World of Toronto: Cityplace is a downtown suburb

Cityplace is a downtown suburb. The density of its highrise condominiums is commendably urban, but its landscaping is distinctly suburban. I walked through the development a handful of times this past summer to get from my office to the softball diamonds on Lake Shore. Each time, I was infuriated by the poor design decisions that have contributed to the suburbanness.
They start at the intersection of Bremner and Spadina. The intersection is a gargantuan, multistage crossing that handles the entry and exit of traffic for the Gardiner Expressway. Pedestrians are afforded barely enough time to cross Spadina and they have to do it on the north side. They’re forbidden to cross at the south end.

The shape of Bremner is another problem. Between Spadina and Bathurst it winds. I don’t know if there were any technical reasons for winding it but I doubt it. The likely reason was to discourage through-traffic – a suburban strategy to isolate residential areas from the bustle of the city. We’ll see the effects on car traffic once Bremner is opened all the way to Bathurst, but for pedestrians, the windy road makes walking less efficient.

The wide median and sidewalk planters exacerbate the inefficiency of the street. The sidewalk width is half-consumed by planters which run nearly unbroken along the length of the road. The planters are made with raised concrete edges and open soil that limit the ability of pedestrians to cross the road or enter parked cars. Probably meant to keep traffic moving, they disconnect pedestrians from the other side of the street. The planted median is yet another barricade. Pedestrians are forced to cross at the intersections, meaning people in the condo directly opposite Canoe Landing Park must take a circuitous route just to enter the park.

Still another borrowed feature of the suburban realm is the dead-end street. Because Cityplace borders the train corridor, it has dead-ends on the streets north of Bremner. This isn’t so much the developer’s fault, as a constraint of the geography. But one could have asked for more bridges over the train tracks to connect Cityplace to the rest of downtown. As it happened, it was difficult to get agreement for one pedestrian bridge.

Concrete is not a popular landscaping material to begin with. But there certainly ought to be a visual difference between construction-grade concrete and landscape-grade concrete. Cityplace decided to go cheap on the concrete they used for landscaping. It is monotone and peppered with air holes.

Even their attempts to cover it are awful failures.

Finally, Cityplace developers have put commercial uses in the ground level of their buildings so their projects can be truthfully labeled ‘mixed-use.’ But a bank branch that takes up an entire city block does not constitute vibrant street life.