1.5 ConEd Learning Hours
2:00 p.m.‐ 3:30 p.m.
Toronto is at a tipping point. In the past 80 years, the city has transformed from a post‐Victorian manufacturing town to a global city powered by financial services, media, and information technology. In less than a decade, the city’s population is expected to hit 6.8 million, with almost half of all new immigrants to Canada settling in the GTHA. The planning and urban design guidelines that govern development are only now responding—incrementally—to this shift. Yet, to many observers, it is apparent that intensification is the only realistic and sustainable response to these inevitable changes. Cities across the Region and the Province are facing similar pressures, and asking the same questions. How do regulatory frameworks constrain the growth that is essential to healthy cities? How do current planning regulations and urban design guidelines inhibit architectural innovation and experimentation? Are they too prescriptive for the task of modern urban intensification? What kind of city do we want to build? Do we have the tools to build it?
Learning Objectives
1. Understand the lessons of other cities confronted by the pressures of 21st century global migration, climate change, and economic instability.
2. Understand how other zoning policies (such as New York, Chicago, and other cities) have met the pressures of rapid intensification.
3.Examine the relationship between top‐down planning and real consequences on the ground.
4. Identify lessons relevant to intensification in Ontario cities and towns.
Julia Di Castri, M.Arch., MA, BA, Design Reach Studio Head architects—Alliance
Julia Di Castri heads the Design Research Studio of architects—Alliance, which explores the ideas and impacts of architecture and urbanism as they play out in the modern city. In 2023, Julia and the research studio developed The Weight, a multimedia installation for the European Cultural Center’s 2023 Venice Architectural Biennale that considered the Leslie Street Spit as an index of the city’s unrestrained cycle of self‐destruction and reinvention as it has grown, explosively, in a single generation. A graduate of the University of Toronto, with postgraduate degrees from the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and the School of Architecture, University of Illinois at Chicago, Julia is a lecturer at the UofT John H. Daniels School of Architecture, Landscape and Design. She continues to interrogate the value of architecture in the 21st century city.