The City of Toronto recently hosted a week of events associated with the EglintonConnects planning study that looks at the opportunities to transform Eglinton Ave. in tandem with Metrolinx’s $6-billion investment in the Eglinton-Scarborough Crosstown LRT project.

John van Nostrand and I teamed up with the Paris-based architect and urbanist Antoine Grumbach to undertake this project for the city. Grumbach knows and loves Toronto and taught at the University of Toronto in the late 1960s. Last week’s event included Grumbach’s recent work designing Paris’s Le Tramway — a project that transforms our understanding of how transit infrastructure, if conceived as a comprehensive quality-of-life exercise of urban design, economic opportunity and equity, can transform the city around it.

With the construction of the Eglinton-Scarborough LRT there is a unique “moment in history” to set the stage for the transformation of Eglinton — the street Grumbach calls Toronto’s “New Decumanus,” after the ancient Roman term for a city’s main east-west avenue.

There are four key messages from Grumbach that Toronto should heed:

Balanced/Equitable Mobility:

Eglinton may be the tipping point for Toronto to move beyond the fractious and ridiculous debate that has pitted cars against bikes (read Jarvis), cars against transit (read St. Clair). On Eglinton we have the ability to provide safe, efficient passage for all forms of mobility: vehicles, transit, pedestrians, wheelchairs and cyclists. Think about it. We are all multi-modal, and if you aren’t now you will be someday.

Eglinton can be the first contiguous east-west city-wide corridor with dedicated, protected, safe bicycling lanes. It’s a goal worth working very hard to achieve.

100,000 Eyes on the Avenue:

Toronto will grow from within, including along this 27-kilometre stretch of Eglinton. Thousands will live and work in right-sized buildings facing onto this transformed avenue. If we are asking hundreds of thousands of new people to live, work, and thrive on Eglinton it’s worth asking what they will see when they look out their window. What do they experience as they step out their front door?

Eglinton must be green and it must be beautiful to create a quality of life that will make people — including families — want to live on the avenue. The standard of design for the street will set the bar to leverage the construction of beautiful/green buildings. There is much to learn from Grumbach’s Le Tramway. The LRT brings a ribbon of green grass and trees through avenues that were formally seas of grey asphalt. Materials are chosen to last a thousand years. A flowering tree canopy drapes over the station platforms. The experience of waiting for transit is transformed into what Grumbach calls “moments of grace in the city.”

Public Space:

Let’s admit it. Toronto has a lacklustre history when it comes to public space. The word parsimonious comes to mind. We are lacking when it comes to providing diverse, vibrant and beautiful public places within the fabric of our everyday lives. (By the way, it’s interesting to see that the few great urban squares in the inner city west of the downtown, St. Andrew’s and Clarence Square, have gone to the dogs — literally. A good portion of these parks have recently been fenced in as dog parks).

When it comes to public space we don’t even seem to know what to ask for, except for big parks or money to maintain big parks. But big parks are often physically and culturally divorced from the pattern of our everyday lives. The Dutch urbanist Aldo van Eyck characterized this mindset as “parks as an apology for the city.”

Eglinton’s transformation must consider a range of smaller public spaces, courts, piazzas and clusters of nature that are moments of relief in the street wall. These spaces should be experienced every day on the way from the avenue to one’s work and home or waiting, with coffee in hand, for the tram. The “hundreds of thousands” require a new network of public spaces to support their quality of life and create unique local identities along the avenue. In this sense the transformation of Eglinton is not just about where and what to build; it’s also about where not to.

Inclusiveness and Equity:

Perhaps the most important opportunity Eglinton provides is to contribute to a transit network that reaches out to all corners of the city — especially to the disadvantaged priority neighbourhoods. There are so many growing areas at the periphery of the city where one’s ability to find and keep a job and create a stable family life depend on easy, fast transit within walking distance.

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One of the most memorable observations from Grumbach (and you should imagine hearing this in a very thick Parisian accent): “I have no doubt that very soon Scarborough will be the most beautiful place in the city.”

Calvin Brook is an architect and urbanist with Brook McIlroy and a member of the Crosstown Collaborative with John van Nostrand of Planning Alliance and Antoine Grumbach of AGA Paris.

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