Speaking at ULI Toronto’s Electric Cities Symposium, Jennifer Keesmaat, Toronto’s chief city planner since 2012, said, “We have a running joke in the city planning department that we’re waiting for the lull.” With the unprecedented level of growth the city has seen in the last five years, the pace of development continues to ratchet up, creating both new opportunities and challenges for Canada’s largest city.
For a city with 10.2 million trees, Toronto has a surprising lack of green space in its core. Toronto Mayor John Tory wants to change that with a 21-acre (8.5 ha) signature park. ULI Toronto convened a panel of urban-park and public-realm experts from the United States and Europe to discuss successes and challenges related to legacy parks in their own cities and the achievements the city could build on while incorporating a number of best practices into its approach.
Home prices in Toronto, Canada’s largest city, have risen dramatically in the years since 2008. With most market analysts in agreement that a slowdown will not materialize anytime soon, ULI Toronto recently hosted a debate on the impact of land-use policies, some of which are geared towards preserving green space, on housing affordability.
At its essence, retrofitting suburbs is about transforming strip malls, sprawling subdivisions, big-box stores, and all the other spaces that Ellen Dunham-Jones calls “prototypical suburban property types” into more livable and sustainable places.“[The suburbs] were wonderful places when they were being built, and they helped a lot of generations of families achieve terrific quality of life,” Dunham-Jones told ULI members gathered for the inaugural ULI Toronto Emerging Trends and City Building Fall Symposium, held at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.
According to the latest Emerging Trends in Real Estatereport, published by ULI and PwC, Vancouver and Toronto claimed the top rankings for investment potential in Canada, placing at number one and two, respectively.
