Early every morning, at bus and subway stations around the world, the people who make cities work meet.
A few hours before office workers make their way into the central business district or tourists head out to see the sights, you’ll find nurses and cleaners, nightclub bar staff and market workers, even the occasional journalist working the overnight desk, all on their way home or on to their next job.
Improved transit options can make city life easier for these residents and workers.
MM : It's taking people out of cars, it's giving them options to get around. In some cases, like Toronto, where we have a lot of congestion, it's giving people more time back in their days as a result of that. There's positive impacts to greenhouse gas reduction and on and on.
But at the same time, better connections can push up rents, forcing less well-paid workers even further out, disrupting the communities they live in, and changing their historic character.
Welcome to Engineering Matters. I’m Rhian Owen, and I’m Alex Conacher. In this episode, part of a mini-series produced in partnership with Egis, we will be learning how transit-oriented communities can be developed that give everyone access to our cities and access to new local homes and services, without putting public sector budgets under further strain.
MM : When we think about commercial viability, it's you know, there is kind of a public investment and underwriting of a pretty massive cost. But the project still needs to kind of pencil within its own government priorities and budget.
MM : And opportunities to generate and see positive returns through increase in land values, increase in tax opportunities for new businesses or new developments that might be spurred from it are all part of it.
Michael Matthys is an urban planner at SvN, part of Egis’s 10N collectivenetwork of architectural practices. Around the world, planners like him are aiming to develop sites that combine new connections with homes, offices and commercial premises.
MM : By developing a transit-oriented community around those pieces of infrastructure and stations, you have an opportunity to stretch those dollars a little bit further
MM : And then there are other spur-on benefits to it, right? Like you're increasing your transit rider base right at the transit station.
MM : You're creating opportunities to deliver more housing, more jobs, more community services.
A transit oriented community can see homes and offices built around a station. Or, they can be stacked on top of it.
MM : The way we think about constructability and transit-oriented community development in very broad terms from an integration perspective is, is it horizontally integrated? So is it...
MM : ...station beside development, independent foundation, or are they kind of vertically integrated? In which case their kind of foundation and structure needs to be resolved as a cohesive kind of design solution. And that creates a whole range of challenges from the constructability perspective.
SvN is working on projects in downtown Toronto. It’s the sort of buzzy and historic area that excites urbanists like Michael.
MM : As a planner and urbanist I love downtowns, because there's so much texture right?
MM : You can kind of stand on a corner and just look around and soak it all in...
MM : ...buildings of all different periods that reflect your city's history. And those create a whole mass of constructability issues.
Downtown Toronto sits on top of the ancient bed of Lake Ontario. It’s not easy ground to build on.
MM : As a planner, I'm advising my clients on what's good planning, right? And that has to do largely with, from my core expertise, like what's the quality of the community we're creating? is it a right place for development in this and this, right? But there's also an element of implementation so I need to work with structural engineers and architects to understand if something can be built right?
One way to develop transit-oriented communities here is to make use of existing structures. The shell of a historic building can be transformed into a new station, minimising new pressure on the ground below.
That takes careful sequencing, as publicly-funded work on transport infrastructure is completed and work then begins on the community around it.
MM : There will be kind of a brief moment in time where these buildings kind of go from, you know, their historical volume to kind of shrinking down, having a transit station inside of them until they're kind of filled out with a transit-oriented community above it.
MM : It would be much simpler to demolish it and remove it but then we lose that texture and the richness of our cities in doing that. And that's a tremendous shame.
Further out from the centre of the city, are the streetcar suburbs, built around earlier transit lines. These are often home to those late night/early morning commuters we met earlier.
MM : The worry is that, you know, for somewhere that investment comes and where a new transit oriented community is developed, that it could have the effect of kind of pushing people out.
The province of Ontario and the city of Toronto have established policies to avoid this.
MM : Ontario has created a framework too, it's called inclusionary zoning...
MM : ...essentially it requires that developers provide a certain percentage of the total GFA and or units as affordable housing within a designated area. And that area is based on a certain perimeter around the transit station.
MM : And on the municipal side, the city has designated what we call major transit station areas and protected major transit station areas. And those protected station areas, the boundary kind of around them denotes an area within which inclusionary zoning applies.
MM : So that would require any development within that boundary of that protected station area to include affordable housing.
It’s not just a question of improving transit options while keeping homes affordable. It’s also important to deliver broader community benefits.
MM : There's an impetus and I think an onus on myself as a consultant, our project team and also government to to be sensitive to that, to think of that and think and think really carefully about how do you deploy the resources that you have as a project team, which in our case kind of includes that percent set aside for community services and benefits, how do you deploy that in a way that improves equity across the transit line?
MM : Not all communities that are intersected by the transit line are kind of created equal. Some have more, some have a little bit less to put it very broadly. So where you distribute that community benefit I think is really really important
MM : Delivering those benefits requires taking the time to talk to locals. In many suburbs like this, people will have complaints that are unheard and needs that are unmet. But when Michael talks to them, it’s clear that doesn’t undermine their love for their community.
MM : What I think resonates with people is when you can really listen and really understand the concerns that they're bringing to you and put them in a frame of your project.
MM : The engagements that we've had in Thorncliffe Park, I think will always stick with me in a few respects. One thing that came across really clear is it's a community that's super engaged. There's a lot of pride in their community and a lot of love for it.
Not everyone will share the same view of their community. An old factory that symbolises for one resident the pride of good work and a wage that paid for their home, might not be as loved by another.
MM : There's one area that we were planning to conserve a few elements of a structure, not the structure in its entirety, but one of them was like a historic smokestack of this old factory. And someone was like, why do you want to conserve that ugly thing, right?
MM : And that, I think, is the real richness and texture of our communities as people's lived experiences. And for better and worse, when we can kind of understand those and bring those to the fore, those can influence design, I think, in meaningful ways.
For an urbanist like Michael, balancing new connections and opportunities within tight budgets, and scheduling works for maximum constructability, is vital.
But it’s the little details that can help retain a sense of community and history, through a time of rapid change.
MM : So just in the heritage space, I mean, one thing that we do regularly in Toronto, and I'm sure many other jurisdictions, is this kind of interpretation plans.
MM : Sometimes it's plaques and stuff like that, but sometimes it's landscape design. There's some really subtle design moves that I'll grant are pretty geeky. And for a lot of people, it maybe goes unnoticed, but I think it can add a lot of interest and value to a project.
