Sim City Toronto

Have you ever played Sim City? The premise of the game is simple, you build a city......... you start by building roads and zoning the land for residential, commercial and industrial use..... you provide electricity and water....and if you build it, they will come....people will move in and industries, houses, condos, office buildings, stores and even farms will be built.....I'm so addicted to the game that I have to keep the CD far away from my computer, or my day will be shot.....before I came home to Toronto I spent about a week doing nothing but waking up in the morning, grabbing some coffee, playing Sim City, going to the bathroom, then going to bed, only to wake up to repeat the cycle again....well it help get me through a difficult break-up, and I ended up with a wicked city.....it was more than a city actually, it was an empire.......

When I finally came home to Toronto, I looked at the skyline and saw new buildings popping up everywhere, and I could've sworn that I could also see blocks of zoning like in the game.... commercial, industrial, and residential, roads and utilities, etc....or perhaps I had played the game so much that the images were just burned into my retinas....at any rate, I had come home to a real life, not so "sim" city....

To feed my obsession further, I learned of the plans to revitalize the city's waterfront.....

thousands of acres of land sit as parking lots or lie delapitated and rusting away .........

remants of Toronto's industrial past.....

the plan is to transform these areas into places worthy of the prime location on which they are situated, and to draw the city to its waterfront.....

I've been keeping up to date with what seems like the slow progress of this plan, but this year, it seems to be speeding up.....pockets of construction have begun or are slated to begin all along the waterfront .....construction of HTO Park at Maple Leaf Quay in the central waterfront between Spadina and Rees in well underway



..... and will transform the quay into an urban concrete beach......

Construction of the first new neighbourhood in the West Donlands also began just this March and will re-claim this wasteland integrating it into the neighbourhoods which surround it, like the Distillery District, St. Lawrence Market, Corktown, Old York.....

The East Bayfront is planned to be more of a commercial district with some residential, planned for occupancy by 2008......

At the mouth of the Don River in the Portlands....where the Gardiner becomes the DVP, a new park will be constructed...... Commissioner's Park ..... it will have all sorts of sports fields and ammenities...... this is what it looks like now.....

And this is what it should look like in the future......

Last week I was able to attend an exhibition of the design competition that called upon five international teams to present design concepts for the central waterfront .....it is envisioned that at the foot of each street that ends at the water (like Spadina, York, Reese, Yonge, Jarvis, Parliament), public gathering places be created, and that a continuous promenade be constructed to tie together the entire span of the waterfront.....

Here are some pictures of the designs.....you can click on each team's name to see their entire presentation....I was completely unable to relate or understand one of the designs so I pretty much ignored it 'cause looking at it gave me a headache and made me confused...

From the team of West 8 & du Toit Allsopp Hillier:

....lots of nice details, but I think that big maple leaf....which is acutally a floating dock....is kinda tacky.....

From Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects & Martinez Lapena-Torres Architects:

.....they propose building another island in the inner harbour....I thought that was kinda cool at first, but then not really.........

From the P.O.R.T. team:

.....they tie the entire waterfront together with these weather veins that jut out of the water .....they sway in the wind and change colour depending on the weather conditions....kinda cool but not really that impressive when you step back and take in the big picture.....they've got lotsa nice details though.....like this new ferry dock.....

or this new park/rink/pool design at the foot of York St......

Okay here's the design I didn't really get by the WASAW team :

My favourite comes from the team of Foster and Partners with Atelier Dreiseitl :

.....that ship-like structure will house shops, restaurants, bars, hotels, gardens, etc......the length of the streets which extend into these structures (Spadina, Reese, and York) will be lined by long pools of water that will direct you to the lake....

I think the exhibitions are over now, but you can learn more on this and the rest of the projects on the waterfront from the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation website.....you can still input your own feedback about these design if you want.....they will decide on the winning design on May 31st, 2006.....