Toronto's Don Lands Project To Transform Waterfront

17 May 2007 - 9:00am

Ambitious plans for a new neighborhood on 2,400 acres of polluted lakefront are underway near downtown Toronto.

"Remaking the mouth of a river while carving a new neighborhood and parkland out of a post-industrial landscape is challenging enough. But the winners of the Lower Don Lands design competition in Toronto, Canada’s largest city, are also taking on a job with real symbolic weight: rejuvenating a 2,400-acre swath of polluted lakefront land that was thought to be beyond repair."

"The $144 million Lower Don Lands redevelopment addresses a complex set of environmental and urban challenges on a brownfield site at the foot of the Don River, one mile from the center of downtown Toronto. These include restoring the mouth of the river where it flows into Lake Ontario—this stretch had been channeled and redirected more than 100 years ago—and the redevelopment of port land nearby. Toronto’s central business district has been isolated from the lake for a century by railroads and an expressway."

Source: Business Week, May 16, 2007
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And many of us – the majority, in fact – find ourselves living in a drive-only landscape, where we must burn gas even to reach a transit stop, if one exists.