New York has its High Line, Paris has its Promenade Plantée and now, with three separate rail deck park proposals, Toronto is raising its game when it comes to vertical neighbourhoods.

Increasingly, a city that works and lives in the sky will play there, too.

Elevated recreational areas, already common in condos and office towers, are now being incorporated into public developments in places where land is at a premium and cost prohibitive.

At Canoe Landing downtown, a community centre and two schools will share a rooftop basketball court and walking track.

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In the suburbs, preliminary designs for a new northeast Scarborough community centre include rooftop fitness amenities that will maximize the constrained building site so the nearby green space remains intact.

Using once overlooked spaces — including those above eye level — for recreational, fitness and social activity is the next step in creating vertical neighbourhoods, said Toronto chief planner Gregg Lintern.

“Elevated is literally the next level,” he said.

It’s one thing to set aside park space in new subdivisions. But in established neighbourhoods, particularly densely populated areas, the city can’t expect to keep up with the green space and public realm needs of a burgeoning population, Lintern said.

“We have to be a lot more inventive in an urban environment,” he said. “That has given rise to using space — finite space — more smartly than we have.”

Elevated parks are only one element in a system of unconventional green spaces and trails — places “hiding in plain sight,” he said. They have quickly become civic jewels.

Lintern cites the Bentway under the Gardiner Expressway; the reimagined CN line, the Beltway, in midtown; and Evergreen Brick Works, a former quarry in the Don Valley that connects to the city’s ravines and offers conservation activities, skating and a farmers market.

“It’s not a business-as-usual where we can just go out and buy a piece of land for a park. It’s too expensive and hard to get hold of,” he said.

In an interview about two mega-developments southwest of the Financial District — the Well and Union Park — Councillor Joe Cressy said an acre of land downtown is valued at about $100 million.

Leo Desorcy, Toronto planning’s manager of urban design, said the most successful of these unconventional parks and trails are complete places in themselves, beautiful and connected to other areas, such as Berczy Park and St. James Park. “One is more urban, more paved, and one is more garden-like and forested so they complement each other,” he said.

But elevated parks are challenging in ways that eye-level public space isn’t. “Rarely do they have the vitality and the connectedness that things at grade do,” he said.

Desorcy points to the Toronto City Hall green roof where only a handful of brown baggers and sunbathers have climbed the ramp at lunchtime from the bustling farmers market below in Nathan Phillips Square.

“As a destination, (elevated spaces) can be special. It’s quieter up here, it’s got a little bit of a breeze, but you have to make an effort to go here,” Desorcy said.

There is a rooftop garden at the RioCan Yonge Eglinton Centre. It is the kind of privately owned public space (POPS) that will become increasingly common. (The rail deck park at CIBC Square will be a POPS, Lintern said.) The Yonge-Eglinton roof garden is “beautifully designed and maintained,” according to Desorcy; it is also probably underused — possibly because people don’t know it’s there.

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The city has a signage program for POPS. At Yonge Eglinton, a green wall that hangs over one of the entrances is supposed to suggest a garden upstairs.

It is visible from the street but the escalator ascends to a Winners store. A security guard points to the elevator. Press the “R” button and a visitor is deposited just outside a patio furnished with benches, a fountain, greenery and even a series of stylized panels tracing Toronto’s history from the Battle of Montgomery’s Tavern to the Eglinton Crosstown LRT.

But while, on a recent summer day, customers jockey for a patio table at the coffee shop below, there is only one man eating a snack on the roof. A few minutes later two more men appear, surveying the nearby construction site. They say they know about the rooftop access only because one of them is a retired city planner, who keeps a close watch on the area’s development.

Many elevated spaces are designed to be passive, a place to sit and relax. But space constraints and expense are also driving the creation of more active rooftop facilities, such as the recreation centre being built at Canoe Landing that will be overlooked by CityPlace condo dwellers, who can watch their neighbours play basketball, walk the track, tend raised planters, picnic or practise yoga and tai chi.

The fully integrated $79-million, 9,800-square-metre complex that also includes a community centre, two elementary schools and child care is expected to be a hub, not only for CityPlace residents but also for the King St. and Spadina Ave. and Fort York neighbourhoods, said Ann-Marie Nasr, director of parks development and capital projects for the city.

“Kids can go to school during the day and then walk right into the community centre after school and enjoy programs. Families can come. It’s not just about picking them up from school and heading home. They may stay for a program. They may go home, have dinner and come back for a program,” she said.

As the population grows, personal space is shrinking — condos are about 25 per cent smaller than they were 15 years ago, Nasr said.

“So these areas, these libraries, these community recreation centres and our parks have to be extensions of people’s living areas. By putting basketball courts on the roof of a community recreation centre, being able to offer outdoor programming there, it’s absolutely essential. It has to be how we think about the planning and designing of these facilities for these future communities,” said Nasr, who expects the new recreation centre to open in about the next year.

Generally the city plans recreation centres to serve about 35,000 people but there are 15,000 residents in CityPlace alone and another 2,000 expected, part of a downtown population expected to double in the next 25 years.

The city is also planning to incorporate a recreation centre in a highrise as part of the redevelopment of 1 Yonge St., where the Toronto Star is located, and another on the East Bayfront at the base of a condo, spilling on to the waterfront promenade.

“With our vertical growth we plan facilities carefully so they don’t just take up all the park space and it’s just a facility in a parking lot,” Nasr said. “We try and make sure that we keep the park space as much as possible and design the community centre to be efficient and using those areas, including the roof.”

That extends to the new recreation centre being planned in Scarborough near Sheppard Ave. E. and Morningside Ave. where the community wants recreation space, including an indoor cricket pitch, but is adamant about maintaining Joyce Trimmer Park.

“There are schools adjacent to that parcel so we’re not just looking at our site with blinders on,” Nasr said. “We’re looking at how do we have an integrated set of open spaces? How do they connect? How will the community use the space?”

Although it’s a relatively new neighbourhood of mostly lowrise housing, the site is constrained by the demands on the existing park space and the possibility of using nearby land to hold the Eglinton Crosstown vehicles, said Councillor Jennifer McKelvie (Ward 25, Scarborough—Rouge Park).

The city is still working through some accessibility issues and the design is subject to change, but McKelvie says she is excited about the early concept of a slope leading to a flat roof that provides some formal and informal active space.

“I love the idea of being able to run up the side of the roof as part of your workout,” she said, adding that rooftop recreation is an efficient use of space.

“In addition,” McKelvie said, “Scarborough is beautiful. So if you can get a great view of our neighbourhood from a rooftop, why shouldn’t we enjoy that?”

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