In the Daniels Faculty's Integrated Urbanism Studio, students picked "design action zones" — areas of the city of Toronto where environmental, economic, and social pressures demand some form of design intervention. Working within those zones, student groups produced master plans that responded to the requirements of the international Green New Deal Superstudio. Stefan, Madison, Howard, and Bernardo chose to focus on downtown Toronto's southwestern edge, where the Humber River empties into Lake Ontario.

They chose the site because it's a point of confluence. "There's so much infrastructure there, like the Ontario Food Terminal and the Humber Treatment Plant," Madison says. "And there are all these layers of transportation infrastructure. And it's also a beautiful area."

Overview of the group's design action zone.

The group noticed that a tremendous amount of energy and materials were flowing through the site, but none of it was coordinated. The Ontario Food Terminal, the Humber Treatment Plant, and the nearby residential communities were all operating in isolation from one another. Stefan, Madison, Howard, and Bernardo decided to find ways of using design to link the energy flows from all those different constituencies.

The Humber Treatment Plant was a particularly vexing problem. The municipal facility, a 41-hectare site that treats wastewater generated by about 680,000 Torontonians, is known for one thing and one thing only: its smell.

The Humber Treatment Plant, the metabolic park, and the Ontario Food Terminal.

Stefan, Madison, Howard, and Bernardo's master plan calls for the plant to be transformed. The existing water-treatment facilities would be converted into an anaerobic digestion system — a closed environment in which microbes break down waste products into biogas. The biogas would be used to power a series of new greenhouses on the roof of the Ontario Food Terminal. The treatment plant's grounds, meanwhile, would be opened to the public as a "metabolic park," where visitors could relax among the sealed, odour-free digester tanks.

"The idea was to cycle the energy and waste collected from the wastewater treatment plant into powering and taking advantage of biosolids for transforming the Ontario Food Terminal's function," Howard says.

"We were looking at opening up the food terminal to make it a little more democratic," Stefan adds. "We were thinking about how we could make it so that it's not just a hub for the distribution of food, but is actually a site for production as well."

Another energy flow that caught the group's attention was construction fill. The Greater Toronto Area's multi-decade building boom has created a massive surplus of excavated dirt, all of which has to be dumped somewhere. In previous generations, this excess material was poured into Lake Ontario, as a way of artificially expanding Toronto's waterfront.

The "gills."

Stefan, Madison, Howard, and Bernardo suggest reviving this strategy. Their plan includes a series of new landforms, made of construction fill. The new landmasses would be positioned all along Toronto's western shoreline. Towards the western end of the site, near the mouth of the Humber River, would be a chain of small islands the group calls "the gills." The primary purpose of these islands would be to filter contaminants from the river and from the treatment plant.

Over time, these filtration islands would become habitats for vegetation and wildlife. "We visualized how the islands would change," Madison says. "The idea was that they would be catching sediment coming down the river and would grow with time. And hopefully there would be wetland plant communities that would also help with the filtration."

Section views of the group's interventions.

Towards the eastern end of the site, near the Toronto neighbourhood of Parkdale, the terraforming effort would be significantly more ambitious. "We were trying to imagine how we could create more living opportunities," Howard says. "We were interested in what was happening in Parkdale with gentrification. We wanted to explore what could be done by building out some space and creating a new living situation."

Top: Lakeshore Commons. Bottom: Detail of Lakeshore Commons island green space.

On a new waterfront landmass made from construction fill, there would be an entirely new residential community, the Lakeshore Commons. These new homes would be low-rise structures, designed to match the scale of the existing residential neighbourhood to their immediate north. To the south of the Lakeshore Commons would be yet another chain of artificial islands — but these, unlike the ones to the east, would be large and stable enough to support parkland for residents to enjoy.

A site plan of the group's design action zone.

Linking all these new additions would be a series of new pathway connections designed to allow residents to traverse the Lakeshore Commons, the artificial islands, the metabolic park, and the Ontario Food Terminal without having to dodge car traffic on the nearby Lake Shore Boulevard.

The group's proposal is described in more detail on their project's website.

Instructors: Fadi Masoud and Megan Esopenko