As if there wasn’t enough to think about on the Waterfront these days, an unofficial Expo 2015 website has been launched, branding Toronto’s Expo theme, “The Future of the City.” The site’s creators hope that a successful bid would provide a “realistic look at what innovations can be made to help enhance the quality of life of urban space around the world.” Their plan calls for the Expo to spread out over three waterfront locations: Exhibition Place, the Docklands, and the Toronto Island Airport.
Here you can find the City’s more comprehensive plans for the bid. The 136 page document, released May 11, proposes a broader theme: “The Spirit of Ingenuity.”
“The Spirit of Ingenuity” will look at how cities and nations rapidly evolve and how essential ingenuity is to address the challenges ahead in order to create a sustainable future.
The official report suggests Downsview, the Portlands, and a split Portlands / Island Airport as possible sites for the Expo. The most detail is given to the Portlands site, and rightfully so. With Downsview not exactly central, and the split site (by the report’s own admission) too costly and difficult to service, the Portlands is the most attractive. This is fortunate, since the split site plans include the construction of not one, but two bridges to the island airport, specifically to deal with “cars and truck traffic generated by the Expo.”
The Portlands site would include (among dozens of other amenties) a 5,000 seat amphitheatre, a world museum of aboriginal art, and “innovative housing.” Of course, none of this will matter unless the federal government decides to submit Toronto’s bid to host the Expo by November 3 this year, but it certainly makes for interesting reading with the bottom of the city under such scrutiny these days.
5 comments
What a complete and utter waste of money.
Let’s pray this never even gets submitted by the Feds.
“Downsview not exactly central”
Central to what? The Annex? Queen West? Toronto could do some attractions that don’t involve funnelling more people through Union Station or the Yonge subway.
As for the “unofficial” expo site, I’m sure the City solicitors, faced from being beaten by a couple of elephants, are preparing the “cease and desist” letters as we speak.
Central to what?
Restaurants, hotels, transportation, people?
I’m not actually convinced Expo is a good idea at all but let’s go with the assumption it is:
Transportation – Sheppard GO, GO buses, Spadina line past York, frequent Sheppard/Yonge-Downsview buses, Pearson, 401, 400. That’s just what’s there now. Expo at Downsview would in my view be a good reason to extend the Sheppard line to Downsview Station and have the legacy of make the stubway go somewhere rather than nowhere. Alternatively you could halt the Spadina subway at York and build the LRT network Steve Munro proposes.
Hotels – lots near Pearson for starters. Could kick off some in North York and Vaughan “Corporate Centre” too to avoid driving away non-expo business and give the 905 a reason to support a 416 event.
People – The expo will be in Toronto but will essentially be a GTA expo – are they all coming in on the Gardiner/DVP? The Ontario figures assume 4m visitors visiting 7 times each out of a total of 13m estimated living in Ont in 2015.
http://www.tedco.ca/PDF/expo_appendix2.pdf page 19
Restaurants – again, this is something that can be developed but with good connections to North York that can act as a secondary focus point along with subway connections downtown.
Expo should not be filling existing venues – the existing attractions should be doing that like the Opera Company, the theatres, the sports franchises etc. etc. Expo should be creating a raison d’etre for new ones and helping to balance out the city. Without a major project I fear Downsview Park will never reach fruition.
It seems clear that from the point of view of at least some expo supporters, the benefits of a Toronto bid for expo2015 include a further chance to argue in favour of the destruction of Toronto City Centre Airport (as a bonus, they wouldn’t mind vandalising the ship channel in the portlands with a “promenade”, thus cutting Toronto off from one of the major modes of low-pollution bulk transport).
The desire by some people to use the promotion of a world’s fair to destroy the airport seems especially hypocritical in view of the prediction by TEDCO that expo2015 will attract up to seven million “international” visitors from the farther areas of the United States, India and China. Virtually all of these visitors will come by air, generating an roughly thirty thousand take-offs and landings by large jets, in addition to Toronto’s existing air traffic. That means that if Toronto won the bid for the 2015 world’s fair, we could expect an additional takeoff or landing every minute of every day from 7 in the morning to eleven at night, all through the during the summer months. It seems clear that, unlike some anti-airport campaigners the downtown waterfront promoters only object to takeoffs and landings near where they live.
If the twin concerns about global warming and dwindling fossil fuels have encouraged us to consider our priorities for air travel, it seems to me that we should ask ourselves whether the World Wide Web, among other technologies, has not provided a more cost effective (and less polluting) way to fulfill the promise of a world’s fair.