their downtown cores, and neither city places blanket height limits on these towers, instead using surrounding context to guide appropriate building heights. A key difference between the two cities' downtowns is building use; Chicago is largely dominated by office and commercial towers, whereas Toronto has a more varied residential and commercial mix. Chicago's homogeneous use is a legacy of mid-century planning policies that encouraged a residential exodus to the suburbs, whereas Toronto, while also enabling the exodus, managed to maintain a healthy residential population near the downtown core, which has expanded greatly thanks to the push to densify the downtown area in recent decades.
Beyond the downtown core, the treatment of density diverges between the two cities. While beyond the Lake Michigan shoreline areas, Chicago's skyline is generally as flat as its landscape with few exceptions. Toronto, conversely, is a city with clusters of towers popping out of otherwise low-rise residential neighbourhoods, mainly concentrated at density nodes around major transit hubs. Toronto was ahead of its time in terms of planning density. Dating back to the 1950s, planning policies encouraged high-rise development adjacent to low-rise suburbs as a way to economically support the provision of transit and other city services to these areas. Planning in the latter half of 20th century established nodes of density in the suburbs - Yonge-Eglinton, North York Centre, Etobicoke Centre, and Scarborough Centre - while more recently, density is encouraged adjacent to future major transit hubs, like East Harbour, Humber Bay Shores. and Downsview.
The driving force behind Toronto's policies is largely directing higher density to where the infrastructure already exists to support it, or can be easily augmented. This mainly revolves around higher-order transit, but also includes proximity to green space and areas where high-density buildings already exist. There is also, of course, the infamous 'yellow belt', the swaths of detached homes where multi-unit residential development was prohibited until recently, largely driven by local communities supporting exclusionary policies meant to resist change and maintain the status quo. While multi-unit residential development is now permitted in these areas, the building heights are still capped as low-rise. These yellow belt areas have forced development to be concentrated in the few areas that actually permit high-rise construction, creating taller and denser nodes across the city.
Diving deeper into Chicago's makeup, it paints another picture. It is similar to Toronto of a couple years ago in the fact that the majority of its zoning by-laws exclusively allow detached, single-family homes to be built outside of the downtown core. But unlike Toronto, its distribution of high-rise development outside the downtown core is largely concentrated within a mile of Lake Michigan. The shoreline along the North Side of the city contains the densest neighbourhoods in Chicago, and their waterfront is lined with high-density development for most of its stretch northward. The south side shoreline also contains some high-rise buildings, but they are more sparse. Aside from the lakefront and downtown, most of Chicago does not boast high-rise building clusters.
While Toronto's planning policies focus a lot on directing and managing intense growth, Chicago's planning policies focus more closely on community revitalization. While there are plenty of lovely, livable neighbourhoods area Chicago, mid-century planning policies have left a legacy of segregation with huge disparities across different areas in terms of poverty, density, and vibrancy. Damaging urban renewal projects from the mid-century onwards, especially in the city's south side, have targeted minorities and vulnerable communities, forcing once vibrant neighbourhoods into decline and ruin. Many residents relocated to lower density suburbs than Toronto's during this time, leaving empty and run-down neighbourhoods in the inner city. Chicago has not experienced the population boom that Toronto has in recent decades, so many of these communities remain in a disparaging state, and development is more focused on integrating gentle density to revitalize and foster local low-rise communities rather than controlling high-rise growth. Nearly all of Chicago's current high-rise proposals are concentrated in and around the downtown core, where skyscrapers already exist.
While Toronto is on pace to overtake Chicago in the number of skyscrapers in the coming years, beyond a comparison of simple quantities is where our differences emerge. Toronto is a city that is experiencing rapid growth, and has been for many years. Its planning policies are a reflection of this growth, and display an effort to spread it across the city to ease the strain on specific neighbourhoods, and to capitalize on existing infrastructure and available land. Chicago, on the other hand, is a city that is comparatively stagnant population-wise, experiencing only modest growth over the past couple decades. Its planning policies are more a reflection of efforts to revitalize parts of the city and spur development and community investment. In both cities, these factors have contributed to different patterns in distributing density and high-rise developments, reflecting both the cultural and economic conditions of each.
UrbanToronto will keep you updated on all the skyscrapers going up across the city, and we will certainly be watching closely for if or when Toronto passes Chicago on the skyscraper list. In the meantime, you can check out all the active developments here in the Forum and on our front page.
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UrbanToronto's research and data service, UTPro, provides comprehensive data on construction projects in the Greater Golden Horseshoe—from proposal through to completion. Other services include Instant Reports, downloadable snapshots based on location, and a daily subscription newsletter, New Development Insider, that tracks projects from initial application.
