When Derek Goring walks onto the rooftop of the defunct Unilever factory at the foot of the Don River and looks across, he sees the future.

“From here, you’re literally watching the city come towards you,” First Gulf’s vice-president of development notes as he surveys the new residential buildings that have cropped up on the other side of the river, downtown’s new frontier.

The city’s momentum has been moving eastward, and First Gulf is gearing up to launch a monumental 12-million-square-foot master-planned development that will provide all those thousands of new residents — and ones living in the surrounding Leslieville and Riverside neighbourhoods — a place to work and play.

Dubbed East Harbour, this office-retail hub situated on a 60-acre post-industrial site at 21 Don Roadway, on the eastern bank of the river, will be the commercial heart of the redeveloped Port Lands.

“It’s the outlet for future growth of employment space in the city,” says Goring, noting that at full build-out, East Harbour will comprise 10 million square feet of office space and two million square feet of retail, entertainment, cultural and institutional uses — including business and artist incubator spaces.

Envisioned as a round-the-clock destination for office workers and area residents alike, the community will be fully digital and powered by a robust fibre-optic network. “We’re wiring the heck out of these buildings,” says Goring. It will be on the cutting edge of sustainability, too, and well-served by multiple modes of transit.

The community will have two-way, all-day rail service on the two GO Transit lines (Lake Shore East and Stouffville) running adjacent to the site; an extended Broadview Ave. streetcar will run through the property, connecting up with a potential Queens Quay LRT south of the site. East Harbour would also be served by SmartTrack, and the proposed Relief Line subway.

“We like to say transit is the first, second and third most important thing to this development.”

East Harbour, positioned where the Don Valley Parkway winds into the Gardiner Expressway, was top of mind for Toronto councillors when they voted in March to realign the Gardiner to unlock the vast potential of the lower Don Lands, a 700-acre swath. And last year, the city earmarked $5 million to complete due diligence work on a proposal to naturalize the river’s mouth, including creating flood protection to support development like this.

A wise investment, given East Harbour is projected to generate an estimated $1.4 billion in annual tax revenue, according to Goring. “That pays back a lot of infrastructure spending.”

Key to the project’s success will be its transit tie-ins, including the creation of a multi-modal transit station. “We can’t do this development without a transit hub here,” Goring stresses.

Accessibility to transit is critical in order to attract office tenants — 50,000 people are projected to ultimately be working at East Harbour — who themselves are trying to attract and retain talent, talent that doesn’t tend to own cars.

In a city like Toronto where congestion is a major challenge, being able to get to work from across the region using public transit is an essential requirement.

At East Harbour, this means a GO/RER/SmartTrack station at the site with weather-protected connections to each of the office buildings, as well as TTC interconnections for the Broadview streetcar and future services such as the Relief Line Subway and the Queens Quay LRT.

Transit will also be essential to serve the 80,000 people living within a one-kilometre radius of East Harbour, and Goring predicts the new station’s passenger volume will be second only to that of Union Station.

Building design details are preliminary, but East Harbour ultimately will include up to 20 structures, a mix of shapes, sizes and styles, and designed by different architects. While the Unilever factory is slated for demolition (making room for a berm to protect the site from flooding), several heritage buildings on the property’s east side will be retained and adapted for community use.

East Harbour will be a walkable neighbourhood that’s cyclist-friendly, too, located at the nexus of the Don Valley and Martin Goodman trails. “And we’re focusing on ways to get people from the trails directly into the site without having to get into mixed traffic, to facilitate folks getting to work by biking,” says Goring.

The community will be on the sustainability vanguard, and Goring says First Gulf is investigating the feasibility of making it a carbon neutral neighbourhood that meets its energy needs with minimal use of fossil fuels.

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And East Harbour could be a game-changer in how it copes with cars; Goring notes his team is looking at how to incorporate driverless car technology, for example. “The scale of this development allows us to do things we wouldn’t be able to do on a single-building project,” he explains. “The stuff we can test and validate here we can use in (First Gulf’s) other projects. So we want to push the envelope and experiment.”

Retail will also be innovative at East Harbour. Goring suggests some stores might function solely as showcases, with no actual inventory on-site (shoppers scan codes to buy products, which are then delivered by courier, obviating the need for stock space and big trucks on site). “It’s one example of the type of thing we’re thinking about,” he says, noting there’ll be a focus on “experiential retail” that complements online shopping rather than competes with it. “The main thing is we’re trying to be flexible.”

Construction of East Harbour is slated to commence by 2018, with the first phase completed by 2023, including the transit hub. “That’s critical for tenants,” says Goring. “They won’t come if that station isn’t available the day they move in.”

Speaking of tenants, he notes First Gulf has been in talks with potential occupiers of East Harbour’s office space — local businesses as well as international firms keen on the idea of signalling their arrival by sticking the company name on a tower in Toronto’s new centre of gravity.

“Having a place like this will end up becoming a huge competitive advantage for the city,” says Goring.

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