A new park suggests Toronto is getting serious about design

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Toronto’s newest downtown park promises to be memorable. It will have a birch forest, a sculptural two-floor balcony lit up with art projections, and a strong Anishinaabe narrative built into its design.

Yet this two-acre park at 229 Richmond St. West may be most significant for the process that created it – including a design competition, a rarity in Toronto, that has hired a strong, international team.

This week the city’s parks department announced that a proposal dubbed Wàwàtesí – or “firefly” in Anishinaabemowin – had won a design competition for the park. The design comes from the Dutch firm West 8, together with Vancouver architects HCMA, Native Art Department International, and Shelley Charles of MinoKamik Collective.

It’s a distinguished group, yet some have never done a City of Toronto project. In the competition process this fall, the designers were evaluated on the basis of their ideas by a professional jury, and they were invited to create something meaningful.

They have. In addition to the balcony – which serves as a sort of speaker’s corner – the design (which will be further refined) also includes landforms that are shaped to provide seating and shelter from the elements.

All this will serve cultural events, such as Toronto International Film Festival screenings, but also the everyday needs of park users – including unhoused people. “We wanted to create a radically inclusive park for all Torontonians,” says Shelley Long, a landscape architect and team leader at West 8 in Rotterdam.

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The park is “a place for respite, a place for self-expression and politics, as well as for day-to-day activities,” adds Ms. Long, who is Canadian. The elevated balcony expands the amount of available public space, and the designers imagine that art projections will dance across its surface.

The city is seeking just this kind of complex and multivalent space. The project “is a big, landmark move in the city’s park system,” says Jessie Gresley-Jones, director of capital projects design and delivery at Toronto Parks, Forestry and Recreation. “We wanted to give it a design process that matched its importance and potential.”

Design competitions are uncommon in Canada, and in Toronto – even though Toronto City Hall, a powerful municipal symbol, came out of an architectural design competition in 1958. More recently, the agency Waterfront Toronto used competitions for its major Don River project and parks such as Sugar Beach and Love Park.

To be sure, no process is perfect. This 229 Richmond competition set out too many requirements for this space. The city must pare back its ideas, simplify the design, and ensure that the final product will be well built and maintained.

But that’s doable. The competition brought together a team with “a very strong point of view,” says Alexandra Kenyon, an architect with Vancouver’s HCMA, who is collaborating on the park. “Everyone on this team knows how to execute a design, and do so at a high level.”

Indeed. And yet these designers wouldn’t normally get hired for a Toronto city project.

That’s because the city’s normal process of design procurement is seriously flawed. For one thing, low fees are effectively required in order to win. Public projects are prestigious, so design firms will do them at a loss. This in turn can lead to bad working conditions for their staff. Unpaid overtime is rampant in the design professions.

Another problem is incumbency. If you haven’t designed a library nearby recently, you won’t get a chance to design a library. This is a Catch-22, and it means the most intellectually ambitious and talented designers in the city – and the world – are shut out.

The result is that Toronto’s public design projects tend to be mediocre.

The city would benefit hugely from a wider range of voices and a better design process.

Competitions will do that. They will always bring in a higher calibre of designers who know they won’t be nickel-and-dimed On 229 Richmond, “Money was not an issue for this project,” says Paul Farish, the city’s head of parks planning. The city will negotiate a market-rate fee with the design team. And the numbers involved are small. The total added cost of the competition process might be one or two per cent of the total $11-million project.

So why doesn’t City Hall do more competitions? Mr. Farish and Mr. Gresley-Jones say their department is open to the idea.

Good. Toronto is a rich city that is building billions of dollars in public works. Hiring the best designers is the most powerful thing a government can do to improve the quality of public space. At last, perhaps, Toronto understands that.