LORINC: The finicky business of planning Ookwemin Minising

The City of Toronto and Waterfront Toronto have been futzing around with the zoning for Ookwemin Minising, formerly Villiers Island, for going on a decade now — a period that included a lengthy digression that culminated in a nearly universally panned plan, released in 2024.

That grimly monochromatic version of a high-density community of an estimated 15,000 people looked, basically, like the cluster of big glass buildings in the South Core — large blocks, large podiums, large towers, no imagination.

After the City and WT were told in no uncertain terms to go back to the proverbial drawing board, they recruited a noted Danish landscape design shop, SLA, to lead an effort to conjure up something more expressive of the location and less (obviously) beholden to the least imaginative manifestations of Toronto high rise development.

The big reveal occurred last week, assisted by WT’s PR machine. The new “development concept plan” will go before council’s planning and transportation committee on Thursday.

In several important ways, this plan is an improvement, featuring a much more granular approach to the development of a 21-acre island using smaller blocks, some riffs on public space (about which more in a moment) and a far greater variety of envisioned building sizes and forms, described in the proposal as “strategic density.” Per the bird’s eye renderings, the result is — or will be, or may be — a city scape that aspires to urbanism instead of ROI.

But I must confess I don’t love the new concept plan, and found myself wondering about the long-term viability of the ideas and symbolism it extolls — all the gestures towards Indigenization and the car-free high street (“commons”), as well as an idea of density that evokes those sections of mid-town Manhattan where buildings of all vintages, heights and purposes are crammed atmospherically together (and which took generations to achieve).

To my eye, the existential planning challenge confronting Ookwemin Minising is very obvious and external to the site itself: how does this island avoid becoming another Liberty Village, a precinct encumbered by a huge amount of density that is isolated from transit and cut off from the west end by transportation infrastructure? In fact, there are two other analogous development zones that should offer Toronto planners some cautionary lessons: the aforementioned South Core and City Place, between the Rogers Centre and Bathurst Street.

WT’s long-term and successful planning outlook has been to invest heavily in creating enticing public spaces — parks, boardwalks, etc. — that will, in turn, attract developers eager to build near such amenities. Ookwemin is surrounded on two sides — to the west and the south — with some of the most spectacular public spaces this city has ever created, i.e., Biidaasige Park, and the lower Don, as well the new park at the mouth of the Keating channel.

These spaces are necessary to attract development there, but they are not sufficient, and the reason has to do with transit. Yes, there are some bus loops through the port lands. Yes, some of the political blockage around the Waterfront East LRT loosened earlier this year with a big funding announcement. But that LRT project is years and years from completion, and, so far, we’re only talking about one part of the proposed streetcar service into Ookwemin.

Assuming the city and WT aren’t willing to wait for a decade-plus to tender the early development parcels, it seems highly likely to me that many of the first projects will offer plenty of parking to attract buyers/tenants who own cars they’ll need for crazy errands, like grocery shopping (how much density is required on Ookwemin to justify a supermarket?) or dropping kids off at school. Absent streetcars, we’ll be baking in car use, as well as bottlenecks near the two signature bridges, described in the new concept plan as “special moments.” Incidentally, the bottleneck story plays out twice daily at the spot where Liberty Village opens onto Strachan.

I also find that two of the most public-facing elements — the Centre Street Commons and Ookwemin Street, which are all or mainly pedestrian-oriented — to be performative, fodder for colour-saturated renderings and gullible city councillors, but by no means durable or even compelling.

More than most places with troubled settler narratives, Toronto has made significant strides in Indigenizing and decolonizing, which is as it should be. Indeed, I’d argue that the high-water mark of this work is the re-naturalization of the lower Don — a profound and historic gesture towards reconnecting the city with its pre-settler past.

Next to that, Ookwemin Street — which uses meandering paver markings and trees to evoke an historic Indigenous path to the sandbars that became the Toronto Islands — feels gimmicky, and not especially resilient. We all know the type of public space neglect the City of Toronto is capable of, and I don’t think it’s overly cynical to predict that this “trail” will go the way of a lot of these kinds of high-concept landscaping gestures — torn up by roadwork, sloppily re-paved, littered upon, etc., etc.

Likewise the lushly landscaped Centre Street Commons, which is intended to somehow attract a spine of development, but without a civic focal point that will serve as an anchor and a magnet. Absent buildings, the Commons is just a street without a street wall. So the question is, does this particular expression of public space interest developers? It may be a lovely idea to have a car-free pedestrian street running through a fully built-out Ookwemin, but I’m not convinced this particular proposal is grand enough to entice builders to invest in a highly challenging area.

Finally, the projected walking times in the plan seem hugely optimistic, maybe clocking the pace of someone who is young and/or moves very quickly. Ookwemin’s south-east blocks, which will be developed last, are as far from the earliest phases, as well as proposed public spaces like Sandbar Square, as Church Street is from University Avenue. Not super far, but not close either, especially in a setting that will remain raw for years to come.

Sandbar Square — which is to overlook the Keating Channel, eventually facing a wall of tall towers, with another wall of tall towers at its back — to me exemplifies an unresolved tension at the core of this plan. Is Ookwemin supposed to be a piece of fully realized city, with all the trimmings, or does it aspire (at least via the design team’s ideas) to concoct some kind of naturalized, Indigenized slice of Manhattan or King West? Will the developers who build here buy in? And will the people who go to live there embrace these ideas as they go about the ordinary tasks of big city living?

Initially, those first residents will be, well, pioneers, colonizing, dare I say, this new-old piece of Toronto, and whatever form of urbanism takes root there. But if we want the future residents of Ookwemin Minising to live according to a vision of low-carbon urbanism, the city’s got to do the tough quotidian work of providing sufficient transit to ensure this precinct gestates and then functions without importing a glut of cars.

Whether the new concept plan gets us there, or even to the starting line, is an open question.