City-Scale Project on our Site: Jennifer Keesmaat, Toronto's Architect
Toronto, the fastest-growing city in North America, is revolutionizing its urban landscape with a fresh city planning strategy that prioritizes pedestrians over cars. This approach, aimed at improving livability amid rapid expansion, has been the subject of a recent interview on The Life-Sized City.
The interview, hosted by Mikael Colville-Andersen, featured Jennifer Keesmaat, the former chief city planner of Toronto. Although the discussion did not provide new information about the city's strategy to accommodate growth and adapt to changing urban dynamics, it did shed light on the city's commitment to creating a more walkable and livable environment.
Key aspects of Toronto’s approach include:
- Planned Growth with Speed and Efficiency: The city is advancing housing approvals through streamlined processes to meet fast population growth, while managing design costs and speeding up building permits to accommodate urgent housing needs. This indicates a strategy that balances “planning” with flexible, expedited implementation.
- Mixed-Use Development and Heritage Preservation: Toronto pursues intentional growth with a mix of heritage preservation and modern mixed-use projects, ensuring that the city retains its character even as it grows.
- Pedestrian-Focused Design: While explicit details on pedestrian-friendly design were not fully listed in the search results, the emphasis on “orderly and easy-to-navigate infrastructure” and Toronto being a “livable city” suggest an integrated approach to street design prioritizing walkability, safety, and public spaces conducive to pedestrians.
- Green Initiatives: Toronto is transforming tens of thousands of acres into urban forests visible from space, reflecting a commitment to integrating green space into urban planning, which greatly benefits pedestrians and quality of life.
In summary, Toronto balances rapid growth by accelerating development approvals and integrating mixed-use, heritage-sensitive projects, while making the city more walkable and livable through careful street and green space design. This combination of planning and fixing addresses growth challenges proactively while fostering a pedestrian-friendly urban environment.
It is worth noting that the city planning strategies discussed in the interview are not specified in the provided context. However, the focus of city planning in Toronto is shifting from cars to pedestrians, as evident in the city's commitment to re-designing streets for pedestrians and creating a more livable city. The Life-Sized City partnered with the website for a series of stories, providing an exciting platform for continued exploration of Toronto's innovative city planning strategies.
- As part of Toronto's commitment to creating a more livable environment, they are prioritizing pedestrians over cars, and the city's new approach includes a focus on pedestrian-friendly designs.
- In their efforts to revolutionize the urban landscape, Toronto is not only streamlining development processes for rapid growth but also incorporating home-and-garden elements, such as green initiatives and integrating tens of thousands of acres into urban forests.
