Future Canadian Skylines

[76samian]

Originally Posted by koops65

Yes, this is the 338 metre version.

Damn it, that height increase needs to get approved. It does not look right with just one tier at the top.

[Chadillaccc]

Is it not already approved?

[Gresto]

Originally Posted by Chadillaccc

Is it not already approved?

The construction is well above-ground now, but the developer applied for a small height increase a couple of months ago. The increase hasn't been approved yet, but I assume it will be.

[koops65]

55 Yonge:

• Video Link

[IMG][/IMG]

[IMG][/IMG]

[TorontoDrew]

It's a shame that 55 Yonge will be mostly hidden. What's that strange black tower in front of it?

[hipster duck]

Originally Posted by TorontoDrew

It's a shame that 55 Yonge will be mostly hidden. What's that strange black tower in front of it?

I think that's the L tower shaded rather darkly.

Yes, 55 Yonge will be hidden from view, at least at ground level, from the Islands. Koops' view appears to be elevated by about 100m or so. I think that's preferable. While I really like 55 Yonge from street level, the top part with its unnecessary tulip-shaped bulge and partial crown doesn't really do it for me.

[steveve]

Toronto Development:

[koops65]

[IMG][/IMG]

[scryer]

These future renderings just kind of prove how insane Toronto is getting. I quite like this kind of urban insansity though .

[isaidso]

As big as Toronto's skyline is getting I wouldn't describe it as insane. It's all relative though. If you come from another Canadian city it will feel busy and dense. I've lived downtown for 10+ years and it doesn't feel like that to me at all.

When one watches videos of people driving around Manhattan, then Toronto, there's still quite a big drop off. Downtown Toronto would need to triple in size before it feels like that. Another 200 high-rises downtown and another 200,000 people? Bring it on. As long as we double/triple the width of sidewalks in the process. They're absurdly narrow.

[JHikka]

Originally Posted by scryer

These future renderings just kind of prove how insane Toronto is getting. I quite like this kind of urban insansity though .

Very slowly becoming an actually big city.

Originally Posted by isaidso

As big as Toronto's skyline is getting I wouldn't describe it as insane. It's all relative though. If you come from another Canadian city it will feel busy and dense. I've lived downtown for 10+ years and it doesn't feel like that to me at all.

When one watches videos of people driving around Manhattan, then Toronto, there's still quite a big drop off. Downtown Toronto would need to triple in size before it feels like that. Another 200 high-rises downtown and another 200,000 people? Bring it on. As long as we double/triple the width of sidewalks in the process. They're absurdly narrow.

Pretty much. Sometimes it's a bit jarring to walk around even just in the City proper and see how much land we aren't really using for housing or any sort of development at all, and then look at lower-density developments that can easily make way for more high-density stuff. There's enough room here for a lot more people, but yes the infrastructure needs to seriously catch up.

[biguc]

When Toronto builds another downtown's worth of stuff on the Portlands and Billy Bishop, it'll maybe be almost at a London level of intensity.

[ssiguy]

^^ Are they getting rid of Billy Bishop?

[WhipperSnapper]

Don't confused the miles of continuous 60 metre street walls in Manhattan built in the early 1900s to Toronto not building at far greater densities now with its woeful transit system and lower capacity grid than Manhattan. Manhattan, with more abandoned transit than Toronto has active and wider, more abundant avenues wouldn't likely consider the densities whimsically being approved weekly without a billion dollar community enhancement fee.

I don't know what has happened to city building in Toronto. It just keeps getting more absurd. Recently, the province has engaged allowing developers to go wild around transit stations as a means to reduce traffic. It doesn't delve into the maxed capacities of Toronto's woeful transit system or encourage mixed use to get fewer people commuting reducing those current maxed capacities.

The traffic and crush loads should not be what they are in a city like Toronto and they are only getting worse with, IMHO, terrible planning and development. I hope it all works out in the end. What is being built is far more more pleasing than the majority of the world despite the abundance of cheap spandrel glass and the concerns with overbuilding.

[JHikka]

Originally Posted by ssiguy

^^ Are they getting rid of Billy Bishop?

There's been chatter about phasing out BB and moving everything to Pearson but I don't think there's much of an appetite for it at this stage. Tempting development opportunities on that land will only increase in the future, though.

[biguc]

Jane Jacobs was involved in the Harbour City plan back in the '70s, which would have used the Billy Bishop land and then some. The idea is out there, the demand exists, it'll happen eventually.

The Toronto harbour front right now isn't very impressive. Besides downtown, it's not very built up, and the island blocks any inland-sea feel you might get from the lake; it might as well be a large river. Building out Portlands (which would be a great place for a megatall) and BB would give it a serious megacity feel, like Shanghai mixed with Singapore.

[kool maudit]

Montreal has always been a bit better than Toronto at dropping the mega-infrastructure, possibly because its island geography made a lot of that necessary

Tunnel expressway through downtown, canals, rail tunnels... I enjoy your megalopolitan ambitions for Toronto, isaidso, but WhipperSnapper has a point. You need that heavy rail in there, and it needs to be tight. The New York City Subway and the London Underground are SERIOUS BUSINESS in those central cities, and even little Stockholm has 100 stations.

Even littler Copenhagen is dropping new lines out onto ghost quays, and over the bridge to Malmö even -- 24-hour/day system for a city of two million, 44 stations on top of 86 S-Train stops.

Toronto is skipping leg day over there.

It's not Chicago or something, either: TO is a city with European ridership levels.

[biguc]

For real. The Ontario line, and Smart Track, and making big intermodal stations at East Harbour and Exposition are a start. They also need another line across downtown from Bloor to East Harbour and into the Portlands. And to keep the pedal down on Smark Track until it's a city-spanning S-Bahn system, with stops in the Don Valley and on the CP ROW north of Dupont so they have a central ring. That's still just a start.

[wg_flamip]

Even if it were to close, I doubt we'd see the island airport lands developed anytime soon as anything other than more park space. There's absolutely no appetite for anything else, and so much of the city left to accommodate more growth.

[MonkeyRonin]

Originally Posted by wg_flamip

Even if it were to close, I doubt we'd see the island airport lands developed anytime soon as anything other than more park space. There's absolutely no appetite for anything else, and so much of the city left to accommodate more growth.

This is unfortunate, but definitely the correct answer. There's zero pressure to shut the island airport right now, and even if it were to happen, the "everything must be a park!" crowd would be out in full force.

While a new skyscraper sub-CBD core would look really cool, it would also be impractical (too peripheral - there are more obvious locations for employment clusters) and not really the most appropriate use of the space anyway (do office workers need prime waterfront real estate?).

What I'd love to see is it redeveloped into something more human scale, if not a bit experimental in urban form. Low/mid-rise, small lots, car-free, criss-crossed by canals or islands. Something not entirely unlike the old Harbour City plan.