SITE: TORONTO
Mind the Gap: Filling in the Toronto Grid
The twenty-first century has been marked by the return to the city. Micro industries and the digital era have further increased the mobilization of the workforce, but they have returned to the city centre. The decreased demanded for large size housing, partially due to the shrinking and evaporation of the nuclear family, as well as increase need for public amenities, entertainment and leisure has made the city centre a desirable place to live once again. Wide scale gentrification of the nineteenth century affordable housing stock has placed housing out of the reach of many low-income families. Government implemented social housing has always been an experiment of mixed results, frequently positing architecture as a solution of a social and economic problem. There must be a rethinking of how housing is configured in the city.
As a major metropolitan city in Canada, Toronto faces many of the realities of the new urbanity. The diverse morphology of housing types and the various standards of living they enable, makes understanding how to provide outstanding public housing a challenge. Where and how does a government provide housing that aids in equalizing the stigmas and disadvantages associated with a low soci-economic status? Is architecture enough of a solution or does the city need to evolve at the level of urban design and planning to make adequate living conditions? Perhaps most controversially, should the entire city as well as all its inhabitants have to adjust their current living conditions to make social housing better?
By distilling the block down to residential lots, each block yields around 38% of itself for reorganization and potentially reconstruction. Focusing on the service space of garages and laneways we can extract about 25 % new site space from many of Toronto's blocks, creating an urban restructuring as opposed to a unique individual site. Toronto's gridded block typically involve two parallel rows one on each side of the perimeter, creating the structure that we understand today. By injecting each block with a new third row of housing and opening the interior spaces into two visually expansive linear green ways we are able to create a more porous block structure and reorganize the city on a smaller scale grid. This new grid could accommodate almost 40% more housing than currently. Given the spreading gentrification of old Toronto's neighborhoods, and the rapidly increasing average market rent, this would allow the city to maintain the influx new Canadians each year with out necessarily having to move its population into the sky with vertical housing. Traditionally, this has been the method applied in the city's establishment of non-profit housing, while the majority of Toronto residents live in market geared single detached housing. The expanded housing pattern allows the density of vertical housing schemes to disperse across Toronto creating a more equalized density throughout the city. This proposal suggests that the urban organization of social housing has influenced the stigma and lack of success associated surrounding it, rather than the architectural design of the housing unit. Countless public housing typologies have been constructed over the latter half of the last century by a range of architects from `le Corbusier to MVRDV, experimenting with numerous sizes and organizations of interior space. However none have successfully pulled social housing from its stigmas of concentrated poverty and segregation from the surrounding city. This project proposes that reintegration with the city is key in alleviating the stigmas and investigates the architecture of the block rather than the housing unit, to understand the most important question of how this reintegration will synthesize with the existing community.
(Competitor's text)
9 scanned / 9 viewable
- Presentation Panel
- Presentation Panel
- Presentation Panel
- Presentation Panel Excerpt
- Presentation Panel Excerpt
- Presentation Panel Excerpt
- Presentation Panel Excerpt
- Presentation Panel Excerpt
- Presentation Panel Excerpt
