HOUSING MULTITUDES

A RECENT EXHIBITION AND RESEARCH PROJECT REVISITS THE SUBURBS AS A PLACE TO ACCOMMODATE TORONTO’S GROWING POPULACE.

At a recent exhibition, a pastel-toned panorama filled the long front wall of the gallery at the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. The 23-metre-long rendering showed the city of Toronto’s skyline, set against Lake Ontario.

But instead of the regular from-the-lake vantage point, which highlights the soaring CN Tower accompanied by a host of skyscrapers, the viewer is placed north of the downtown core, past Highway 401. The forest of downtown towers is a speck in the distance: occupying the bulk of the image is a carpet of small houses.

The perspective serves to highlight the enormous footprint taken up by low-rise housing in the city the so-called “yellowbelt” of land zoned that way, which makes up half of Toronto’s buildable land. In the image, each of those parcels is marked by a monopoly-house-like yellow block. The city’s current and prospective towers, along corridors and at growth centres such as at Yonge and Eglinton, are coded in pink and cream.

The graphic manifests the city’s “tall and sprawl” planning policy which encourages high-density towers downtown and along major arterial roads, set within a sea of individual houses. The accompanying exhibition, Housing Multitudes , sets this model against the reality of a rapidly growing population: last year, almost 160,000 newcomers arrived in the GTA, and the city’s populace is set to grow by 50 percent in the next 25 years. How can the needs of both current and new Torontonians be better met by architecture and planning policy?

Curators Richard Sommer and Michael Piper, in collaboration with faculty colleagues and students, have offered an array of possible answers that build on existing tendencies in the yellowbelt, where intergenerational households and informal economies are evident. A set of animated videos imagines how a suburban house might change over time to accommodate multi-generational living; a series of graphic-novel-like renderings suggests transforming malls into public transit and micro-economic nodes; a planning map proposes the gradual transformation of existing neighbourhood blocks.

“A lot of contemporary research and practice about retrofitting the suburbs critiques this landscape for not being ‘urban’ enough, with not enough density nor active social space,” says Michael Piper. In contrast, he comments, “Our projects explore emergent forms of urbanity in the suburbs for example, how immigrant communities have reappropriated this landscape and produced new kinds of social space, or how retired citizens produce community by gathering in shopping mall food courts to play board games.”

A section developed in partnership with LGA Architectural Partners explores the nuts and bolts of how to convert single-family homes, whether in downtown or suburban neighbourhoods, into multi-unit housing. Funded by the Neptis Foundation and designed to continue after the exhibition closes, the display and an accompanying website, ReHousing.ca, offer a catalogue of typical Toronto housing types, along with blueprints for how they can be modified to add housing units. An inter-war semi, for instance, can be converted into separate upper and lower units with interior renovations only, gain a third unit with a top addition, and add a fourth unit with a laneway house.

To further empower “citizen developers,” as Janna Levitt of LGA Architectural Partners calls them, the researchers are currently working with the major banks to enable the purchase and renovation of homes into multi-unit dwellings. This would open homeownership to prospective buyers who may need a rental unit to make their purchase viable, or who may wish to partner with a friend for a house purchase.

While it’s not the first (or last) exhibition on suburbia, Piper says that Housing Multitudes is different in aiming to meet Toronto where it’s at rather than proposing to tear it all down and replace it.

“We hope the work will encourage policy makers and design practitioners to imagine suburban retrofits that learn from the existing landscape, amplifying its nascent urban qualities,” says Piper. This would result, he adds, “in what we think will yield a truly new kind of urbanism.”