With little room left on the ground, Toronto’s developers are looking above street level to find homes for public space.

An urban park proposed by the Oxford Properties Group on Wednesday marks the third public space to be proposed above the Union Station Rail Corridor in recent years. It’s part of Union Park, a $3.5-billion proposed development to transform four acres of land just north of the Rogers Centre and CN Tower into a 4.3-million-square-foot mixed-used development.

It follows similar proposals such as the Rail Deck Park, proposed by the City of Toronto in 2016, and CIBC Square, an office complex developed by Ivanhoé Cambridge and Hines.

Union Park, considered the largest mixed-use development in Toronto’s history, would include a range of office space, about 800 residential units and nearly 200,000 square feet for retail space. The proposal devotes two acres of land to the park above the rail corridor, spanning between Blue Jays Way and the John Street Bridge.

In its press release, the Oxford Properties Group said that public green space in the heart of Toronto’s downtown core is “much needed” — and Toronto’s green-space advocates tend to agree.

“The reality is that there’s very little public space left in the downtown core,” said Jake Tobin Garret, manager of policy and planning with Park People. “Developers and the city alike now need to find creative ways to build public spaces — and sometimes this means going above ground.”

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A study from the Ryerson City Building Institute in 2017 found that parkland in Toronto comprises 6.9 per cent of all land in Toronto’s downtown, with only seven parks larger than five hectares (12 acres) in size.

Building over the rail corridors comes with challenges of its own, including issues of accessibility and co-ordinating with the transit using the railways. (A spokesperson for Metrolinx said the transit agency is prepared to work with developers to ensure GO trains are not impacted by plans such as the park, though some of the “air rights” are owned by Toronto Terminals Railway, which is owned by CN/CP.)

Cherise Burda, executive director of the Ryerson City Building Institute, notes that the lack of park space is not only an environmental problem but also a disadvantage for residents of Toronto’s downtown, 90 per cent of whom live in apartments or condominiums and don’t have access to backyards or personal green space.

“We’re starved for park space in the city,” she said, “so in many ways, building up is one of the few options remaining.”

Ken Greenberg, one of the urban designers behind The Bentway, a two-kilometre stretch under the Gardiner Expressway converted into space for public programming and events, said he anticipates that “unconventional” approaches to building public space will soon become the norm in Toronto’s downtown.

“We have to look in unexpected spaces to build now because the spaces we currently have are at capacity,” he said.

But building in unconventional spaces comes with its own set of difficulties, Greenberg warned, including how to make elevated spaces accessible and connected with the infrastructure around them.

“It’s a design challenge, for sure, but it’s solvable,” he said. “We need to consider ways to connect everything — whether that’s using ramps, or escalators for people with disabilities — so that these spaces don’t exist in isolation.”

The Rail Deck Park, proposed by the City of Toronto, would make up 21 acres of the rail corridor from Bathurst St. to Blue Jays Way and cost just over $1 billion, not including the cost of “air rights” above the tracks owned by CN Rail and Toronto Terminals Railway.

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Jennifer Keesmaat, the city’s former chief planner, said the park would be a relief for a downtown that’s at a “tipping point” for green space, and either needs to start investing in parks or stop approving massive condominiums.

The CIBC Square development, poised to open in 2020, aims to connect two office towers via a one-acre elevated park over the rail corridor capable of hosting an “array of cultural and recreational events,” according Ivanhoé Cambridge’s proposal.

With files from Rhianna Jackson-Kelso

Jacob Lorinc is a breaking news reporter, working out of the Star's radio room in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @jacoblorinc

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