The 2013 Toronto Jazz Festival descends on the city this Friday with a huge “free for all” event. That means all of Friday’s programming at every Jazz Festival venue is, yes, completely free of charge. There will be concerts from local favourites Molly Johnson and Mary Margaret O’Hara, plus a show by Smokey Robinson and Martha Reeves, who will be launching the fest from its epicentre, Nathan Phillips Square.

Here’s a rundown of some of the shows worth checking out on Friday—and during the rest of the festival, when you’ll actually have to pay.

Folks who are planning on having a swim in the pool at Scadding Court Community Centre over the next few days may find themselves a little disappointed. Those who want to go fishing, however, will probably be ecstatic.

For the rest of the week, the Community Centre will be holding its annual Gone Fishin’ event, meaning its indoor pool will be an indoor fish pond. The pool has been drained, dechlorinated, and refilled with 2,000 rainbow trout, to be caught by local children and families.

Photo by postbear from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

Although you can’t see it from the sidewalk, there’s a condo atop the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Architecture building at 230 College Street. Far from being another of those soulless glass boxes scattered around the city’s downtown, however, this condo is all about life and diversity. But it’s bees and wasps only, here.

What most people would call a nest box, York University doctoral candidate Scott MacIvor likes to call a “bee condo.” It’s MacIvor who placed the footlong bee home on the roof of the architecture building, where U of T maintains its Green Roof Innovation Testing Laboratory, or GRIT Lab.

The nest box is just one of many MacIvor has placed around the city. He’s hitched them onto everything from trees in quiet ravines to stop signs downtown, as part of a four-year experiment on wild-bee diversity in Toronto that is now in its final year.

“There’s been a flurry of research in the last decade or so suggesting that urban landscapes have a negative impact on wild species in general,” MacIvor says. Yet some species, like pigeons and certain weeds, seem pre-adapted to urban life, and have not only persisted, but flourished in manmade surroundings. MacIvor says this is true of some of Toronto’s 100-plus species of wild bee, too.

“Cities can act as a filter for biodiversity,” MacIvor says. “Going increasingly outside the city, you find more diversity.” He wants to see which wild bees are being filtered out of Toronto’s urban landscape, and which are adapting to it. Already, he’s found that the alfalfa leafcutter bee, for example, is thriving in Toronto, as it’s capable of living nearly anywhere, from rusty nail holes to mailboxes to barbecues. The rusty patch bumblebee, meanwhile, is struggling. MacIvor says he and a labmate have been searching for this bumblebee—which, only about 15 years ago, was one of the area’s most common bees—for two years, and have yet to find one. MacIvor now believes the species to be extinct.

The GRIT Lab at U of T is home to one of MacIvor’s “bee condos.”

To carry out his project, MacIvor puts up dozens of nest boxes each April. The boxes are made by MacIvor himself. Each one consists of a short length of PVC piping stuffed with foam, into which a number of cardboard tubes are inserted. It’s in these tubes that female bees nest and lay their eggs. The openings of the tubes vary in size—MacIvor explains that bees like to fit snugly into their nests, and, given that different species of bees grow to different sizes, using only one size of cardboard tube (as is common with commercially available nest boxes) could potentially limit the diversity of bees capable of nesting there. Each nest box is fitted with an electronic sensor that allows MacIvor to track environmental variables, like humidity and ambient temperature, which might affect the diversity and number of bees that choose to nest in a given box.

MacIvor takes the nest boxes down in October. He removes and unravels every cardboard tube, documenting meticulously the contents of each one. Each bee larva is put in its own cell, which is then labelled and placed in a refrigerator for a few months, to simulate winter conditions (the larvae don’t freeze—evolution has gifted them with a natural antifreeze that allows them to supercool the liquid inside their bodies). Finally, in the spring, MacIvor rears the bees in a growth chamber.

MacIvor says the information he gathers will help him to determine “what in urban landscape design dictates the presence or absence of bees and bee diversity.” His research may even reveal ways in which urban landscape design principles could be adapted to enhance wild bee diversity in Toronto.

One of MacIvor’s nest boxes.

But what makes the humble bee worthy of such efforts?

Wild bees perform an invaluable function in our urban ecosystem: they pollinate many of our myriad tree, flower, and plant species. According to MacIvor, a diversity of bee species performing the same function—that is, capable of pollinating the same species of flora—is beneficial, because it means that if a disturbance in the ecosystem were to eradicate one species of bee, there would likely be several other species capable of carrying out its function, thus ensuring the propagation of the plant species it once pollinated.

Moreover, some species of wild bee are specially adapted to pollinate particular species of flowers that other bees are unable to pollinate. If those specially-adapted species can’t tough it out in the urban environment, their co-evolved counterparts may not be able to either.

(MacIvor also notes the importance of wasps—the other tenants of his bee condos—as “pest-controlling agents,” although he is more interested in the pollination services bees provide.)

While MacIvor says bee diversity (and biodiversity, generally) is important and worth protecting in its own right, he adds, “What’s interesting is putting an anthropocentric spin on ecosystem functions and referring to them as ecosystem services. So in that way we can start to tell people that we are a part of biodiversity as humans as well, and we can derive benefits from there being a breadth of species doing the same thing.”

There are aesthetic benefits, of course. “Even green space in cities will become significantly homogenized to only those that are wind-pollinating, like dandelions, grass, willow, oak, and maple, if we don’t have pollination services,” MacIvor says.

But there may also be economic advantages to having a diverse wild-bee assemblage in Toronto. Current urban landscape design practices mean that when a flower or plant in a human-maintained garden dies, it’s simply replaced. “It’s interesting to me,” MacIvor says, “how landscape architecture and design, unwittingly, could potentially make bees and pollination redundant in some cases.” But, he adds, if the urban landscape were designed in such a way that more wild bee species were allowed to flourish, those bees could aid in the maintenance of garden plants and flowers, potentially reducing the cost of maintaining them ourselves.

The face of one of MacIvor’s nest boxes, with its electronic sensor visible to the left.

MacIvor says bees need three things: pollen and nectar, both of which are abundant in Toronto; nesting material—some bees collect leaves and mud, while others will use anything from flower petals to plastic bags; and places to nest. According to MacIvor, when it comes to bee diversity, “nest locations are the limiting factor for a lot of these bees.” He says around 80 per cent of Toronto’s bee population nests in the ground. “So there’s a limiting factor right there, if we’re paving everything.”

During the first three years of his project, MacIvor has learned much. He’s found, for example, that bee colonization of green roofs decreases significantly with building height. After four or five storeys, he says, colonization drops, and so does diversity.

There’s a lot still to learn about bees and green roofs, in fact, especially as the latter become more prevalent in Toronto. Green roofs, MacIvor says, “could be a good thing if the [urban] landscape is so depauperate that there’s not enough forage for [bees] and a green roof enhances foraging opportunities.” But, he adds, green roofs could also have a negative effect on bees if, say, their elevation endangers the lives of bees who are forced to go up and down the sides of buildings to reach their nests.

MacIvor says there are still lots of questions to be answered. But urban landscape design should play a role in enhancing Toronto’s biodiversity, he says, “and without thinking about bees in that equation, we’re shorting ourselves quite a bit.”

Photos by Graeme Bayliss/Torontoist, unless otherwise indicated.

Photo by {a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ddotg/7052055551/"}DdotG{/a} from the {a href="http://www.flickr.com/groups/torontoist"}Torontoist Flickr Pool{/a}.

If you’ve been paying attention to the battles over urban planning in Toronto over the last year, you may have noticed a slight shift in the debate: while tensions over sky-high towers continue unabated, some of the most notable fights in neighbourhoods around the city are over the more modest “mid-rise” developments—ones in the 5-10 storey range—that have, until now, made up a smaller share of development.

Toronto’s still-relatively-new chief planner, Jen Keesmaat, would like to change that. Keesmaat told reporters last week that she wants to see the City change zoning regulations to automatically allow mid-rise development along Toronto’s “avenues”—a specific list of designated arterial roads, like St. Clair and Danforth, which form the spines of residential neighbourhoods but themselves are already somewhat built up. The goal is to accommodate Toronto’s growing population by increasing density while maintaining more moderately scaled neighbourhoods, distributing some development across several main streets rather than concentrating it only clusters of giant towers. Avenues, in particular, are generally streets that already have infrastructure (most notably, transit), which is what makes them good candidates for this scaled growth.

Officially, this has been one of Toronto’s planning goals for quite some time. One key problem: the City’s own zoning rules don’t currently support that vision.

The problem is a conflict between two key documents: our Official Plan (a big-picture vision, in which a municipality sets out its planning direction and a strategy for managing future growth) and our zoning bylaw, which lay out the specific rules about what a developer is allowed to build at any given location. Paul Bedford, one of Toronto’s former chief planners, distinguishes between zoning and the Official Plan simply: “the Plan is about vision, the zoning bylaw is about precision.”

Zoning determines everything about a building, from the uses it can be put to (residential, commercial, etc.) to its physical shape: its height, how much of the lot can be occupied, how much parking it needs and where on the parcel of land that parking goes, and so on. Despite the vision articulated in the Official Plan—which explicitly calls for growth along the avenues—most of the city, including large portions of those avenues, isn’t currently zoned for mid-rise buildings.

Eglinton Avenue—one of the targets for increased density in Toronto. Photo by {a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/news46/2381253052/"}Tom Podolec{/a} from the {a href="http://www.flickr.com/groups/torontoist"}Torontoist Flickr Pool{/a}.

This is what Keesmaat is hoping, specifically, to change. The idea is to get to the point where mid-rise construction wouldn’t need to go through the time-consuming zoning application process at all, enabling a developer who wanted to build mid-rise on an avenue to simply apply for a building permit and go, able to construct mid-rise “as of right” (i.e. without needing special permission). “We would essentially take out a whole layer in the process, which is quite time consuming, and for developers quite costly,” Keesmaat told us last week, when we asked for more details about her plan.

This doesn’t mean developers will necessarily build mid-rise (they can always try to ask council for a amendment to build a high rise), but streamlining the bureaucratic process for mid-rise construction is one way of encouraging developers to build the more modest forms. Some avenues have already been “up-zoned,” and Keesmaat would like to see the process streamlined further.

Bedford was Toronto’s chief planner in 2002, and helped write the Official Plan that formally committed the city to development along the avenues. “I totally support what Jen is aiming for,” he told us. “We have to accept the reality that Toronto is growing, and that’s a good thing.”

But wait. If the City’s Official Plan was adopted in 2002, why are we still talking about this in 2012? Why weren’t Toronto’s zoning by-laws synchronized with the Official Plan years ago?

Bedford, speaking with the candor that a former civil servant is allowed (but gets a current one in trouble), says there are a number of reasons why councillors aren’t eager to allow developers more zoning freedoms.

“Councillors love to have the ability to get public benefits out of Section 37 through the rezoning process,” says Bedford, and proactively up-zoning gives away that opportunity. “Also, councillors are key in the rezoning process. They’re kings and queens in that process. And I think they like that.”

Photo by {a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/lychee_aloe/7054518993/"}Lychee_Aloe{/a} from the {a href="http://www.flickr.com/groups/torontoist"}Torontoist Flickr Pool{/a}.

Keesmaat stresses that if this new process is implemented, residents won’t be cut out of the consultation process entirely. Rather, instead of piecemeal consultations for each individual development—which is what happens now, and how we end up in so many battles about individual building proposals—City staff, councillors, and the community would engage in a consultation process for an entire avenue at once.

Avenue studies aren’t new to Toronto, but this larger-scale approach is something we’re still exploring. The City began conducting one for Eglinton Avenue in 2011: it’s designed to help plan and manage the changes along the forthcoming LRT route. An examination of 20 kilometres along that transit line, the scale of this study is unprecedented in Toronto. It’s this Eglinton study, and the wide-angle lens it brings to city planning, that Keesmaat wants to emulate in other parts of Toronto.

Keesmaat hopes that the corridor-wide Avenue Study process will defuse some of the local antagonism to developers. “I think it’s better for consultation to happen in the context of the study, because you get less parochial interests then with a specific application.”

Mid-rise developers are, predictably, excited about the possibility of a shorter, less onerous process. Shane Fenton, vice-president at Reserve Properties (developer of 109OZ, among other buildings), says the current process actually causes more disruption than a more permissive one would.

“Someone who wants to build six storeys has to go through the same process as someone who wants to build 30,” says Fenton. “A lot of developers look at that and think, ‘why is it worth my time and money’?” Fenton estimates that it takes anywhere from one to two years to get approval for a mid-rise project, and that’s assuming that there aren’t any major disruptions: Reserve’s development at 1960 Queen Street East had its first application filed in April of 2011, was unanimously approved by Toronto-East York Community Council in May of 2012, and will now go to the Ontario Municipal Board on February 5, 2013. (Queen Street East is now the subject of a Visioning Study, a less robust form of examination than an Avenue Study, in part because of the community reaction to Reserve’s and other development proposals.)

There are other obstacles to mid-rise development: there are a limited number of “soft sites,” as Bedford calls them—places that are particularly well-suited to this form of development. While he was still working for the City he and planning department staff estimated that there is room for 120,000 units along our avenues.

Fenton adds that mid-rise buildings, while less disruptive to neighbourhoods than monolithic towers, do come at a premium: units in these buildings are more expensive on a per-square-foot basis, mostly because smaller developers can’t capture the economies of scale that large towers can.

But with planners inside the City and out warning that the earliest, easiest sites for tower development have all been filled, the question may no longer be whether mid-rise is preferable to towers, but whether it’s preferable to nothing at all.

CORRECTION: 4:24 PM As pointed out by a reader, we originally conflated some terminology (regarding zoning variances and amendments) in this article, which we have since corrected.

The Gardiner is crumbling, but what's to be done? Photo by {a href="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7204/6873476185_df4a64821a_z.jpg"}Ottawa Bus Gallery{/a}, from the {a href="http://www.flickr.com/groups/torontoist/pool/"}Torontoist Flickr Pool{/a}.

You can tell a city has vitality, if, by a certain point in time, discussions turn to what a worn-down piece of infrastructure could eventually be, as opposed to the eyesore and municipal tax burden it’s become. The Gardiner Expressway has certainly become that focal point for Toronto—though, in our case, we’re not talking about saving a part of the city’s history, as with the famed High Line park in New York City. There, concerned residents advocated for the transformation of an abandoned, decrepit piece of railway, after the 19th-century elevated line was slated for demolition by then-mayor Rudy Giuliani’s administration. It was a discussion of heritage, of preserving an endangered piece of the city’s character.

Here, when it comes to the Gardiner, not so much. Our discussions have been about doing something with the decaying expressway out of necessity, simply to stave off further decay. At least that’s the way we’re talking about it in 2012.

The discussion about transforming the Gardiner, of course, has been ongoing for more than two decades. After David Miller’s 2008 announcement that a planned extension of Front Street would not proceed, Waterfront Toronto announced plans to spend 10 million dollars on an environmental assessment of a new project: tearing down the Gardiner between Jarvis Street and the Don. “This is the least utilized part of the Gardiner,” Waterfront Toronto CEO John Campbell told Spacing magazine in 2008. “What we’re proposing today is doable. We can’t afford the billions it will cost to dismantle the whole thing. That will be a question for the next generation to answer.” The tear-down still hasn’t happened.

Unfortunately, a generation appears to span approximately four years, at least in Toronto. Last month, IBI Group—an independent development firm hired by the City—reported cracks, splits, spalls, patches, and other structural weak points in the Gardiner that hadn’t been noted earlier. These were found, according to the Star, in six separate areas of the eastern Gardiner, spots that the city said were free of surface deterioration. The report recommended immediate protective action to prevent falling chunks of concrete from injuring people: debris netting, reinforcement, and the closure of areas beneath the Gardiner to pedestrians.

Ultimately, IBI Group concluded that the Gardiner, in its current 60-year-old state, presents a “significant hazard to public safety.” The report says that even immediate precautionary action can’t guarantee that the Gardiner won’t continue to fall apart.

Is our only option to tear it down and start again?

In North America, replacing a major urban thoroughfare isn’t without precedent. But the process of transforming the Gardiner may be less like building New York City’s High Line, in fact, and more like the process of tearing down San Francisco’s Embarcadero Freeway. Heavily damaged in 1989 during the Loma Prieta earthquake, the freeway was at the heart of a local policy debate that, 20 years later, Torontonians might find remarkably familiar.

Led by Art Agnost, then the city’s mayor, city officials proposed removing the damaged freeway entirely and replacing it with a revived pedestrian plaza. Nearby businesses, meanwhile, opposed that plan fiercely. They feared it would hurt sales.

Though the proposal cost Agnost his job in San Francisco’s 1991 election, demolition began on the Embacadero late that winter. Today, walking the area’s palm-lined paths, you would hardly know that its landscape was once occupied by an aging, deteriorating freeway. Neither would you guess that the transformation of the area was once so strongly opposed.

What damaged the Embarcadero, of course, was nothing short of a 7.1 earthquake shaking its foundations loose. As infrastructure losses go, that’s a total write-off. But the difference between that and the Gardiner’s situation, arguably, is pretty negligible. A public-safety hazard is a public-safety hazard.

To some in the environmental and urban-planning communities, the Gardiner’s hazards are the ultimate indication that something should already have been done with it. Today its removal seems all but inevitable, with nearby development having eliminated any viable alternative. It’s a costly, frustrating predicament for Toronto. But to some, like Kevin Coulter, an environmental planner who works with several local firms, the long-term benefits of a reimagined Gardiner are worth it.

“I don’t think you can find a better candidate for a more meaningful act of city building in Toronto than the Gardiner,” Coulter told Torontoist. “Development is becoming increasingly contentious across the city and this is one space where everyone agrees the status quo is unacceptable.

“Redevelopment, when done right, has the potential to remove what’s always been seen as a psychological barrier to the waterfront.”

Can that grey, looming stretch of the waterfront between Dufferin and Jarvis be somehow restored, similar to what San Francisco saw with the Embarcadero? Questions of infrastructure remain the biggest obstacle to any sort of progress. Put simply, people generally want to move quickly through their cities, and a temporarily redirected Gardiner would get in the way of that. But, again, supporters of a reimagined Gardiner, like Coulter, think a progressive downtown needs fewer highways, anyway.

“Concerns about how this will affect getting in and out of downtown are legitimate,” he said, “but I think this speaks more to the need for greater integration in our transit and infrastructure planning than anything else. The fact is that while highways are essential for travel between cities, experience from across North America is showing they don’t belong in them.”

CORRECTION: November 14, 2012, 10:00 AM This post originally said that Mayor David Miller announced that a planned extension of the Gardiner “would not proceed.” The paraphrase of Miller was accurate, but the road was not: the former mayor was referring to an extension for Front Street. This post also incorrectly stated that Waterfront Toronto announced $10 million in funding for tearing down the Gardiner between Dufferin and Jarvis streets. In fact, the organization’s $10 million announcement concerned an environmental assessment of the possibility of tearing down a portion of the Gardiner between Jarvis Street and the Don Valley. The post has been altered to reflect all of this.

Rendering of the proposed condo development at Queen East and Kenilworth.

When the flagship Lick’s Restaurant at Queen and Kenilworth announced it would be closing for good after 32 years slinging burgers, to make way for a condo development, some Beach residents balked. The proposed new six story building does not fit in with their sense of neighbourhood, and they’ve been rallying to try to stop its construction.

It’s one in a long list of examples of friction in the east-end community, which has resisted a great many development proposals in recent years. A new set of principles has been proposed to try to improve matters: the Queen Street East Urban Development Guidelines [PDF]. The guidelines, explains the City report on the subject, are intended to balance new development in the area with “the desire of the local community to maintain its existing character.”

Those guidelines will be discussed at City Hall later today and have the backing of area councillor Mary-Margaret McMahon (Ward 32, Beaches-East York), but local residents are far from united in supporting it.

Photo by {a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/74772318@N00/2622383555/"}Philip Jackman{/a} from the {a href="http://www.flickr.com/groups/torontoist"}Torontoist Flickr Pool{/a}.

The guidelines are the culmination of a visioning study commissioned by the City at McMahon’s request, and carried out over this past summer. Beach residents and urban designers, worried about over-development, held six meetings over five months; more than 250 people and several community organizations participated. “We had more members on our stakeholder advisory committee than Waterfront Toronto had on theirs. We had more community consultation than these new studies require, and every deadline was extended. It was intense, and we needed it to be intense,” McMahon says of the process.

The plan imposes limits on building height on Queen East between Coxwell and Victoria Park: between four and six storeys, depending on the site and the design (the top two floors of a six storey building would need to be set back so they don’t overshadow the street). Its goal is to preserve the current look and feel of the neighbourhood while allowing for some incremental growth and increase in density.

The Beaches Residents’ Association of Toronto (BRAT) isn’t so keen on the idea, however, and they’ve launched a campaign called Save Queen Street in response to the new plan. They’ve been imploring residents to contact McMahon and tell her the guidelines “are unacceptable and should not be passed until the OMB Appeal for Lick’s (1960 Queen) has been heard.” They have also been canvassing, planting lawn sign, and sending email blasts to spread the word.

BRAT has a long list of problems with the visioning study. In addition to numerous procedural concerns, they also worry about balance, and maintain the study should have been conducted by a third party. “Many local participants felt the process was very rushed, poorly advertized, and that the resulting guidelines contradict City and Provincial policy—promoting population growth without including any studies of infrastructure impacts such as traffic, transit, parking, sanitary and storm sewer capacity, schools, daycares, etc.,” they wrote in a media release late last month. McMahon, for her part, is determined to persevere, and hopes to address these concerns at community and stakeholder meetings starting at the end of this month.

The Queen Street East Visioning Study will be discussed at the Toronto and East York Community Council meeting today at City Hall. Debate is scheduled to start at 3 p.m., but it may be delayed if previous items take longer than expected.

“The passion Canadians have for their cities is palpable. But so is the frustration, and the sense that we continue to miss the mark. We need new planning paradigms that entwine our cities and regions, we need clarity about what it will cost to make the public infrastructure investments that we require, and we need to embrace new, creative financing models.”

—Toronto’s newly installed chief planner, Jennifer Keesmaat, writing in the Globe and Mail today about her vision for the city and her understanding of the most urgent challenges we face.

“Walking tells us something about who we are and what it is that we in fact value.”

—Jennifer Keesmaat, who will be serving as the new chief planner for the City of Toronto. Here she is giving a TED Talk this spring: 17 straight minutes on the virtues of, yes, walking. A surprising choice in the era of Rob Ford, perhaps—though one that may give hope to many who think we could benefit from a more urbanist approach to planning in Toronto.

Yonge Street as it could be, with the removal of two traffic lanes and the inclusion of bike lanes, a widened sidewalk, and cobbled pavement. Image courtesy of Chris Hardwicke and the Toronto Centre for Active Transportation.

Ryan Whitney grew up in a small town in northern Ontario where the streets were designed with cars—and only cars—in mind. The safety of pedestrians and cyclists was an afterthought, subsidiary to ensuring the smooth flow of vehicular traffic. Now living in Toronto and working as a researcher and project manager for the Toronto Centre for Active Transportation (TCAT), Whitney can see some of those small-town planning sensibilities on our big city streets. But problem streets don’t need to be blown up and rebuilt, he says. They only need to be completed.

A “complete street” is one that is safe and accessible for pedestrians, cyclists, transit users, and motorists, irrespective of age or ability. “It’s not something to benefit one user over the other,” Whitney says. “It’s a comprehensive approach that benefits everybody.

“Complete streets can exist in any type of environment,” he adds, because they’re designed contextually and with respect to their surroundings.

The concept has spread rapidly across the United States since the formation of the National Complete Streets Coalition in 2005. In 2009, TCAT and the Toronto Cyclists Union (now Cycle Toronto) teamed up to bring the concept to Toronto. Earlier this year, TCAT produced Complete Streets by Design, an “envisioning exercise,” as Whitney calls it, “that shows what Toronto could be.”

Complete Streets by Design identifies six major types of Toronto street—urban arterial (east-west), urban arterial (north-south), suburban arterial, highway crossing, urban residential, and suburban residential—and shows how all of them might be made “complete.”

Whitney notes that many of the hypothetical changes proposed in Complete Streets by Design are simple and inexpensive. “We wanted to show that complete streets don’t necessarily cost a lot of money,” he says. On Danforth Avenue at Logan Street, for example, a central turning lane is removed in favour of a pair of bike lanes, and the speed limit is reduced by 10 kilometres per hour. On Jane Street at Highway 401, vehicle lanes are narrowed slightly in order to accommodate bike lanes.

Danforth Avenue at Logan Avenue is depicted here with its turning lane removed in favour of bike lanes. Image courtesy of the Toronto Centre for Active Transportation.

But where the completion of a street requires more than a dash of paint and a new set of traffic signs—if, for example, a road needs a tree-lined median strip, a cobbled surface, or traffic-calming curb extensions—Whitney notes that complete streets can be built gradually.

“If you’ve adopted a complete-streets policy, that doesn’t mean that all of a sudden you have to go out and all of your streets have to become complete,” he says. Changing Toronto’s streets, he thinks, could be a gradual process, timed to coincide with scheduled road maintenance. “Whenever there’s an opportunity,” he says, “we need to move forward.”

So far, Toronto has lagged behind. Whereas Montreal has had segregated cycling infrastructure since the 1970s, and Vancouver has dedicated resources to making its key corridors more pedestrian- and cyclist-friendly, Toronto has, for the most part, stuck to a “business-as-usual approach to road design,” says Whitney.

“And business-as-usual approaches lead to business-as-usual outcomes,” he adds.

Still, Whiteney sees some cause for hope. He notes that the first step toward completing a city’s streets is to strengthen that city’s policy language. In Toronto’s case, “a lot of the ideas and a lot of the language is definitely [already] there.” But the language could still use some tweaking. When it comes to implementing design policies, he says, “if you have language like ‘might consider,’ then that essentially means ‘no.’”

With Rob Ford as mayor, getting from “maybe” to “definitely” poses a significant challenge. “We’re in a situation where it’s become a left-and-right issue,” Whitney says. “It’s become an urban-and-suburban issue.” The concessions required of drivers to complete some of Toronto’s streets—lane reductions, lane-width reductions, and speed-limit reductions—will certainly make it a cyclist-and-motorist issue as well.

But Whitney insists that it is possible to move past the divisiveness and political polarization that has impeded so much progress in Toronto. He cites the case of Charlotte, North Carolina, where an award-winning complete-streets policy was formally adopted in 2007. “Every single street there goes through the process and it’s no longer a question of left or right. Once it’s established, and once it’s integrated into the culture, it takes it out of the realm of politics and it becomes just the way that municipalities do business.”

This rendering of Seneca Hill Drive includes curb extensions, which discourage speeding by narrowing sight lines. Image courtesy of the Toronto Centre for Active Transportation.

Ideally, Whitney says, what Toronto needs are “visionary politicians who view road design as a balance to serve all users.” But with no such prospects on the immediate horizon, he thinks arguments in favour of complete streets should focus on hard facts and figures. He thinks TCAT’s statistics demonstrate that streetscape improvements can benefit safety and public health.

Community engagement could be an important catalyst for change. “We need citizens to demand that their city is built with all users in mind,” Whitney says. “We need vocal citizens who get out there, talk to their councillors, and get complete streets on the agenda.”

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Let’s all check our language, Gillian Mason told the room of planners, students, and community members last night. The director of the Centre for City Ecology, she instructed us to expunge any jargon from our speech and to raise a hand if something wasn’t making sense to us. This was going to prove difficult, as the topic of the evening’s discussion was the often murky, you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours dealings of Section 37 of the Planning Act—the one which allows the City to barter extra density or height on a development site in return for agreed upon community benefits.

To help matters, the CCE brought in two speakers—urban planner John Gladki and property development lawyer Patrick Devine—to help explain what Section 37 allows, how it’s used, and how it can be improved to better serve Toronto.

To attempt to read the Planning Act, one of the pieces of provincial legislation that guides the planning and development of Ontario cities, is to submit oneself to the sometimes frustrating, often dry, and always dizzying world of legalese. You can do A, but not B, except if you do C, subject to D, excluded when E is involved, which it only is if you do A and B together and then stand on your head and spit three times. Simply put, it’s not the type of document you curl up with at night with a glass of wine.

Understanding the implications of this document, however, is crucial to anyone interested in grasping how planning decisions are made in the City of Toronto, what decisions the City is actually allowed to make, and what tools are available to build the kind of city we want and need. Section 37 is one of those tools.

To quote directly from the Act, Section 37 says: “The council of a local municipality may, in a by-law passed under section 34, authorize increases in the height and density of development otherwise permitted by the by-law that will be permitted in return for the provision of such facilities, services or matters as are set out in the by-law.” Essentially, the developers get to extract more value from their land in exchange for providing community benefits; they do this by providing capital facilities or cash that go to capital facilities: they install public art, provide daycare space, do heritage preservation work, and so on.

Section 37 is predicated on the idea that the community should share in the economic uplift a developer gets when the City allows them extra density or height (and thereby higher profits), but also that negative effects of a higher density development should be mitigated. These benefits are negotiated by the councillor in the ward in which the development is situated. Some of these negotiated benefits, such as Wychwood Barns, are probably seen as a good use of Section 37 money, while others, like the instance of a $70,000 dog drinking fountain mentioned by Devine…not so much.

And that is where Patrick Devine sees a problem. “The fundamental problem with Section 37 is the governance issue,” he said, calling each ward councillor the “kings and queens” of their areas. He recounted one story of a time he had brought suggestions for community benefits, based on community consultation, to the councillor in question. This councillor’s response: “Why are you even talking to me about this? There’s only one person who can decide where that money’s spent. Me.” While this reaction is hopefully atypically dramatic, the point is that there needs to be more community involvement and oversight in these decisions.

Devine argued that we’d do better with a different model of government, which would see half the current number of councillors elected in wards that matched the Provincial and Federal ridings (right now there are 44 councillors, each of which have roughly half of one federal/provincial riding), with another 22 councillors elected at-large among four districts. This, Devine said, would allow decisions to be made by councillors not beholden to a narrow geographic area.

John Gladki was also concerned with the lack of community consultation on how to spend Section 37 funds, and argued that the public needs to be involved earlier in the process. He also raised another persistent problem: the greatest needs are often in areas where development isn’t as robust. He suggested that we need to find a way to distribute some of the funds to areas across the city rather than keep each development’s Section 37 funds in its surrounding neighbourhood. Gladki also suggested opening up Section 37 to funding maintenance as well as capital expenditure, which would allow for things like ongoing park upkeep.

The audience’s response in the discussion afterwards highlighted the importance in reforming Section 37 in another way—to demystify a process that often feels a bit too back-room-dealy for some. People argued that it allowed councillors to sprinkle benefits around their ward, currying favour to those groups that may help them win re-election, rather than going toward the projects that are best for the community at large.

Whether this is always the case, one thing that everyone in the room agreed on: Section 37 could benefit from a little tweaking to become more transparent and better involve the community.

Etobicoke Clerk's Dept. photo of officials touring a residential development, likely Don Mills, 1950s, from the City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 213, Series 1464, File 7, Item 3.

With the passage of provincial legislation on April 2, 1953, the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto became a legal reality, joining together the City of Toronto with its twelve neighbouring municipalities in a regional federation. But few of the region’s 1.1 million inhabitants perceived Metro Toronto, with its combination of dense urbanization and abundant farmland, as a physical reality.

So, when an interim administration was established under inaugural Metro Chairman Frederick G. Gardiner on April 15, 1953, to prepare for the regional government’s full assumption of duties on January 1, 1954, one of the first tasks was to sell the concept of Metro as a reality—at least to those City aldermen and suburban mayors and reeves who would be governing it through the Metro Council.

To do so, on April 30 Gardiner and his hand-picked director of planning, Tracy Deavin leMay, led two busloads of area politicians and bureaucrats on a 70-mile tour to inspect the present state of Metro and outline future plans for growth and development.

Travelling to the far-flung corners of the territory, they passed through each of the now-federated area municipalities (except Forest Hill) and suffered Metro’s extremes, from “bumpy dust-covered suburban roads” to “rush-hour city traffic,” as the Globe and Mail (May 1, 1953) later put it.

By James T. Lemon’s count in Toronto Since 1918 (James Lorimer & Company, 1985), the tour highlighted almost 100 sites, projects, or proposals, particularly those related to water supply and sewage disposal, regional transportation routes, planning, and housing—all now areas of Metro responsibility. The officials observed, one newspaper touted, almost $1 billion of growth that had occurred in the previous five years, in the form of new apartment blocks, shopping plazas, and sites zoned for industrial development.

And as Gardiner presented Metro’s possibilities and problems and its plans for growth in the coming decades—many of which had been outlined in a 1943 master plan composed by leMay’s Toronto City Planning Board—city and suburban officials alike, a newspaper argued, gained “insight into the problems they [had] to solve.”

Toronto Star (May 1, 1953)

After the buses departed City Hall, the first stop of the tour, the Parkdale Pumping Station, served as a perfect illustration of why Metro had been created.

At the Second World War, Greater Toronto was compact, comprising three highly urbanized municipalities—Toronto, East York, and the Township of York—and surrounded by farmland and tiny settlements. But as pressures of outward expansion and urbanization increased, these sparsely populated municipalities proved unable to cope with the necessity of developing water and sewage infrastructure, or unwilling to broaden their tax bases through the industrial development required to fund such services. The City of Toronto, needing room to grow, pleaded with the province to expand the city’s jurisdiction through amalgamation. The province’s compromise was federation, whereby common issues, like the provision of infrastructure and services across local boundaries, could be tackled on a regional basis without sacrificing local-level governance.

When the tour visited, the capacity of the Parkdale Pumping Station was being increased to push nearly 3 billion gallons of water daily up to York and North York townships. Later that day, officials also visited the R.C. Harris Water Filtration Plant and the Ashbridge’s Bay sewage disposal plant, both of which were also undergoing capacity upgrades to better serve outlying districts until Metro could construct an infrastructure network to support orderly development on the fringe.

Metro Chairman Frederick G. Gardiner, 1950s, from the City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1257, Series 1057, Item 3050.

Aboard one bus, Gardiner “outlined the important problems and possible solutions, advanced by planning officials,” as one reporter observed. Aboard the other bus was leMay, the man whom, as the City of Toronto’s chief planner for over four decades, had been responsible for the vast majority of the regional solutions so far advanced.

Trained as a surveyor in his native England and having apprenticed at a Toronto firm, leMay was appointed city surveyor in 1910 at 26 years of age. Although leMay was primarily charged with completing legal surveys, tasks were progressively added to his portfolio, including civic beautification, the review and approval of subdivision layouts and high-rise development, street design and traffic engineering, and the consolidation of zoning by-laws. His duties had always included a degree of urban planning and his title evolved over time; he was elevated to the position of planning commissioner in 1930 then made secretary-treasurer of the Toronto City Planning Board (TCPB) in 1942, and its successor, the Toronto York Planning Board (TYPB), upon that body’s creation in 1947.

Map from the Toronto Planning Board's Master Plan for the City of Toronto and Environs (1943).

Enlisting the assistance of expert town planners, architects, and engineers in 1943, the TCPB composed a comprehensive plan for next 30 years of the city’s growth, The Master Plan for the City of Toronto and Environs (1943). But rightly perceiving “that the political boundaries of the City [bore] no relation to the social and economic life of its people,” as the plan put it, the TCPB attempted “to co-ordinate the physical development of the Metro Area as one geographic, economic and social unit.” The plan anticipated the necessity of some form of metropolitan unification a decade before Metro’s creation—although it was very brief, and short on implementation details.

It was a visionary plan, adapting international trends in urban planning for the local context, and incorporating elements from previous city proposals or initiatives. Nevertheless, the 1943 plan had, as Don W. Thomson argues in Men and Meridians, Volume 3 (Queen’s Printer, 1969), “very far-reaching effects upon the development of post-war Toronto.” It was a formative influence on the early days of Metro, and many of its specific suggestions were featured as sites visited or proposals discussed during the bus tour.

Aerial view of Gardiner Expressway, 1950s, from the City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 220, Series 65, File 47, Item 5.

Gardiner envisioned, in one reporter’s words, “a solid industrial belt, stretching from Oshawa on the east to Niagara Falls on the west.” The weak link in this chain was Toronto in the middle, which had plenty of industry but terrible traffic. Like most provincial highways, the Queen Elizabeth Way ended at the city limits, dumping highway drivers onto the Lakeshore at the Humber River, creating “Metropolitan Toronto’s most urgent traffic problem,” according to a 1954 pamphlet by leMay, promoting three self-guided driving tours of Metro.

A waterfront superhighway, elevated between Bathurst and Cherry Streets, was deemed the only adequate solution for speedy access from the city limits to downtown, Gardiner explained to his bus-riding audience. It was to be one leg in an interconnected network of expressways called for in the 1943 plan. Another was the province’s Toronto By-Pass Highway (now known as the 401), which was already in operation from near Weston Road to beyond Yonge Street.

Toronto traffic, ca. 1950, from the City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1128, Series 381, File 319, Item 12641-20.

Proposed solutions to the city’s traffic problems would be a recurring theme of the bus tour. By 1939, the area’s existing road system was 30 per cent overcapacity and had only worsened despite the efforts of leMay and other bureaucrats to solve congestion. As if to underline the centrality of the problem’s scale, the tour buses kept getting stuck in traffic.

In trying to navigate around one jam, the bus guided by leMay got lost.

As the tour travelled north from the village of Long Branch, talk turned to the plan to expand Highway 27 (Brown’s Line) into a four-lane route carrying workers to the industrial districts of Etobicoke and defense-industry jobs in Malton.

Construction of bridge on Jane Street at Black Creek, 1950s, from the City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 220, Series 65, File 43, Item 9.

Then, after a steak-and-fixings lunch at the Old Mill Inn, the bus tour drove along St. Clair Avenue past the construction project at the northern end of the extension of Spadina from MacPherson Avenue. It was the first stage of the 1943 plan to use ravines to extend the road up to Wilson Avenue, a proposal which had been long delayed due to the opposition of the York and North York townships. Ironically, just over a decade later, the northern suburbs would be among the strongest proponents of upgrading Spadina from roadway to expressway.

Farther along St. Clair, the officials took advantage of the Mount Pleasant extension—recently completed to extend Jarvis Street up to Eglinton Avenue, at a cost of $4 million—to get to Leaside.

Beyond visiting more industrial areas, such as Scarborough’s Golden Mile strip and the Golden Gate Industrial Area north of O’Connor Drive in East York, officials looked at the region’s undeveloped fringe. Luckily, not knowing what to expect in the wilds of the Metropolitan hinterland, some downtown aldermen had brought rubber boots.

Etobicoke Clerk's Department photo of potential site for development, 1950s, from the City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 213, Series 1464, File 29, Item 4.

Here, Gardiner explained, he hoped “the Metropolitan Planning Board [would] have regional authority to prevent haphazard industrial and residential growth.” Although he was usually opposed to state authority constraining business, Gardiner expressed unbridled support for Metro’s planning powers, proclaiming on another occasion that the Metropolitan Toronto Planning Board (MTPB) was to be “the most important thing in the whole metropolitan setup.” The MTPB, with leMay as planning director, would have broad planning and zoning powers, not only over Metro but also over 500 square miles of adjacent land beyond its borders.

As Timothy J. Colton argues in Big Daddy (University of Toronto Press, 1980), Gardiner took an active interest in planning but recognized that he wasn’t the generator of ideas. Rather, taking advice of his experts, he selected which proposals ought to be fought for in the political sphere, and then bulldozed them through approvals.

Etobicoke Clerk's Department photo of potential site for development, 1950s, from the City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 213, Series 1464, File 29, Item 11.

In his decades as a bureaucrat, leMay had proven to be politically astute and adept at reconciling “local self-interests with the high ideals of planning,” as his friend Humphrey Carver said. Gardiner knew this well; the two had worked closely on the TYPB when Gardiner had been its chairman. So leMay was the natural choice as Metro’s first planning director in 1953, and staff loyalty ensured that many of his employees at the City joined him with the new department.

LeMay shared with Gardiner a reputation as an extremely hard worker, spending night after night in his office and taking much on himself rather than delegating. On different occasions, he and Gardiner both had to be hospitalized for conditions stemming from overwork. A quiet, unassuming man, leMay emphasized the need to educate stakeholders and build consensus through committee work. Although he was, by some accounts, an engaging and wryly humorous public speaker, leMay seemed happy enough to leave bold public pronouncements to Gardiner.

York Downs Drive, 1950s, from the City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1257, Series 1057, Item 82.

LeMay also shared Gardiner’s and the Metro Council’s pragmatic planning philosophy, where—through their provision of infrastructure and roadways—Metro was to be an enabler of natural growth undertaken by private enterprise.

This was seen clearly on the Metro tour by its emphasis on the industrial sites and residential development being built by private companies. As an example of private development done right, the bus stopped on Lawrence Avenue at the offices of the Don Mills Development Co., where the tour group examined a contour map of the ambitious development then under construction—at half the density of downtown neighbourhoods.

To enable the planned community’s growth, Eglinton Avenue was being extended, at a cost of $4 million, over the Don Valley to connect the existing portion in Scarborough with Leaside near Laird Drive.

Construction of bridge on Eglinton Avenue East at Don Valley Parkway, 1950s, from the City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 220, Series 65, File 52, Item 1.

Regent Park, then also under construction and another tour stop, presented the other end of Metro’s housing spectrum during the tour. Undertaken as a result of the 1934 Bruce Report, the 44-acre social-housing project was then considered a model of how Metro could use its powers over housing in the future. The tour also identified the Humber Valley Golf Course as another site for low-income housing development.

The tour concluded where it began, at City Hall, with exhausted officials disembarking after a seven-hour excursion. Although much of what they had seen and heard had been outlined in the 1943 Master Plan, proposals for future growth would be updated and formalized in the MTPB’s 1959 Official Plan. This far more detailed document was developed by leMay’s successor as planning director, Murray V. Jones.

LeMay died, at 70 years of age, in July 1954, after 44 years as a civil servant. One observer called him “primarily the father of town planning…in Ontario.”

Gardiner got off to a rocky start with Jones. Where leMay was a man of practical field experience, which Gardiner respected, Jones had enjoyed a formal academic education in planning—too much of which Gardiner considered impractical in the politically charged municipal environment. It took a degree of feuding with Jones before he and Gardiner found a way to work together effectively.

In that sense, beyond the grand vision extolled and construction projects visited on that April day in 1953, the Metro tour highlighted the collaborative relationship between the inaugural chairman and his hand-picked chief planner in Metro’s formative days.

Other sources consulted: Humphrey Carver, Compassionate Landscape (University of Toronto Press, 1975); Graham Fraser, “Planning vs. Development: Placing Bets on Toronto’s Future,” in Alan Powell, ed., The City: Attacking Modern Myths (McClelland and Stewart, 1972); Tracy D. leMay, Tour of Metropolitan Toronto (Board of Trade of the City of Toronto, 1954); James T. Lemon, “Tracy Deavin LeMay: Toronto’s First Planning Commissioner, 1930–1954,” City Planning, 1, No. 4 (1984); Albert Rose, Governing Metropolitan Toronto: A Social and Political Analysis, 1953-1971 (University of California Press, 1972); John Sewell, The Shape of the Suburbs (University of Toronto Press, 2009); and the Toronto Star (May 1, 1953; July 28 & 29, 1954).

Every Saturday, Historicist looks back at the events, places, and characters that have shaped Toronto into the city we know today.

CORRECTION: APRIL 23, 12:22 PM As pointed out to us by a reader, the lead image in this article, though it comes from the Etobicoke Clerk’s archives, does not actually appear to be of Etobicoke. We have updated the image caption to reflect this.

photo by {a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mtunney/3282585763/"}Michael Tunney{/a} from the {a href="http://www.flickr.com/groups/torontoist/"}Torontoist Flickr Pool{/a}

After several polls showed Rob Ford and his plans for Toronto are becoming deeply unpopular with citizens from all areas of the city, the mayor came out to say that he was going to “stay the course.” But what exactly is that course, and is it the right one for the city? Does Toronto have a vision, or has it stumbled blindly into a dark spot? And maybe most importantly, how do we get out of it?

This question was put to four city builders yesterday at an event organized by the Canadian Urban Institute and hosted by the University of Toronto’s Cities Centre. The panel consisted of Geoff Cape of the Evergreen Brickworks, University of Toronto professor David Hulchanski of “the three cities” fame [PDF], Julia Deans of Civic Action, and John Van Nostrand of planningAlliance.

There has been much hand-wringing over the state and direction of Toronto during the last 10 months since Rob Ford stood in the front of the council chamber and officially became mayor. During this time it seems many people have gathered at events, much like the one put on by Canurb, to basically ask the question: “How the hell did this happen to us?”

One of the answers to that may be found in something that former mayor David Crombie said at a discussion of the work of Jane Jacobs last week when he spoke about the gap in dialogue between the old City of Toronto and the newer amalgamated city with all its suburbs. One can’t help but reflect on this gap after attending several of these events, which all happen to take place in the downtown area and are attended mostly by downtown residents. “There’s a real need to get to know each other’s city,” John Van Nostrand said. In fact, several of the panelists at yesterday’s event spoke of the need to provide spaces for discussion in suburban areas, where members from across the city can gather to share exactly what kind of city they want. Or, in other words, talk about that vision thing.

Many times at these events it’s easy to come away with the unsatisfying feeling that, although many interesting things were discussed and debated, real, practical solutions remain slightly out of sight. Sure, it’s great to speak about the need to create wider dialogue and spaces to connect, but when the inevitable questions arise during the Q&A period about how to actually achieve these things, the discussion becomes a lot more difficult.

However, two ideas emerged, not from the panelists, but from audience members during the question period, that present a real, practical way to work toward building a new vision for the city. One was presented by a member of the Annex Residents Association who said the ARA hopes to “twin” with another residents association, such as one in Scarborough, and will hold several joint meetings in both neighbourhoods. This idea has enormous potential to get residents from different areas of the city to meet and share.

The second idea, which built on the first, came from a woman who wondered how to engage Toronto’s youth from across the city. She suggested a similar “twinning” program for school classrooms, where downtown classes travelled to meet with classes from suburban areas and vice versa. David Hulchanski spoke about the need to create spaces where ideas can happen, spaces of compromise and discussion. This “twinning” could be one way to create such a space.

Visions are not something formally bestowed upon a city from above; they come bubbling up from underneath, from the, as Geoff Cape put it, “patterns of actions” of different communities.

We are at a perfect point in Toronto to discuss the vision thing. Rob Ford has done much for civic engagement in this city by forcing many people who perhaps don’t engage often in civic issues to become deeply involved in things like the core service review, or the plan for the waterfront, or the TTC. We are gathering and discussing and debating big civic issues almost monthly. And this engagement will hopefully continue now that the City’s Official Plan, the document that sets out the course of development in the city over the long term, has come up for its five-year review.

Over the next few months, Torontonians will be meeting across the city to discuss exactly what kind of Toronto they envision. Planning is done best when it’s done not just by “experts” at the top but through facilitating discussion with the very people who live in communities all around the city. John Van Nostrand said yesterday that “we have a potential plan lying beneath us.” We just need to all figure it out together.

CORRECTION: September 22, 2011, 2:10 PM This post originally stated that the ARA had already “twinned” with a residents association in Scarborough, when in fact the idea has not been formally adopted by the association.