Toronto is a campus, and we are all students. As whole swaths of the city are colonized by academic institutions, the city is relearning the ways of urbanity.

Whether it’s Ryerson, the University of Toronto, George Brown or Centennial Colleges, post-secondary schools have wrought big changes to the landscape. This year has been no exception.

By their very nature, these changes have been good for Toronto. The closure of Gould St., for instance, brought a measure of balance to a city that has historically favoured cars over pedestrians. Though this is Ryerson’s main drag, it belonged to delivery trucks and drivers looking for a shortcut between Yonge and Church. Now it has been taken over by the school and given new life.

Work has also started on Ryerson Student Learning Centre. Occupying the old Sam the Record Man site at Yonge and Gould, it will mark the main entrance to the emerging campus.

At the former Maple Leaf Gardens, where a Loblaws opened just weeks ago, Ryerson’s new athletic facility is taking shape. Situated in the upper half of the cavernous Art Deco structure, it will enable the decommissioned shrine to find new meaning.

George Brown, meanwhile, is quietly but decisively remaking King St. east of Jarvis. To keep up with demand, it has acquired and renovated a series of buildings in this historic but long-neglected district. More than three decades after the school bought the 1874 Christie’s bakery on King, it has become a huge presence in the neighbourhood.

Little wonder then that school officials are talking about pedestrianizing Frederick St. This tiny road, which runs from King to Adelaide, could give the campus a place to gather.

“This was definitely a wasteland when we moved here in 1978,” admits George Brown president Anne Sado, “but not now.”

How true. The school will also acquire space for 500 beds in the Athletes’ Village now underway in the West Don Lands in anticipation of the 2015 Pan-American Games. Many of us have forgotten, but for ages, this was the location of a giant cement plant.

“This will be our first student residence,” Sado explains. “There’s huge demand for housing. And this is a fantastic location. Between 85 and 90 per cent of our students use transit, so transit is a big issue for us.”

At the same time, George Brown’s Health Sciences Centre remains under construction on Queen’s Quay, east of Jarvis on the waterfront. It won’t open until next fall, but when it does, will bring 4,000 to 5,000 people to the area daily. Facing south onto Lake Ontario, it represents a big step forward in the ongoing revitalization of the area.

Farther afield, Centennial College continues to do its bit to bring civilization to Scarborough. Its recently unveiled library offers a new image of a commuter campus that’s slowly evolving into something rather more urban.

These are the latest results of a process that began tentatively more than decade ago. The U of T kicked things off in the ’90s when it launched a campus renewal program. Since then, impressive additions on Spadina, College, and St. George streets have helped alleviate damage done in the 1960s and ’70s when architecture and planning were at their most philistine.

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Learning to accommodate these campuses within the larger urban context isn’t always easy. Though that hasn’t changed, attitudes have. Where once we blithely assumed students would make the necessary sacrifices on the altar of the city, now we’ve learned that they are a part of Toronto, too.

Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca