February 21, 2007

Architecture

Develop creative neighbourhoods using 'inner artist'

New approach sought in building future urban developments

PETER KENTER

correspondent

TORONTO

Developers need to embrace their inner artist to help build communities where creativity can flourish.

That was the message to delegates at the recent Canadian Urban Institute conference, The Path to Culture-led Regeneration: Who’s Leading the Way?

While new condominium and commercial developments often trade on the creativity of the neighbourhoods in which they’re built, they can also destroy the creative character of those communities.

Case-in-point: Toronto’s Queen West Triangle, a creative and cultural centre whose regeneration is driven almost exclusively by generic condominium and retail developments with the blessings of the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB).

401 Richmond Street West, the former Macdonald Manufacturing Company, became an affordable workspace for an eclectic clientele after being purchased by Urbanspace Property Group Ltd. in 1994.

“The OMB comes to mind for reminding us recently that it just may not be the kind of place one looks to for creative planning solutions,” says Tim Jones, CEO, Toronto Artscape Inc., a non-profit group promoting the establishment of creative communities.

“Major centres of creativity and innovation cannot afford, as they did in decades past, to sit back and watch artists and creative entrepreneurs driven out of the neighbourhoods they helped enliven.”

Cities need to take a holistic approach to planning, instead of implementing planning policy on a piecemeal basis, says Ken Greenberg, principal, Greenberg Consultants Inc. He points to the City of Ottawa’s Master Plan, which goes into effect any time development threatens to change the character of a significant number of buildings or properties.

Tim Jones

“[In the Queen West Triangle,] in effect there really is no plan,” says Greenberg. “What we’re getting is an accidental by-product of a number of decisions on individual parcels which, if built the way they have been approved, would be an incoherent jumble of highrise condominiums and apartment towers with no meaningful streets or walkways, no real vital public spaces, no significant linkages and very little acknowledgment of the special role of arts and culture.”

But Margaret Zeidler, president of Urbanspace Property Group Ltd., says she wonders whether developers can play any significant role in cultural development in a high octane real estate market.

“I don’t think they can play a constructive role in an overheated market economy like the current one we have in Toronto, even if they wanted to,” she says. “At the annual real estate conference in Toronto, you will not see a single image of a city or a building or a streetscape. You will see images of bar charts and pie charts indicating which markets currently provide a higher yield on investment. Developers are not interested in much else unless culture and creative industries become something that can be used to their advantage.”

She points to creative developments using older properties in Toronto’s King and Spadina area, which were possible in the depressed real estate market of the 1990s, but impossible today.

“Even developers who would want to have artists as tenants couldn’t afford to because those rents wouldn’t pay the current mortgage,” she says.

Instead of putting the brakes on the construction market, Zeidler says public policy should harness that market, requiring banks and developers to support and provide affordable creative workspaces as a condition of new development.

The artistic community can also be encouraged to purchase real estate, rather than to rent it and face eventual eviction when property values rise.

“In the United States and Europe, the banking system is required to fund these types of activities,” she says.

“They’ll lend a great deal more money than Canadian banks will.”

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