Selected Project

The City Limits: Rethinking a 100-year-old Toronto Suburb

Tim Scott | Architect, OAA
Geoff Scott 

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Project Summary

The subject Reshaping Communities implies a hopeful future. The only context for such a future I can imagine is one where climate change is acknowledged as the core design issue for all buildings and city planning. My proposal is neither new nor surprising. It is based on the premise that we will all need to live in a wider range of communal buildings, located in recognizable neighbourhoods, and connected to the rest of the city by streets designed to accommodate all users.

To meet our collective obligations to reduce carbon emissions, confront climate change, and reimagine our communities as civil, human-scaled places, it is necessary to conceive of changes at all scales: from the selection of construction materials, to the design of streets and public spaces that shape our neighbourhoods, to the necessary paradigm shift away from the broken structures of our car-dependent cities.

The specific intentions of this proposal are:

1. To illustrate the outcome of changes in residential building design, block configuration, and street design within our existing 100-year-old residential neighbourhood. The objective of these changes is to increase the number of residential units by a minimum of four times without substantially changing the form or physical character of the original neighbourhood
2. To return the existing streets and lanes to the public space of the neighbourhood.
3. To demonstrate strategies for designing buildings that achieve carbon net zero emissions.

And, ultimately, to imagine a place where we might like to stay.