[MonkeyRonin]

Originally Posted by biguc

I really do appreciate your point about keeping the Island islands. But I also really like JHikka's idea of Kensington Market with Canals. Couldn't they dig a new shipping channel along the runway to keep the Islands separate, and let a neighbourhood develop on the landward part?

It's not really Canada's style, but the best airport converted to a park has to be Tempelhofer Feld. The city has taken a hands-off approach to that--it wasn't even formally a park for years after it closed; people were using it as a de-facto park while it was fenced off. This resulted in a bunch of funny things developing in the airfield, like an anarchist allotment garden. Canadian cities tend to be too regimented for this, but I'd love to see an intentional community like Copenhagen's Freetown Christiana on Billy Bishop.

That was my idea.

Freetown Christiana was actually along the lines of what I had in mind when writing that - an experiment in grassroots, laissez-faire urbanism. Divvy the land up into small allotments that the City could sell or lease to private individuals (no corporate ownerships, no land assemblies, many/most at below-market rates), provide services, and then let nature take its course! Or something like that - it’s nothing more than a vague thought.

Of course, Toronto-the-government is way too conservative for anything like that at the moment anyway. Or even for an ambitious, centrally-planned Harbour City-type development. Maybe in the 60s; but realistically if the City were involved it would just end up as a Cityplace-on-the-Island with a half dozen plots of land sold to the highest-bidding developer.


Tempelhofer is cool too; I like when people make impromptu use of otherwise unused spaces. I don’t think that sort of thing could ever happen with Billy Bishop (too desirable and prominent), but that sort of thing does happen in Toronto - they’re just eventually sold to condo developers. Bloordale Beach is the latest such reclaimed public space here, which appeared last summer on the site of a demolished school. It’s literally just a dirt patch with a cheeky name, but all the same has become a semi-popular local park:


https://www.thestar.com/opinion/cont...ept-water.html