Toronto Scarborough Town Centre Redevelopment | ?m | 65s | Oxford Properties | BDP Quadrangle

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In a word: Ugh!

I get it, it's a box, and because the box has cinemas in it, they don't want windows.

But then put in 'fake' windows. I'm not suggesting this needs to be ornate........but really must it be this 'blah'.

How about an architectural flourish at the roof line? Something, anything that makes this seem something other than industrial plaza meets Best Buy.

Also the sidewalks on 2 sides are narrow and abutting the street, that is not the way to create an even tolerable public realm. Sidewalks should be separate from the road by a tree-lined boulevard. There's more than ample room for that here.

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Side note...... I'm going to have to look up the species list for this proposal again........because I don't know of any tree that's poppy red in the middle of summer.

Edit: I checked the landscape plan.....the render artist has been into the sauce.......there is nothing on the plant list that would produce that colour in summer. Not likely that bright a red in fall either....but I digress.
 
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A great piece by the Globe and Mail's architecture critic


Planners face huge hurdles in trying to create ‘vibrancy’ in Scarborough’s quasi-downtown
One thing seems clear after this week’s chaotic Toronto transit discussion: The Scarborough Subway Extension is still likely to get built.

But the city hasn’t thought enough about what we get for our $3.9-billion and counting. Toronto – or at least Premier Doug Ford – likes big infrastructure and big plans. The question is, now that Scarborough is getting a subway station or three, what kind of cityscape will they create?

Not a very good one.

Plans are well under way for a Scarborough Subway Extension (SSE). To justify its massive expense, the city is encouraging dense development around Scarborough Town Centre, bringing new people to ride the train. This means transforming a scrubland of parking lots, big boxes and small factories into a “vibrant, urban and pedestrian-friendly” neighbourhood, as a city planner working on the area told me recently.

There are two big promises here: that the subway will make part of Scarborough “urban” and will get more people out of their cars. Yet these tasks are extremely hard, and the promises may well never come true.

The new station at Scarborough Town Centre is to be accompanied by a massive plan to reconstruct the shopping mall and the surrounding area, 180 hectares in total. If it all works out, this zone will house up to 40,000 residents in a new neighbourhood, city of Toronto planner Kelly Dynes told me this week.

City planners and private-sector planners – led by Urban Strategies for the mall owner, Oxford Properties – have been imagining this for years now. In Scarborough, Ms. Dynes is leading the planning effort along with Xue Pei of the Urban Design division at City Planning. When they discuss it, they talk about “vibrancy” and walkable streets with “character.”

To achieve that, the city is planning a new public square at the entrance off the new subway station. And a new set of roads, slicing up the large area into smaller chunks. And new parks. It’s a massive set of public works that will take a generation to build.

At the mall, Oxford is trying “to grow it slowly with interesting places and experiences that are different from what people can get elsewhere in Scarborough,” says Craig Lametti, a partner at Urban Strategies. The subway could bring a walkable outdoor shopping strip that he compares to the Distillery District.

Okay: The city planners are doing their best. But they are starting with two problems. One, they are crowding a lot of people into dense buildings. This means big condos by big developers, hemmed in by the belching 401 and fast arterial roads. Two, they want people to walk places. But where is there to walk to? The mall, yes. The nearby civic centre and beautiful library. New parks, someday. And as Ms. Pei points out, the area has the ravine system of Highland Creek; the planners aim to create new walkable streets and pedestrian paths to connect new residents to it.

But let’s be honest: That doesn’t add up to much. People walking a kilometre to go to the park is not how you get Jane Jacobs’s “sidewalk ballet.” And the people who live here, in new market-rate condos, will probably drive to work in Markham or Richmond Hill or North York Centre. This is exactly what has happened along the Sheppard subway, where condo dwellers around Bessarion and Leslie stations predominantly continue to TTC – Take The Car. It’s been more than 16 years since those stations opened.

Maybe this time is different. But probably not. There are few if any examples in North America where urbanizing the suburbs with big new “downtowns” has been done successfully.

Even the very architecture of the subway station will hurt the neighbourhood. The station buildings, designed by architects with the engineering behemoth AECOM, are totally uninspiring so far. And the station’s huge bus terminal, which will bring in buses from a wide area to feed the maw of the subway, creates a deep trench that cuts right through the heart of the area. Ms. Pei is trying to figure out how to fix this mess that the TTC has commissioned.

So why are we proceeding this way? Because Toronto politicians don’t talk much about land use. And transit policy is run by people who travel in Escalades.

Remember, the SSE was not born as a city-building exercise. It was born because Rob Ford liked subways, subways, subways; they wouldn’t get in his way on the roads. The late mayor, ignorant of how LRTs actually work, killed the Transit City LRT plan. That project would have brought more spread-out growth near, and in, existing neighbourhoods – neighbourhoods that are good places to live, and that in many cases are losing people. At Scarborough Town Centre, the single-family neighbourhoods a stone’s throw south of the subway are untouched in the city plans.

It could be different. Without the Fords, Scarborough’s seven-stop, $1.48-billion LRT would be done by now, providing better service to more people in more places than the SSE, and seven opportunities for creating new homes and workplaces. The results would be more modest, less flashy, but located in real places that don’t need to be created from scratch.

Since Premier Ford is set on this subway – and maybe more subway stops in Scarborough, which would be even worse for place-making – we seem to be stuck with this new quasi-downtown. Here’s hoping the city and developers make it as good as possible. But that will be an attempt to salvage the best from a bad situation. Which is no way to build a city.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/can...huge-hurdles-in-trying-to-create-vibrancy-in/
 
One city and I rebuke this left wing poor excuse for a paper. The hate for beautiful yet neglected Scarborough is crazy from these downtown elites.
 
It’s not “hate” to observe the facts about STC and the surrounding area. It’s a low-density, pedestrian-hostile neighbourhood with a dated, tired mall surrounded by acres of surface parking at its heart. It’s not “hate” to ask for a value for money audit of a project that will consume a large fraction of the entire region’s tax dollars. I kind of get the strategy of SSE boosters, and I have to commend them on smart politics. By reframing SSE as a matter of equity, and casting its opponents as sneering, snobbish, elites who “hate” the hard-done-by real salt-of-the-earth folks of Scarborough, they take facts, data and analysis out of the equation.
 
One city and I rebuke this left wing poor excuse for a paper. The hate for beautiful yet neglected Scarborough is crazy from these downtown elites.

The column had some extremely valid points, and you're ignoring them because they hurt your fee-fees.

Drop the act. This is a site for urban planning geeks, not the general public. Grandstanding and feigning offence won't get you anywhere.
 
One city and I rebuke this left wing poor excuse for a paper. The hate for beautiful yet neglected Scarborough is crazy from these downtown elites.

Ok.....did you just label the newspaper that is owned by Canada's richest family and is famous for its 'Report on Business' section, and which to my knowledge has rarely, if ever endorsed a social-progressive party......left-wing?

Really?

Elitist......maybe..........left-wing? I don't think so....

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Apart from that, what actual criticism do you have of the column?

I say this as someone who actually could support a variation of the SSE (3-stop, scaled back STC station, for a cost not exceeding @4B, excluding a new yard, which is needed anyway.

But I also sympathize w/the column, because I think we need fulsome, honest information on the table; we need to be realistic about what the project is likely to facilitate or deliver; and the sell that STC will turn into a 'downtown' anytime soon is more wishful thinking that evidence based policy.

The SSE might be justified without such assumptions, but again, asking that that be weighed openly and honestly is neither elitist, nor anti-Scarborough.
 
Ok.....did you just label the newspaper that is owned by Canada's richest family and is famous for its 'Report on Business' section, and which to my knowledge has rarely, if ever endorsed a social-progressive party......left-wing?

Really?

Elitist......maybe..........left-wing? I don't think so....

***

Apart from that, what actual criticism do you have of the column?

I say this as someone who actually could support a variation of the SSE (3-stop, scaled back STC station, for a cost not exceeding @4B, excluding a new yard, which is needed anyway.

But I also sympathize w/the column, because I think we need fulsome, honest information on the table; we need to be realistic about what the project is likely to facilitate or deliver; and the sell that STC will turn into a 'downtown' anytime soon is more wishful thinking that evidence based policy.

The SSE might be justified without such assumptions, but again, asking that that be weighed openly and honestly is neither elitist, nor anti-Scarborough.

Didn't you get the memo? Left-wing is when you criticize stuff.
 
Ok.....did you just label the newspaper that is owned by Canada's richest family and is famous for its 'Report on Business' section, and which to my knowledge has rarely, if ever endorsed a social-progressive party......left-wing?

Really?

Elitist......maybe..........left-wing? I don't think so....

***

Apart from that, what actual criticism do you have of the column?

I say this as someone who actually could support a variation of the SSE (3-stop, scaled back STC station, for a cost not exceeding @4B, excluding a new yard, which is needed anyway.

But I also sympathize w/the column, because I think we need fulsome, honest information on the table; we need to be realistic about what the project is likely to facilitate or deliver; and the sell that STC will turn into a 'downtown' anytime soon is more wishful thinking that evidence based policy.

The SSE might be justified without such assumptions, but again, asking that that be weighed openly and honestly is neither elitist, nor anti-Scarborough.
I presume that you have done the wise thing and stayed out of the Scarborough Subway thread over these years.

Sixrings is joking.
 
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I like ya for keeping us up to date......................

But unrepentant ugliness; and the utter incompetence showcased by this design is pretty much unforgivable and nausea-inducing.

Just in case I wasn't clear w/my opinion, I believe any developer should be legislatively prohibited from owning any property in Ontario, just for proposing this; and I think the architectural firm should see their professional credentials rescinded.
 
I like ya for keeping us up to date......................

But unrepentant ugliness; and the utter incompetence showcased by this design is pretty much unforgivable and nausea-inducing.

Just in case I wasn't clear w/my opinion, I believe any developer should be legislatively prohibited from owning any property in Ontario, just for proposing this; and I think the architectural firm should see their professional credentials rescinded.
I think it's important to think about it in the context of Oxford's master plan and what they are planning in later phases in terms of the high level direction of this.. but in terms of architectural detailing, yes, it needs a bit of work. Standard concrete paving in that central plaza is going to be.. unfortunate. Needs some greenery and landscaping variety to liven it up.
 
I think it's important to think about it in the context of Oxford's master plan and what they are planning in later phases in terms of the high level direction of this.. but in terms of architectural detailing, yes, it needs a bit of work. Standard concrete paving in that central plaza is going to be.. unfortunate. Needs some greenery and landscaping variety to liven it up.

You're being charitable!

I certainly have hope the latter phases will be better; I would despair that it were otherwise.

But even as an interim use, there's a complete lack of understanding of how to craft a good patio; a cinema entrance with a sense of 'event' or even a pedestrian box with just the tiniest bit of verve.
 
I like ya for keeping us up to date......................

But unrepentant ugliness; and the utter incompetence showcased by this design is pretty much unforgivable and nausea-inducing.

Just in case I wasn't clear w/my opinion, I believe any developer should be legislatively prohibited from owning any property in Ontario, just for proposing this; and I think the architectural firm should see their professional credentials rescinded.
It's a pathetic attempt at "design" and "architecture" and make no mistake, that all parties involved (Oxford, Cineplex, etc..) are laughing to the bank with this one because they know they can get away with the bare minimum here. Cineplex in particular should be ashamed of this garbage.

I think we've gotten to a point where various academic institutions (ie: Ryerson, U of T, Sheridan, etc..) have surpassed various private developers in terms of architectural ambition and that's something no one would have ever imagined 20-30 years ago.
 
I believe it represents a modification to the Block Context Plan, not a wholesale abandonment of it.

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