Tonight on The Brian Crombie Hour, Brian is joined by Amy Jiang, Principal at BA Group and one of the leading transportation planning engineers shaping the future of development across the Greater Toronto Area. Amy brings 20 years of experience working on the GTA’s biggest and most transformational projects — including the 30-year redevelopment of the Downsview Airport lands that will eventually welcome 165,000 residents and 50,000 jobs.
In this conversation, they discuss what transportation planning really is, the future of Downsview, what makes a community feel alive, secrets of successful large-scale developments, and Amy's personal journey in engineering.
In this conversation, they discuss what transportation planning really is, the future of Downsview, what makes a community feel alive, secrets of successful large-scale developments, and Amy's personal journey in engineering.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The views expressed in the following program are those of
the participants and do not necessarily reflect the views of
Saga nine sixty am or its management.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
We didn't mean everyone. Welcome to the Brian Prompty Radio R.
I was at a really fascinating.
Speaker 3 (00:22):
Urban Landing Institute seminar a couple of weeks ago, moderated
by our guest tonight, Amy Jang, and she was actually
she was a fantastic moderator and in the end she
ended up being a panelist almost and really summarizing a
lot of things that it takes to build really good
urban centers.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
In a suburban context.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
And they used a couple of different examples, one of
them being Downsview and the redevelopment of the Downstree Airport
that I think Amy has worked on a fair amount.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
But it was a really good session and as we
think about, you.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Know a lot of the comments that we've heard about
creating density around urban nodes in our sort of ex
serbs or the suburbs around Toronto, I think that the
lessons that came out of that session and the work
that Amy does is.
Speaker 4 (01:04):
Really helpful for us enter a stand and so it's
a real pleasure for me to introduce you tonight to
Amy Jen. She is a principal at an organization called
the BA Group. It's a transportation planning and engineering firm
that works on some of the largest developments development projects
in the Greater Toronto area. She's an engineer with twenty
years of experienced.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Amy, Welcome to the show. Thank you.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
So let's just start out with what is transportation and
engineering planning and how does it apply to our everyday lives?
And maybe you can give as an example the work
that you would have done in designing Dansview Airport. I
think lots of us went to those Coldplay concerts this
summer and saw this massive airport in the middle of
North York and you're going to turn it into an
(01:50):
urban environment in a sort of suburban location in the
middle of Toronto.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
How are you going to do it? And what did
you do? Several questions several questions in there, so I'll
break them down. First of all, you're really lucky that
you've got Coplay concerts. That's pretty honesome. We had a
good time. I went twice. It was such a good concert.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Okay, good for you. You're a real fan though.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
I did have to walk a long way to those
subway stations?
Speaker 2 (02:15):
You did, yes, and actually I will. I will preface
this by saying that the traffic management plan for the
Coldplay concerts and Rogers Stadium is very different from what
ultimately the mobility network will be in in down Steam,
But the stadium itself is very much an interm use
so it's a way to activate the same I was
reminded that I was at a star Stock in two
(02:37):
thousand and three and that was that was a lot
of fun too. So firstly, what do I do? What
is transportation planning engineering? I have to I have trouble
answering this question sometimes at dinner parties because it's not
it can be quite broad and it's not so easy
as you know, as just saying well I drive trains,
which unfortunately I don't. So at its core, I think
(02:58):
my work is about designing built environment that allow people
to move around in the most efficient way possible. So
whether that's my walking or cycling or rolling, transit by
car or even just lingering. If we're talking about designing
a public space, you know, how do people want to
move around and how do we facilitate that? So if
you think of any urban development, whether that's like a
(03:18):
single building or a city block, or entire new community
or multiple communities, as in the case of Dwanns View,
my work would touch on anything to do with transportation
for that development. So you know, there's the obvious things
like designing the internal circulation of a building, how do
people move around there, how do the cars move around,
(03:39):
loading the parking that pick up drop off work, and
then broadly designing the street network around it. What does
that look like, what is the character of that street,
and then thinking about the pedestrian and the cycling infrastructure,
planning for transit, creating traffic modeling to understand the traffic impact,
analysi the traffic impact of that new development, parking policy,
and so on. It also involves a lot of less
(04:03):
obvious things. Because transportation planning and engineering is a very
multidisciplinary field and we're always working with planners and architects
and landscape designers and servicing engineers. We have to kind
of understand what they do also and input into their
work because all of those things impact the way that
people travel and vice versa. So you know, providing input
(04:24):
into broader master plan the land use mix, landscape and
servicing planning policy. There's a lot of them. I think
of it as pontificating. There's a lot of pontificating in
meetings and thinking about those big questions, which is really fun.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
At at the seminar, one of the comments that was
made that I found intriguing is people said, master plan
the site rather than plopping down a standalone building. And
that also they said, worry about the public realm. What
are people like you mean by those two comments.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Yeah, so when you're designing for a larger site, you
need to have a vision for the site because what
you're trying to build is a community. It's not a
collection of buildings. You're trying to create a complete community
that allows people to ideally meet most of their daily
needs within a short distance of their home. Because that
is what kind of creates a vibrant community, and that
(05:14):
honestly is also what solves some of the transportation issues
that we have, which is that people have to travel
too far, they have to drive all the things that
you don't want to do. The way that you create
kind of a compelling community is you focus on the
public realm. And so what makes for a compelling place,
a sticky place that makes people want to stick around.
(05:34):
And so we talked about you know, public spaces, public
parks being one key aspect of a public amenity a street,
like a really fundamental retail street as being the heart
of that community where people can meet their needs, where
they can hang out. And what does that streets look like.
Historically speaking, I think street design was maybe kind of
(05:55):
in the hands of transportation engineers like me. But you know,
twenty years ago. Nowadays is street design is such a
multidisciplinary field and it's more about the public realm than
it is about moving cars, which I think is that's
that's a great evolution of street design. It's it's about
designing a street as a public space for people first
(06:15):
and foremost.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
So public realm is what it's. It's sidewalks, it's it's
park bench, it's it's the stores that you look at.
What is public.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
Realm, Yeah, it's it's all of those things. So it
is the street. So yes, all of the like the sidewalks,
the sidewalks, the boulevard, is the landscaping on the private side,
it's it's the it's the buildings around them. What do
those buildings look like, what is the retail environment that
faces onto them, what are the the public parks, what
(06:46):
are the privately owned but the publicly accessible spaces. It's
basically everything that you would experience as a person walking
through a community. And it's an intangible thing. Like if
you think of your do you have a favorite street? Yes,
what is that street? What does that street look like?
Speaker 3 (07:03):
Right now? It's Bayview just step between Eglington going south,
and it's got lots of uh doesn't have a park,
but it's got lots of nice fruit stands and butcher
shops and cheese shops. It's got an interesting array of
different of different retail shops, restaurants and bars, et cetera.
(07:24):
And it's wonderful.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Yeah. Absolutely, And so there you can pinpoint elements of
that that that street, that the public realm that make
it successful. So of the sidewalks, why actually on baby
that they're not terribly wide?
Speaker 3 (07:38):
Oh they are, they are. They're like I think that
they're double the width of a of a normal sidewalk.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
Okay, that's fair, okay, And so that that's important to
allow the density of people. But they're also I guess
I'm trying to think I know that section of Baby
quite well, and you enjoy it. I enjoy just wandering
down because it's a really fun street to be It
doesn't it has traffic, but the traffic is slow. You
can kind of j walk if you really needed to,
but there's enough signals that you can also cross at
(08:05):
a proper signalized intersection if you want to do. The
storefronts are quite narrow and so every you know, every
short period of time as you're walking down the street,
you can see something new. You can encounter a new business.
There's a vibrance seats of the businesses. There's a mix
of businesses. It's not all just you know, dray cleaners
and wheat stores. You've got your butcher, you've got your restaurant,
(08:28):
you've got your your grosses. You know.
Speaker 3 (08:30):
The three sort of dead spots are where there's a
larger office building for a bank and there's only like
one door in and there's not sort of that presence
on the street, which I think you get when you've
got a large office user that you know goes on
too much of the street with just a blank wall.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
Yeah. Absolutely, And that's all kind of elements of the
public realm that is intangible, but when you put them
all together, you kind of have the sense of, Okay,
this is a really great space. And those are the
things that I think are the heart of a community
that make that community successful in the long run.
Speaker 3 (09:07):
One of the people on your panel said, the green
space is the new anchor. What do you think of that?
Speaker 2 (09:14):
It is a public amenity. It is an important part
of any new master planned community, and in fact, any
new master planned community is required to give up a
certain percentage of its land for public space, and so
it is a very important anchor, I guess because it
is also something that the city typically requires a developer
(09:36):
to deliver early on in the process. And it's specifically
because it does provide early on the heart the public
amenity of that community that allows them to feel like, Okay,
this is home, Like I have a green space to
walk my dogs, for my kids to play, even when
none of you know, even in the first phase of
the development, I have somewhere to go shop. I think
(09:58):
the true anchors one is public green space, the park
that allows you know, the green space review, and then
the other is a successful kind of the main street
environment that gives that place a character and it makes
the early phase successful so that it then people then
want to move into that area and makes the later
(10:19):
face and successful as well.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
That's interesting. I had Joe Barrage on my show once
and what he was of urban strategies, and he was saying,
you need both, and he used Amble Side in West Vancouver.
I'm not sure if you've ever been there, but it
was one of the examples, and he said, the reason
why people do a circle and half the circle is
a whole bunch of interesting commercial outlets, and half the
circle is the beach in the park. And if it
was just the beach in the park, it wouldn't be
(10:42):
as exciting because people would want to grab a coffee
or go shopping. And if it was just the shopping,
it would be like a shopping center. And so it's
the combination of the two that make it vibrant. What
do you think of that?
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Yeah, I agree, I think and sometimes when we're planning
for communities like this, we think of it as a loop,
like you want a variety of experiences. You don't want
to have to walk to the end of the street
and then come back. You want to walk to the
end of the street. You know, you want to kind
of bounce between the little stores and then you kind
of want another interesting route to walk back in. And
that's what keeps people in your community for longer, and
that way they can kind of make a day of it,
they can enjoy it from ach longer. So yeah, I
(11:14):
would agree, what.
Speaker 3 (11:15):
A fun job you've got. What are some of the
interesting projects that you're working on right now? What are
some of the big developments?
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Well, Downsview, the redevelopment of Downsview has been my big whale,
is that what you call it for the last five
plus years?
Speaker 3 (11:28):
For sure, you've been working on it for five years.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
Uh yeah, I mean my firm has been working on
it for decades. Actually before the latest iteration of the
second plan, there's been multiple iterations before this. But so
starting in twenty eighteen is when Bombardier announced that it
was closing It was going to close its facility at
a manufacturing facility at Downsview and it was going to
(11:51):
move to a new facility that was going to build
near Peerson Airport. So at that point, the airport and
the lands on which the Bombardy Manifolip Money facilities are located,
they were sold to PSP, which is the Public Sector
Pension Fund. And so that was a catalyst for this
whole redevelopment plan for the Downsview area. And it's a
(12:12):
huge area. I mean, it's basically the size of Downtown Toronto.
And it's not just the airport of the Bontebardi Lands,
it's also additional lands that are owned by Canada Lands
Company to the north and to the west, and the
City Lands to the east. And so for I think
how many years, for several years we were working with
the landowners on creating a framework plan for all of Downsview,
(12:36):
and then for a couple of years we're working with
the city on developing the Transportation master Plan for the
Downsview area, which then accompanied the secondary plan that basically
enables the redevelopment of these lands. That secondary plan was
approved last year, and that approval provided for the build
out of one hundred and fifteen thousand people residents and
(13:00):
thousand new jobs over thirty plus years.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
So the size of fifteen thousand people.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
Presidence in fifty thousand jobs, so one hundred and sixty
five thousand people over the next thirty years.
Speaker 3 (13:12):
Well, given our you know, our housing crisis and lack
of homes. When are you going to get started?
Speaker 2 (13:18):
Hopefully soon. I think if you talk to my clients,
the landowners, they would like to start next year. So
that Secondary Plan and that transportation master Plan which I
led the creation of, that was approved last year. So
since then I have now been working with the landowners
on their individual districts within the Second Plant area. The
(13:39):
Second Plan area is so big that it's subdivided into
fifteen individual districts, and so for those districts to redevelop,
they each then need to have its own district plan,
which is a master plan in and of itself.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
And so I single family homes, town homes, apartment buildings,
what's going to be there.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
It would be apartment style buildings primarily mid rise through
the majority of the lands, with the exception of around
the three subway stations around Downsview which will be which
will be higher rist. So there are two main majority
land owners in Downsview, the CLC and North Crest which
is a sub subsidiary of Public Sector of Pension of MPSP,
(14:20):
and they are both starting with the districts adjacent to transit,
so near Downsview West Station, near Wilson Station, and there's
also a district in the old Bombardy manufacturing facilities that
the Hangar district, which will have a lot of early
employment uses as well.
Speaker 3 (14:38):
So you've got two three subway stations, you've got the
four oh one, you've got the Allen Expressway. You've got
really good transportation, don't you.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Yes and no. So I think you hit the nail
on the head. Around the periphery of the secondary plant area,
there's a really good transportation. There's, like you said, three
subway stations, there's a ghost station. Two of the subway
stations also have have bus terminals attached to them, so
it's great. The problem is it's all on the edges
and historically Downsview because it was an airport, it was
by design disconnected from everything else around it. And so
(15:12):
you know, like roads literally stop and that you know,
they end at the edge of of you know, at
the bottom of the second planet area and then they
restart north of there. And so our challenge in developing
this transportation master plant is reconnecting this big hole in
the city back into the urban fabric of the city.
So there's there's this network of new streets, new public streets,
(15:35):
major streets that will get extended, so different will get
re extended through basically reconnect between Wilson and Shepherd. Same
for Billy Bishop. It'll get extended north south and then
they'll be too east west new streets as well. That
will kind of reform the grid within within the second plant,
(15:56):
the access to transit was key. That was like a
key element of the TMP, and so one of the
major streets, for example, will have dedicated bus lanes and
that is intended to get people wherever you are in
the area back to the subway stations as quickly as
possible because it's such a big area that you know,
if you were to walk, it takes too long. But
if you were to cycle, if you were to take
(16:17):
ded Kate transit, you can get there very quickly.
Speaker 3 (16:21):
So you know this summer, you've got the Rogers Stadium
that did host numerous concerts. You know, you mentioned that
you were at the Stars concert back in two thousand
and three, which was a huge success with the Rolling Stones.
At one point in time, there was a proposal for
a I believe in NFL football stadium down to you,
(16:41):
is there going to be a big sports or entertainment
use on Downsview.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
No, that is not the plan the sports and well
actually not sports now. The entertainment use is very much
an interim use before that area gets built out. And
the reason is because a stadium it's really fun when
it's populated, but it has kind of the impact of
killing well, if we're talking about the public realm, it
(17:07):
kind of kills the public realm the rest of the
time because it's just sitting empty. So what's meant to
be there is a much finer grained block, a finer
grain network of a finer grained I guess, a street
and block structure that allows kind of a more walkable,
walkable community.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
Are you, you know, gonna have a big shopping center
Yorkdale's just seuth of you. Are you going to have
a big shopping center like Yorkdale? No?
Speaker 2 (17:33):
I think the idea is to have a series of
retail streets. So there's the big central move. I guess
the big kind of idea for all of Down's View
is the idea of the runway. So the runway concept
is being maintained through through Downsview, not the concrete structure itself,
but this idea of a two kilometer long series of
connected public spaces kind of like a long kind of
(17:55):
a not a closet, but like a long promenade that
you know is between twenty and six as why, There'll
be retail that fronts onto that that will be kind
of this really interesting pedestrian experience, and then there'll be
other additional kind of retail streets, like local main streets
that will serve the retail uses. But it's very much distributed.
I don't think I don't think malls like Yorkdale are
(18:18):
really going to get built anymore. It's just not the
future of retail. What is the future of retail, I
think very much distributed. I think retail is going to
be I think there'll be two types, at least that
the types of retail that I work on. There are
two types of retail. One is kind of a character
destination experience style of retail that will draw other people
(18:39):
from other neighborhoods in, and that's very much the case
along the Runway. It'll be kind of a tourist experience
as well as a local experience. And then the other
type of retail will be the stuff that kind of
serves a complete community, like you're when you saw me
at the at the talk. I think I said, a
community needs three things. It needs vegetables, drugs, and booths.
(19:01):
So you need a grocer, you need an ELCBO, and
you need a pharmacy.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
And so vegetables, drugs, and booze. That's what we all need,
is it?
Speaker 2 (19:11):
Well, at least that's what I would need. I would need.
I would like a couple of small grocery stores. I
would like an ELCBO. I would like a pharmacy, you know,
a chief shop, butcher shop, chocolate shop, all of those things.
Speaker 3 (19:23):
I'd a restaurant to that mix. But I agree with you.
I think that that's a great accommodation. You need a place,
You need that third place. You know, there's a bunch
of academics that have talked about this concept of the
third place, a place that's not work, that's not home,
that you can go to, whether it's a pub or
a coffee shop or a restaurant. So I think that's
what you need. We're going to take a break for
some messages and come back with our guest, Amy Jong,
(19:45):
talking about sort of master planning of some of the
more urban environments in our city, but not downtown, in
suburban locations, and one of the things that they talked
about at the seminar that I was at that Amy
did an incredibly good job moderating of was redevelopment of
shopping centers, which is I think another big, you know,
(20:08):
challenge plus something that you know, lots of people have
talked about, and we're gonna chat about that and other
opportunities for development. Stay with us, everyone, We're back in
just two minutes with Amy Jen talking about redevelopment, master
planning and doing it in an urban environment in our
suburban areas in the Toronto area.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Stay with us.
Speaker 3 (20:26):
I want back into.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
No Radio, No Problem stream is live on SAGA ninety
sixty am dot c A.
Speaker 3 (20:47):
Welcome back everyone to the Brian Crombie Radio Hour. We're
chatting with Amy Young tonight and she was the moderator
of a seminar I went to by the Urban Land Institute,
and she did a really good job of bringing out
from the panelists what were sort of the keys to
success for them in developing large developments sort of not
whole cities, but almost whole cities or little urban environments
(21:11):
of cities in suburban locations. And the four that we
were talking about was Scarboroughtown Center, Downsview, the Jane Finch Mall,
and I think it was what the development that's City
Place just west of Concoork Place, just west of Rogers Stadium.
(21:32):
So it was an interesting comparison of a couple of
different developments. Amy, I wonder if you could give everyone
a sense of you. You've got like a really interesting background.
You've got a bachelor's in engineering from the u OFT.
You've got a Masters of Engineering from UFT. You've worked
for IBI Group as a transportation consultant and then for
BA Consulting Group for fourteen years. You've been with BA
(21:55):
Consulting Group. How does someone get so excited about trap
and engineering and end up where you are?
Speaker 2 (22:04):
Uh? Well, I think I'll start with the engineering. I
come from a long line of engineers. My parents were engineers.
My grandfather was an engineer. I married an engineer. One
of our kids, at least one of our kids, I think,
will probably be an engineer. It runs in the blood.
My parents were booth professors in China, and that's where
(22:25):
I was born, you know, in a very different environment
from what China is today. I think, you know, people
didn't have cars back then, we had ricky old bikes.
I think we still had steam trains to get anywhere
there was don't cars.
Speaker 3 (22:37):
Whereabouts were you born in?
Speaker 2 (22:39):
In Northeast and China? So if you think of China
as looking like a shape like a chicken, and from
the neck of the chicken, so.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
I've been to I've been to Chian that's northwest. I
guess northeast would be close to South Korea and North Korea.
Speaker 2 (22:53):
North Korea and just west of North Korea. That was
where I was born. And so my parents were professors
at the university. We lived on campus, you know, in
this little tiny apartment that was had running water a
few hours of the day and that was considered privileged living,
and you know, that was that was we were lucky.
We were very private, privileged to have those things.
Speaker 3 (23:12):
And when did you come to Canada?
Speaker 2 (23:15):
Well, I am We moved to England actually when I
was when I was seven, my father was I had
moved there to do his PhD because at the time,
Chinese university didn't actually offered PhD programs. I mean, this
is very very long. It was, you know, close to
forty years you now, And when I was fourteen, after
my father finished all of his his PhD and post doc.
(23:35):
We moved here to Canada, to London, Ontario, ironically, and
when I was fourteen, at sixteen, s right, I moved
here to Toronto to go to UFT. So I studied
in engineering science.
Speaker 3 (23:45):
Well you went to UFT when you were sixteen, that's
pretty young.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
It was young, Yeah, I was, as you.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
Accelerated a few times, I did.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
Yeah, I skipped a few years of high school.
Speaker 3 (23:55):
I was a radiac.
Speaker 2 (23:57):
I was very keen. I still am keen and nerdy,
so that that continued. But I had this really inspiring
professor in first year, Michael Collins, and he taught about
the elegance of civil design and it really made me
fall in love with the ways in which we as
engineers could influence the built environment around us, and often
(24:18):
in really practical but also really elegant ways. And I
was really inspired by that. Transportation though I think I
fell into almost by accident. I did a co op
Experience year, like a full year at co op at
Ibi group after my third year of university, and I
really enjoyed. I think of it as solving problems at
(24:38):
a systems level. You're sort of you know, you're both
down and the weeds, but you're also kind of looking
at the problem kind of from a thirty thousand foot
level to kind of understand how the system works and
what you can tweak and change to get to the
results that you want. And so that's kind of how
I ended up in transportation. I was with IBI, which
is now our Kadus for about five years, and after
(24:59):
that I decided to, you know, to do my masters
just for fun. Really, I mean, I think I just
missed school. But at the same time, I also wanted
to be more involved in planning and transportation planning specifically
in policy, and so I ended up at BA and
I think being is probably gonna knock on wood, that'll
be this will be my final job. I've had a
very deeply rewarding career in transportation in general. It allows
(25:26):
me to use I think, all of the detail oriented
parts of my brain, but also the strategic parts of
the brain. It's it's fascinating. It's a fascinating field.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
Well, I tell you, I got agree. I am. One
of my first jobs, I worked for the Walt Disney
Company and I was working with some transportation engineers designing
the ingress and egress into Disneyland in southern California and
the building of what was then the largest structured parking
lot in the world, because they wanted to get rid
(26:00):
of what was called the South Parking Lot and get
into a park instructured parking so they could build the
MGM studio, tours and Epcot Center, et cetera in the
South Parking Lot. And it was fascinating. And at that
point in time, they were talking about double decking the
highway that went there, and rapid transit and a whole
bunch of other things, and it was really kind of fun.
So I think that you probably went into a really interesting,
(26:24):
interesting business. But I understand you're the first woman principal
in fifty one years. What's it like being in what
I would have thought is typically a male dominated field
as the first women principal in fifty one years?
Speaker 2 (26:40):
It's I mean, first of all, it's fun not to
be the first or to be a woman or whatever
it is, But being a principal is really fun. It's
like I said, it's deeply rewarding. I mean, it's no
secret that engineering is a very male dominated profession, particularly
in the civil engineering and the development industries, which is,
you know, that's that's what we're in always operated in
(27:00):
a primarily male dominated environment and with some exceptions, you know,
which I think that brings. It can bring some challenges,
but also some opportunities. And I mean, we can spend
the entire hour, entire day talking about being a woman
than jury, but it's not the point of this conversation.
(27:21):
So I think I'll say three things. I think, first
of all, I stand on the shoulders of others. I'm
not the first woman to come through, and I'm you know,
obviously not going to be the last women woman to
come through, and there'll be many, many more, And every
successive generation of women in this field and in my
firm has faced I think different and I would like
to think fewer challenges. That's not to say that we
(27:45):
don't face them, right, but the women who came before me,
I think, sometimes face more overt forms of discrimination just
for being women in this field. I have faced them too,
but hopefully to a lesser extent, and hopefully it's even
less for those that are coming up after me. So
I think that's that's one thing. It's you know, every
generation is experiencing things differently, and I stand on the
shoulders of others. I think. The second thing that I
(28:07):
will say is that it sometimes discrimination becomes a bit
more insidious when it's less obvious, and that can turn
into something that you know, constantly invalidates your experience or
expertise as a woman. And so more overt forms of
discrimination become a little bit more insidious, and that becomes
(28:29):
you know, constant microaggressions, and that is also equally damaging.
And so that's what kind of I see more of now.
My third point, though, is because I am genuinely positive
and optimistic about this, is that every generation of women
that have met in this field has also cared enough
(28:49):
to help others that have come after them, to open doors,
to mentor to cheer lead. And also women enter in
the industry today are so much or self aware than
I was at that age, I think, and they have
more confidence coming in and so they will grow at
a much faster rate. So it's I may be the first,
but I'm rapidly not the You know that they're rapidly
(29:12):
more and more coming here after me, and hopefully the
experience will get easier.
Speaker 3 (29:16):
So if you were invited to speak to the graduate
and class of female engineers somewhere. What would you tell them?
Speaker 2 (29:23):
Oh, that's a good question. I like that. What would
I tell myself from twenty years ago? I would tell
myself own your difference. I spent the early parts of
my career, I think, trying to fit in, and over
time I recognized that that fitting in versus belonging are
(29:44):
polar opposite things. And so when you're trying to fit in,
you're trying to change elements of yourself to try and,
you know, pretend to be like the others so that
they accept you. But it doesn't actually work out that way.
And the more that I've leaned into the ways that
I am different, the more successful it's been for me,
and also just the easier it is. Why would I
(30:04):
want to hide the parts of myself that a different,
Because honestly, I can't do it anyway, and there are
strengths to doing that. Sometimes it is actually helpful to
have my voice beat a different voice at the table.
I'm collaborative, I have excellent communication skills. I don't bring
a lot of ego to the table. I want to
create space for everyone to listen. And I think because
our field is so multidisciplinary. When you create space for
(30:27):
everybody to speak, you just get a better solution at
the end of the day. So I found that to
be incredibly empowering, and I would have liked to start
that sooner, but it's okay.
Speaker 3 (30:37):
I got there in the end, So be authentic for yourself. Yeah,
so a lot of great differences. That's great. We're going
to take another break and when we come back, I'm
going to ask Amy about some of these other developments
and some of the secrets that she's found both in
her own work but also in talking to other people
that are doing other developments and creating beautiful places that
we all want to live in around the greater Toronto.
(30:58):
Warious stay with everyone. Will be back in just two
minutes with Amy Jong. What a fascinating personal story as
well as as the work that you're doing. Thanks for sharing.
Welcome back everyone to the Brian Cromby Radio. We're talking
with Amy Jong of the BA Group about developing sort
of urban centers around Toronto in some of the undeveloped
(31:20):
parts Downsview Park. Amy has primarily been working on for
the last couple of years, and she shared some of
that with us as well as her personal background, which
has absolutely been fascinating, I think a little bit inspirational,
So thank you for sharing that with us. But also
in the seminar that you put on and moderated, we
talked about Scarboroughtown Center and some of the significant development
(31:40):
that is proposed there. We didn't talk about Yorkdale, but
I understand that Oxford's got some massive development plans for Yorkdale.
We didn't talk about Cloverdale, but I understand that people
have got some big developments for Cloverdale. You did have
someone from the Jane Finch Mall, which I was surprised with.
You know, we have this image of Jane Finch as
not very positive, but the plans that they that they
(32:02):
had for Jane Finch were really quite exciting. And then
we talked about Concord Place, both to the west of
Rogers Place downtown between the old railway lands, but then
also a development they're doing up at what Leslie in
the four oh one that is kind of exciting. So
(32:23):
when you think about those things, they're all sort of
fairly dense environments with a reasonable amount of height, a
lot of population. All of them I think were mixed
use developments. What makes great developments when you think about
taking really a part of the city that was not
developed as a part of the community, was a shopping center,
(32:43):
aura or a or a airport or whatever, and redeveloping
it to part of a city. What are some of
the secrets that you've seen and that you talked about
in your seminar.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
Yeah, absolutely, Well, I guess there's a bunch of things.
I think the the focus of that, or I guess
the thesis of that that the theme of it was
these large scale developments that are happening in not super
urban but still you know, I guess what if we
call it parent urban, that not parent urban, but that
not suburban either, but ex urban ex urban exurban ex
(33:19):
urban parts of the city that have fairly significant transit
investment that we think unlocks fairly significant density in each
of these areas. I mean Downsviews is one example. But
Jane Finch Mall, for example, has the Finch LRT, which
you know opening any day now, Fingers Crossed, Concord Park
Place has has Basarian Station, which is a subway station
(33:42):
online four Scarborough Town Center has I mean it used
to have the Scarborough Ort but of course now it'll
have a new subway line. So each of these I
would characterize as transit oriented development, and that in and
of itself, I think unlocks fairly significant amount of density
for the lands. But what makes each community successful? And
(34:07):
actually I worked on Jane Finchmoll that was one of
my projects, and so I helped to develop the transportation
mass to plan for that. I think each of the
developers that were at that top, they talked a little
bit about the through line or the north star of
what makes each of these kind of successful in the
long run. And so the first is aside from the
(34:28):
kind of the transportation side of things, that the first
there's a place making element of it. What establishes this
place as a community, as a place that you want
to be. And so we already talked earlier about the
park being one of them and a main street as
being the heart of the community. So that's one another
one that I think a lot about is getting the
(34:49):
bones of that community right. What is the street network
aside from just the design of the streets themselves, which
I also spend a lot of time thinking about, but
what what is the bones Because the development time will
change over time, that you know, the buildings will change,
the uses will evolve as the whole thing gets built out.
But honestly, once you set the street structure, that's it.
Once you've given up the land to the city, that's
there in perpetuity. Those are the bones. So you want
(35:11):
to get those things right. You want to get at
the right size, the right orientation. You want to get
people to and from transit as quickly as possible, and
so you want to allow for that movement.
Speaker 3 (35:21):
So to ask you a question on the bones, you know,
I think when we were building suburban developments in you know,
the last twenty or forty years, we had these streets
that curved, we had called the sacks. It was difficult
to get around. And then a couple of minutes ago
you said, recreate the city grid. So what's the current thinking.
Do you want to recreate a city grid or do
you want to have lots of curvy roads and cull
(35:43):
the sacks?
Speaker 2 (35:45):
We definitely don'tant call the sacks those are those are
pretty pretty terrible. The I think the type of development
that we're building nowadays is very different from the suburban
style of single family housing that we were building, you know,
thirty forty fifty sixty years ago. I think what we're
building nowadays is a high rise or midrise buildings. You know,
(36:08):
there might be some townhouses, but for the most part,
it is a higher density style of housing. And for
those what you want is porosity because we're no longer
building these giant towers in the parks. We want people
to be able to walk around, like I said, to
get to transit, but also get to the stores, get
to their retail, get to the parks as quickly as possible.
So it is very much a grid. Grid is maybe
(36:31):
not the right term because it's not always perpendicular. You know,
you can do lots of things, but it is not
about the Kurby streets that prevent people from entering the
community anymore.
Speaker 3 (36:40):
In the session, people talked about the importance of setbacks
and loading design. What are those?
Speaker 2 (36:47):
Ah? Okay, so well, maybe I'll start with loading design,
because that's something that you don't really see. I had
an architect tell me one time that as an architect,
if you can understand loading in a building your set,
you can design a really great building. And it's because loading,
(37:07):
if you're thinking about the bones of a plan, that
the way that you provide for trucks to move around
the inside of your building. That basically sets the bones
of the inside of the plan. And it's because in
the city of Toronto specifically, but also you know, in
the rest of the GTAH as well. Getting a garbage
(37:27):
truck to maneuver in and out of your site and
do all of its backups within the building itself takes
up a huge amount of space. And so one of
the things we talked about in you know, for a
large mass plant development is how to minimize the impact
of loading on your ground floor so that you can
have things like interesting retail spaces, you can have your lobby,
(37:47):
you can have you know, I don't know, like cafes
or something. And so one of the things you can
do in a larger scale development is you could potentially,
you know, a you could share loading between different uses.
You want to write it into the policy to maximize
your flexibility in the way that you provide loading. Sometimes
we managed to bury the loading. One of my projects
(38:09):
from about ten years ago was the well. While it's
a Spadana and front, I don't know if you're familiar
with that particular site, but a lot of my master
plan clients are interested in the weld because it has
this incredibly interesting ground floor plane that is all pedestrianized.
There are some buildings you can walk between all of them.
It's not separated by streets. And it's because we manage
(38:31):
to bury the loading and all of the loading goes
the low grade. There's a cost to that, but the
benefit is that you get this incredible public realm on
the ground floor. So loading is side of this like
really important backa housing that most people don't think about,
but it's a really important consideration.
Speaker 3 (38:50):
So I had a contractor construction guy tell me that
the city of Toronto demands that all the loading be
done internal, but none of the garbage trucks actually do it.
Their unions don't allow them to do so it's a
complete waste of space because they all load outside of
the building.
Speaker 2 (39:07):
That can be true. There are definitely cases where the
garbage truck operator, they'll you know, like when we're designing
loading spaces, we're usually not allowed to, you know, require
the truck to have to back up onto a policy
street for example, or backup even onto a private a
public laneway. It has to do all of its maneuvering
inside the building, which, like I said, it takes up
a huge swath of the ground floor of the building.
(39:28):
I've had some really interesting conversations with about sustainable design
as it relates to loading. If you think about an avenue.
Let's see in the city of Toronto, and the city
wants all of these midrise buildings with really interesting ground
floor planes with retail stores that front onto the street.
(39:49):
They also, though, require loading to be accommodated within the building.
They don't allow trucks to back up onto the street,
even though you know, as you just said that, we
know that garbage truck operators will do it. You know,
they'll do the loading on the street. But what that does, though,
it takes up the majority of the space on the
ground floor, so you don't actually get a successful retail
(40:09):
environment anymore. So it's kind of this I guess class
is that the right word. There's a bit of a class.
Speaker 3 (40:15):
That needs we need you to take over the planning
department's attitude toward loading. I actually was at a presentation
by the CEO of Allied, that is, one of the
developers of the Well, and he said one of the
secrets there was that they had parking that went underneath
numerous different buildings, and therefore he said designing a mixed
(40:36):
use development as a whole rather than one by one,
was critically important. It made for better ingress and egress.
It made for a better movement in the parking that
maximized the parking. But other people said, that's very difficult
to do, So tell me about that if you could.
Speaker 2 (40:54):
It is. It is incredibly difficult too. So my firm
designed the loading and the parking and all of those
facilities for the Well, and so we're intimately familiar with it.
The incredible thing about the Well is that it's seven
buildings in an entire city block, and they were all
built at once, and that almost never happens. And there
were three developers. Allied was one of them, and a
REO Can was another. There were different developers that were
(41:16):
responsible for the different types of uses in there, like
there was an office developer, a retail developer, and a
residential developer, but they also came together. They put up
the funding upfront to build this giant parking garage and
the seven buildings all at once. And there's a huge
amount of efficiency that can happen when you can share
the parking because you know, it's a very efficient layout.
All of the loading. If you're a semi trailer, you
(41:37):
go straight down into the P four level of that
garage and you can get semi trailers down there, and
all of the loading happens in this one facility. The
problem in most master plant developments is that the money
and the market are not there to build your entire
block at once, and so oftentimes we have to carve
up a single block into let's say three subblocks or
(41:57):
two sublocks, and so you don't get the efficiency in
the parking layout anymore. It's really I mean, it's money
and also market absorption, like usually the market doesn't absorb
some buildings all at once.
Speaker 3 (42:10):
He also commented about the vibrant to retail. He said
he was disappointed that they couldn't have more exterior retail
because it was interior retail that they ended up having,
though he was happy that they had some retail on Wellington,
not on front but on Wellington. What makes for good retail?
You mentioned drugs, booze and what was the third one
(42:33):
and vegetables. When you're designing retail, what is it you
want to do to make it a great main street
because I think that you know, regional walls did a
bad job of creating nice main streets, and we've destroyed
a lot of our main streets because of that. What
makes for designing a good main street?
Speaker 2 (42:53):
That is the That is probably what I spend about
twenty three percent of my time thinking about. And it's
it's very content specific, but well, I mean yes and no,
there there. I think there are commonalities across all of them.
A good main street is a place where you want
to linger, where you can. If I'm sort of starting
from the inside out, if you think of your favorite
(43:14):
main street, think of what is there that you like,
but also think about what isn't there? Is there? For example,
are there you know what's probably there is. There's probably
relatively fewer lanes of traffic. It's probably not a very
busy thoroughfare. Maybe it's two lanes. Sometimes it's for maybe
(43:35):
there's on street parking that supports the main street. And
and you know, developers and retailers really like on street parking.
There may may not be cycling, and you know that
gets a little controversial, like I won't get in time
too much. There's probably decent sidewalks, most main streets probably
don't have a giant, uh you know, landscaping zone because
that makes the street really wide. So and it probably
(44:00):
is a fairly intimate street. It's probably not a super
wide street. The width of the street is probably in
line with the scale of the buildings and the retail decided.
The retail probably has narrow storefronts because every you know,
twenty meters or so, you kind of a as a walker,
you kind of want to experience something new, and so
(44:20):
it's the built the built form, and also the size
of the retail units and the street itself. There are
always trade offs to be made in designing for a street,
because if you put everything that you want into a street,
it's kind of the kitchen sync approach. You end up
with like a street that looks like, I mean, I
don't know, like Highway seven in North York. You know,
(44:40):
technically that's a complete street. It's got every single element
you could possibly want, but it's massive, and you don't want.
Speaker 3 (44:45):
To spend time there if you could never cross it, and.
Speaker 2 (44:48):
Exactly you can't cross it. I think I've heard that
that for a retailer, you know, a retail consultant has
said to me, a successful main street is if you
stand on one side and you can almost touch the
stores on the because you want to be able to
bounce between the stores. You want to feel like there's nothing,
you know, disconnecting you from the other side. That's a
good main stream.
Speaker 3 (45:08):
I used to work, as I mentioned, for the Walt
Disney Company, and I did some work on Epcot Center
and then also in Disney You're Disney, and what they
said there was you need bookends to the street. And
what they wanted was the railway station at one end
and Cinderella's Castle at the other end. And so they say,
(45:29):
too many people focus on the middle of the street,
when really what you want to do is focus on
the two ends. You want to have two bookends because
that's what gets the circulation. What do you think of that?
Speaker 2 (45:37):
That's a really that's that's an interesting That is interesting.
I'm not sure that I specifically thought about having bookends before.
Most of the main streets that we work on, they
don't necessarily I mean that most of the main streets
they have kind of an entry. I guess there's like
this is this is kind of the moment in which
you enter.
Speaker 3 (45:55):
Well, I think the well has bookends because you've got
that entrance and then you got the nice courtyard at
the other end, at the west end.
Speaker 2 (46:01):
Yes, yeah, for something like that, yes, but that's kind
of an internal pedestrianized street. But for a public street,
I think it could work either way. Frankly, I think
if there's enough interest and if it's long enough. I
do think you need it to be kind of long
enough and enough that you want to spend time. I
like the idea of the book ends though, because I
think we were talking earlier about the idea of a path,
(46:23):
like you want to be able to walk to one end,
not get bored, and then have a different way to
experience your walk and come back on the other end.
Speaker 3 (46:31):
So you've got all these potential developments and shopping centers
and other places around Toronto. Do you think they're actually
going to get built?
Speaker 2 (46:37):
Oh? Yes, yes, I think so. I mean I think
the historic, the old types of shopping centers are an
incredible land bank, Scarborotown Cunder being one of them, Jane
Finch Maall being one of them. They were built as
kind of these low rise, primarily low rise shopping centers
with a sea of parking around them, and over time,
(46:58):
what's happened, I think is that the parking demand sometimes
has come down, and so there's a whole bunch of
parking that really just isn't used. And in the case
of Jane finn Small for example, I mean I did
parking studies that showed, look, there's like huge swath of
parking that really isn't necessary anymore, and so that's exactly
where you should build your early phases of development. I
think retail demand within the shopping centers is also dropping.
(47:21):
I mean, you've got these anchor you know, the big
no longer no longer exists, target no longer exists, and
so they just don't need that kind of space anymore.
The retail experience is kind of changing towards more smaller
scale of retail, and I think that does better in
kind of an urban street environment than in a big
enclosed shopping center.
Speaker 3 (47:40):
We've seen, you know, all these big towers, whether they
be downtown or frankly at you know the in Vaughan,
the Von Metro Center, these big forty fifty sixty story towers.
I was surprised that there were a bunch of comments
that were made at your session that projects need to
be right sized. Densities are being reduced, and buildable density
matters more than maximum density. High towers are over effective.
(48:02):
Rental operations work best in twenty five to thirty story ranges.
Phasing and constructive constructibility are critical. Smaller, more buildable buildings
make more sense. What's with all that?
Speaker 2 (48:14):
It is interesting. I've seen that kind of pivot in
my work as well. I would say even five years ago,
we were working on buildings that were routinely forty fifty
stories tall. I mean I worked on one Young which
has the tallest buildings over one hundred stories tall. And
in fact that's a construction right now. In the last
few years, particularly in the current economic climate that we're in,
where the development industry is very much in crisis, there's
(48:37):
not enough of a market to absorb so many units.
I am seeing developers they're cutting down the size of
their buildings even I mean, I think one of the
I think what you just quoted, I think that came
from someone from a homemark who bought Jane Finch Maall
(48:57):
and are about to build the first phases it. And
what they're saying is that they would like to instead
of building the forty some odd story towers that we
had approved. They're actually looking at something in maybe the
twenty five story range. I don't pretend to know the
financial aspects of it, of what makes that kind of
project pencil. I think what he did say is that
(49:18):
from an operational perspective, it works better to operate that
as a rental building than as than a much taller tower.
And that's one of the pivots that we're seeing, is
that a lot of residential condos are pivoting to rental
because that is a more economically feasible thing to build
right now. And I think that could be one of
(49:39):
the drivers of that change.
Speaker 3 (49:41):
We're having a fascinating conversation with Amy Jang tonight of
the BA group of urban centers in our suburban or
ex urban areas Scarborough, North York, Total Co, etc. It's
a fascinting conversation. We're going to take a final break
and come back to some concluding comments in two minutes.
Speaker 4 (49:56):
Stay with us, everybody, stream us live at SAGA nine
sixty am dot CA.
Speaker 3 (50:16):
Well, this has been a really fascinating conversation today with
Amy Jang of the BA group, who's got twenty plus
years of experience as an engineer. She's the first female
director of her firm. She's a brainy actually accelerated a
couple of years and went to her university career at
age sixteen. When I went at nineteen, my gosh, you're like,
(50:37):
you're one of the smart ones around. And she moderated
this session and did an incredibly good job that I was.
I had the privilege of attending a couple of weeks
ago where people were talking about building up these high
density urban environments in our suburbs around Toronto so that
not just downtown Toronto would have all the density, but
Scarboroughtown Center at Downsview, Jane Finch, et cetera have some
(51:00):
of the dancing. And I thought it was really quite
an interesting, interesting discussion and Amy did a masterful job
of moderating it. So thank you. You've had a chance
to work on a bunch of different developments around Toronto
and think about the greater Toronto area. What's your vision
for Toronto? If you had to sort of describe to
me where you think Toronto's going. You know, we've had
(51:20):
people talk about tunnels under the four one, We've talked
about more subways, we talked about LRTs, We've talked about
trains going right through the middle of the city. You know,
in nineteen fifties we talked about five expressways, and three
of them didn't get built, Thank god. What's your vision
for the transportation engineering design of the Greater Toronto area.
Speaker 2 (51:43):
That's a great question. I think that's what the ten
point one billion dollar question. That's the cost of congestion
in the GTA alone. I think the I mean, I
think the big flashy project's got a lot of press.
I don't think at the end of the day, those
are the things that are going to see us, certainly.
I don't think building you know, a tunnel under the
(52:04):
highway is the thing that's going to save us necessarily.
But I think continued investment, I mean, it's gonna sound
a little bored, but continued investment in transit infrastructure is huge.
Finding ways to finance that infrastructure is huge. Finding ways
to design our communities to be more walkable in human scale,
I think that is huge. Building building communities that are
(52:27):
not just residential but have as much kind of mixed
of uses and range of uses is key. I think
maybe I'll leave you with something that Jane Jacobs said, actually,
at this this this the session that ULI session that
you and I met. I quoted something that Ken Greenberg said, sorry,
(52:51):
it was actually Jane Jacob's quote, which is that new
ideas need old buildings. And what that means is that
the things that make our communities vibrant are new ideas,
and oftentimes that it's the artists, it's the entrepreneurs, it's
the mom and pop shops. Is the people with the
really you know, interesting ideas that make our communities lively,
(53:15):
but they need kind of these affordable spaces, these small
scale spaces in which to innovate and to test out
their ideas, and those are the things that end up
being kind of the heart of our communities and give
it that character that makes us want to stay. And
I think that is a really compelling vision for what
(53:36):
we want Toronto to be.
Speaker 3 (53:38):
I agree, because I think that affordability is probably the
number one issue, and it's it's not just new ideas,
but it's new people. It's new vibrancy. It's the people
that you know are there, the culture of our city,
the service workers of our city, the people that you
know make our city a wonderful place to be and
if they can't afford to live here, then we're not
(54:03):
going to be a great city. And so we can't
be you know, people have talked about the Manhattanization of Toronto.
I don't think we want to go there. We want
to make sure and so it's not just old buildings,
but it's it's affordable buildings, and it's for both, you know,
use for commercial purposes that are going to be creating
that innovative incubator ideas, but it's also for people to
(54:25):
live in. And so I think that's the biggest challenge
that we've got to have. Now that said, good transit
makes it easier for us to get around, and so
therefore I think easier to build more affordability into our
city because we don't all have to be all stuck
in one spot. Any John, thank you so much for
joining us. I really appreciate it. I thought the seminar
was excellent, and I thought tonight's discussion was very good.
(54:47):
And congratulations for all the positive work that you're doing
in our city.
Speaker 2 (54:49):
I appreciate it.
Speaker 4 (54:51):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (54:51):
I appreciate that that's our show for tonight. Everybody, thank
you for joining. I remind you I'm on every Monday
through Friday at six o'clock on nine sixty am. You
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Speaker 1 (55:11):
Thanks, good night, everybody, Thank you, No Radio, No Problem.
Stream is live on Saga nine six am dot c
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Speaker 2 (00:18):
We didn't mean everyone. Welcome to the Brian Prompty Radio R.
I was at a really fascinating.
Speaker 3 (00:22):
Urban Landing Institute seminar a couple of weeks ago, moderated
by our guest tonight, Amy Jang, and she was actually
she was a fantastic moderator and in the end she
ended up being a panelist almost and really summarizing a
lot of things that it takes to build really good
urban centers.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
In a suburban context.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
And they used a couple of different examples, one of
them being Downsview and the redevelopment of the Downstree Airport
that I think Amy has worked on a fair amount.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
But it was a really good session and as we
think about, you.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Know a lot of the comments that we've heard about
creating density around urban nodes in our sort of ex
serbs or the suburbs around Toronto, I think that the
lessons that came out of that session and the work
that Amy does is.
Speaker 4 (01:04):
Really helpful for us enter a stand and so it's
a real pleasure for me to introduce you tonight to
Amy Jen. She is a principal at an organization called
the BA Group. It's a transportation planning and engineering firm
that works on some of the largest developments development projects
in the Greater Toronto area. She's an engineer with twenty
years of experienced.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Amy, Welcome to the show. Thank you.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
So let's just start out with what is transportation and
engineering planning and how does it apply to our everyday lives?
And maybe you can give as an example the work
that you would have done in designing Dansview Airport. I
think lots of us went to those Coldplay concerts this
summer and saw this massive airport in the middle of
North York and you're going to turn it into an
(01:50):
urban environment in a sort of suburban location in the
middle of Toronto.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
How are you going to do it? And what did
you do? Several questions several questions in there, so I'll
break them down. First of all, you're really lucky that
you've got Coplay concerts. That's pretty honesome. We had a
good time. I went twice. It was such a good concert.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Okay, good for you. You're a real fan though.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
I did have to walk a long way to those
subway stations?
Speaker 2 (02:15):
You did, yes, and actually I will. I will preface
this by saying that the traffic management plan for the
Coldplay concerts and Rogers Stadium is very different from what
ultimately the mobility network will be in in down Steam,
But the stadium itself is very much an interm use
so it's a way to activate the same I was
reminded that I was at a star Stock in two
(02:37):
thousand and three and that was that was a lot
of fun too. So firstly, what do I do? What
is transportation planning engineering? I have to I have trouble
answering this question sometimes at dinner parties because it's not
it can be quite broad and it's not so easy
as you know, as just saying well I drive trains,
which unfortunately I don't. So at its core, I think
(02:58):
my work is about designing built environment that allow people
to move around in the most efficient way possible. So
whether that's my walking or cycling or rolling, transit by
car or even just lingering. If we're talking about designing
a public space, you know, how do people want to
move around and how do we facilitate that? So if
you think of any urban development, whether that's like a
(03:18):
single building or a city block, or entire new community
or multiple communities, as in the case of Dwanns View,
my work would touch on anything to do with transportation
for that development. So you know, there's the obvious things
like designing the internal circulation of a building, how do
people move around there, how do the cars move around,
(03:39):
loading the parking that pick up drop off work, and
then broadly designing the street network around it. What does
that look like, what is the character of that street,
and then thinking about the pedestrian and the cycling infrastructure,
planning for transit, creating traffic modeling to understand the traffic impact,
analysi the traffic impact of that new development, parking policy,
and so on. It also involves a lot of less
(04:03):
obvious things. Because transportation planning and engineering is a very
multidisciplinary field and we're always working with planners and architects
and landscape designers and servicing engineers. We have to kind
of understand what they do also and input into their
work because all of those things impact the way that
people travel and vice versa. So you know, providing input
(04:24):
into broader master plan the land use mix, landscape and
servicing planning policy. There's a lot of them. I think
of it as pontificating. There's a lot of pontificating in
meetings and thinking about those big questions, which is really fun.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
At at the seminar, one of the comments that was
made that I found intriguing is people said, master plan
the site rather than plopping down a standalone building. And
that also they said, worry about the public realm. What
are people like you mean by those two comments.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Yeah, so when you're designing for a larger site, you
need to have a vision for the site because what
you're trying to build is a community. It's not a
collection of buildings. You're trying to create a complete community
that allows people to ideally meet most of their daily
needs within a short distance of their home. Because that
is what kind of creates a vibrant community, and that
(05:14):
honestly is also what solves some of the transportation issues
that we have, which is that people have to travel
too far, they have to drive all the things that
you don't want to do. The way that you create
kind of a compelling community is you focus on the
public realm. And so what makes for a compelling place,
a sticky place that makes people want to stick around.
(05:34):
And so we talked about you know, public spaces, public
parks being one key aspect of a public amenity a street,
like a really fundamental retail street as being the heart
of that community where people can meet their needs, where
they can hang out. And what does that streets look like.
Historically speaking, I think street design was maybe kind of
(05:55):
in the hands of transportation engineers like me. But you know,
twenty years ago. Nowadays is street design is such a
multidisciplinary field and it's more about the public realm than
it is about moving cars, which I think is that's
that's a great evolution of street design. It's it's about
designing a street as a public space for people first
(06:15):
and foremost.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
So public realm is what it's. It's sidewalks, it's it's
park bench, it's it's the stores that you look at.
What is public.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
Realm, Yeah, it's it's all of those things. So it
is the street. So yes, all of the like the sidewalks,
the sidewalks, the boulevard, is the landscaping on the private side,
it's it's the it's the buildings around them. What do
those buildings look like, what is the retail environment that
faces onto them, what are the the public parks, what
(06:46):
are the privately owned but the publicly accessible spaces. It's
basically everything that you would experience as a person walking
through a community. And it's an intangible thing. Like if
you think of your do you have a favorite street? Yes,
what is that street? What does that street look like?
Speaker 3 (07:03):
Right now? It's Bayview just step between Eglington going south,
and it's got lots of uh doesn't have a park,
but it's got lots of nice fruit stands and butcher
shops and cheese shops. It's got an interesting array of
different of different retail shops, restaurants and bars, et cetera.
(07:24):
And it's wonderful.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Yeah. Absolutely, And so there you can pinpoint elements of
that that that street, that the public realm that make
it successful. So of the sidewalks, why actually on baby
that they're not terribly wide?
Speaker 3 (07:38):
Oh they are, they are. They're like I think that
they're double the width of a of a normal sidewalk.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
Okay, that's fair, okay, And so that that's important to
allow the density of people. But they're also I guess
I'm trying to think I know that section of Baby
quite well, and you enjoy it. I enjoy just wandering
down because it's a really fun street to be It
doesn't it has traffic, but the traffic is slow. You
can kind of j walk if you really needed to,
but there's enough signals that you can also cross at
(08:05):
a proper signalized intersection if you want to do. The
storefronts are quite narrow and so every you know, every
short period of time as you're walking down the street,
you can see something new. You can encounter a new business.
There's a vibrance seats of the businesses. There's a mix
of businesses. It's not all just you know, dray cleaners
and wheat stores. You've got your butcher, you've got your restaurant,
(08:28):
you've got your your grosses. You know.
Speaker 3 (08:30):
The three sort of dead spots are where there's a
larger office building for a bank and there's only like
one door in and there's not sort of that presence
on the street, which I think you get when you've
got a large office user that you know goes on
too much of the street with just a blank wall.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
Yeah. Absolutely, And that's all kind of elements of the
public realm that is intangible, but when you put them
all together, you kind of have the sense of, Okay,
this is a really great space. And those are the
things that I think are the heart of a community
that make that community successful in the long run.
Speaker 3 (09:07):
One of the people on your panel said, the green
space is the new anchor. What do you think of that?
Speaker 2 (09:14):
It is a public amenity. It is an important part
of any new master planned community, and in fact, any
new master planned community is required to give up a
certain percentage of its land for public space, and so
it is a very important anchor, I guess because it
is also something that the city typically requires a developer
(09:36):
to deliver early on in the process. And it's specifically
because it does provide early on the heart the public
amenity of that community that allows them to feel like, Okay,
this is home, Like I have a green space to
walk my dogs, for my kids to play, even when
none of you know, even in the first phase of
the development, I have somewhere to go shop. I think
(09:58):
the true anchors one is public green space, the park
that allows you know, the green space review, and then
the other is a successful kind of the main street
environment that gives that place a character and it makes
the early phase successful so that it then people then
want to move into that area and makes the later
(10:19):
face and successful as well.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
That's interesting. I had Joe Barrage on my show once
and what he was of urban strategies, and he was saying,
you need both, and he used Amble Side in West Vancouver.
I'm not sure if you've ever been there, but it
was one of the examples, and he said, the reason
why people do a circle and half the circle is
a whole bunch of interesting commercial outlets, and half the
circle is the beach in the park. And if it
was just the beach in the park, it wouldn't be
(10:42):
as exciting because people would want to grab a coffee
or go shopping. And if it was just the shopping,
it would be like a shopping center. And so it's
the combination of the two that make it vibrant. What
do you think of that?
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Yeah, I agree, I think and sometimes when we're planning
for communities like this, we think of it as a loop,
like you want a variety of experiences. You don't want
to have to walk to the end of the street
and then come back. You want to walk to the
end of the street. You know, you want to kind
of bounce between the little stores and then you kind
of want another interesting route to walk back in. And
that's what keeps people in your community for longer, and
that way they can kind of make a day of it,
they can enjoy it from ach longer. So yeah, I
(11:14):
would agree, what.
Speaker 3 (11:15):
A fun job you've got. What are some of the
interesting projects that you're working on right now? What are
some of the big developments?
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Well, Downsview, the redevelopment of Downsview has been my big whale,
is that what you call it for the last five
plus years?
Speaker 3 (11:28):
For sure, you've been working on it for five years.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
Uh yeah, I mean my firm has been working on
it for decades. Actually before the latest iteration of the
second plan, there's been multiple iterations before this. But so
starting in twenty eighteen is when Bombardier announced that it
was closing It was going to close its facility at
a manufacturing facility at Downsview and it was going to
(11:51):
move to a new facility that was going to build
near Peerson Airport. So at that point, the airport and
the lands on which the Bombardy Manifolip Money facilities are located,
they were sold to PSP, which is the Public Sector
Pension Fund. And so that was a catalyst for this
whole redevelopment plan for the Downsview area. And it's a
(12:12):
huge area. I mean, it's basically the size of Downtown Toronto.
And it's not just the airport of the Bontebardi Lands,
it's also additional lands that are owned by Canada Lands
Company to the north and to the west, and the
City Lands to the east. And so for I think
how many years, for several years we were working with
the landowners on creating a framework plan for all of Downsview,
(12:36):
and then for a couple of years we're working with
the city on developing the Transportation master Plan for the
Downsview area, which then accompanied the secondary plan that basically
enables the redevelopment of these lands. That secondary plan was
approved last year, and that approval provided for the build
out of one hundred and fifteen thousand people residents and
(13:00):
thousand new jobs over thirty plus years.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
So the size of fifteen thousand people.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
Presidence in fifty thousand jobs, so one hundred and sixty
five thousand people over the next thirty years.
Speaker 3 (13:12):
Well, given our you know, our housing crisis and lack
of homes. When are you going to get started?
Speaker 2 (13:18):
Hopefully soon. I think if you talk to my clients,
the landowners, they would like to start next year. So
that Secondary Plan and that transportation master Plan which I
led the creation of, that was approved last year. So
since then I have now been working with the landowners
on their individual districts within the Second Plant area. The
(13:39):
Second Plan area is so big that it's subdivided into
fifteen individual districts, and so for those districts to redevelop,
they each then need to have its own district plan,
which is a master plan in and of itself.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
And so I single family homes, town homes, apartment buildings,
what's going to be there.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
It would be apartment style buildings primarily mid rise through
the majority of the lands, with the exception of around
the three subway stations around Downsview which will be which
will be higher rist. So there are two main majority
land owners in Downsview, the CLC and North Crest which
is a sub subsidiary of Public Sector of Pension of MPSP,
(14:20):
and they are both starting with the districts adjacent to transit,
so near Downsview West Station, near Wilson Station, and there's
also a district in the old Bombardy manufacturing facilities that
the Hangar district, which will have a lot of early
employment uses as well.
Speaker 3 (14:38):
So you've got two three subway stations, you've got the
four oh one, you've got the Allen Expressway. You've got
really good transportation, don't you.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Yes and no. So I think you hit the nail
on the head. Around the periphery of the secondary plant area,
there's a really good transportation. There's, like you said, three
subway stations, there's a ghost station. Two of the subway
stations also have have bus terminals attached to them, so
it's great. The problem is it's all on the edges
and historically Downsview because it was an airport, it was
by design disconnected from everything else around it. And so
(15:12):
you know, like roads literally stop and that you know,
they end at the edge of of you know, at
the bottom of the second planet area and then they
restart north of there. And so our challenge in developing
this transportation master plant is reconnecting this big hole in
the city back into the urban fabric of the city.
So there's there's this network of new streets, new public streets,
(15:35):
major streets that will get extended, so different will get
re extended through basically reconnect between Wilson and Shepherd. Same
for Billy Bishop. It'll get extended north south and then
they'll be too east west new streets as well. That
will kind of reform the grid within within the second plant,
(15:56):
the access to transit was key. That was like a
key element of the TMP, and so one of the
major streets, for example, will have dedicated bus lanes and
that is intended to get people wherever you are in
the area back to the subway stations as quickly as
possible because it's such a big area that you know,
if you were to walk, it takes too long. But
if you were to cycle, if you were to take
(16:17):
ded Kate transit, you can get there very quickly.
Speaker 3 (16:21):
So you know this summer, you've got the Rogers Stadium
that did host numerous concerts. You know, you mentioned that
you were at the Stars concert back in two thousand
and three, which was a huge success with the Rolling Stones.
At one point in time, there was a proposal for
a I believe in NFL football stadium down to you,
(16:41):
is there going to be a big sports or entertainment
use on Downsview.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
No, that is not the plan the sports and well
actually not sports now. The entertainment use is very much
an interim use before that area gets built out. And
the reason is because a stadium it's really fun when
it's populated, but it has kind of the impact of
killing well, if we're talking about the public realm, it
(17:07):
kind of kills the public realm the rest of the
time because it's just sitting empty. So what's meant to
be there is a much finer grained block, a finer
grain network of a finer grained I guess, a street
and block structure that allows kind of a more walkable,
walkable community.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
Are you, you know, gonna have a big shopping center
Yorkdale's just seuth of you. Are you going to have
a big shopping center like Yorkdale? No?
Speaker 2 (17:33):
I think the idea is to have a series of
retail streets. So there's the big central move. I guess
the big kind of idea for all of Down's View
is the idea of the runway. So the runway concept
is being maintained through through Downsview, not the concrete structure itself,
but this idea of a two kilometer long series of
connected public spaces kind of like a long kind of
(17:55):
a not a closet, but like a long promenade that
you know is between twenty and six as why, There'll
be retail that fronts onto that that will be kind
of this really interesting pedestrian experience, and then there'll be
other additional kind of retail streets, like local main streets
that will serve the retail uses. But it's very much distributed.
I don't think I don't think malls like Yorkdale are
(18:18):
really going to get built anymore. It's just not the
future of retail. What is the future of retail, I
think very much distributed. I think retail is going to
be I think there'll be two types, at least that
the types of retail that I work on. There are
two types of retail. One is kind of a character
destination experience style of retail that will draw other people
(18:39):
from other neighborhoods in, and that's very much the case
along the Runway. It'll be kind of a tourist experience
as well as a local experience. And then the other
type of retail will be the stuff that kind of
serves a complete community, like you're when you saw me
at the at the talk. I think I said, a
community needs three things. It needs vegetables, drugs, and booths.
(19:01):
So you need a grocer, you need an ELCBO, and
you need a pharmacy.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
And so vegetables, drugs, and booze. That's what we all need,
is it?
Speaker 2 (19:11):
Well, at least that's what I would need. I would need.
I would like a couple of small grocery stores. I
would like an ELCBO. I would like a pharmacy, you know,
a chief shop, butcher shop, chocolate shop, all of those things.
Speaker 3 (19:23):
I'd a restaurant to that mix. But I agree with you.
I think that that's a great accommodation. You need a place,
You need that third place. You know, there's a bunch
of academics that have talked about this concept of the
third place, a place that's not work, that's not home,
that you can go to, whether it's a pub or
a coffee shop or a restaurant. So I think that's
what you need. We're going to take a break for
some messages and come back with our guest, Amy Jong,
(19:45):
talking about sort of master planning of some of the
more urban environments in our city, but not downtown, in
suburban locations, and one of the things that they talked
about at the seminar that I was at that Amy
did an incredibly good job moderating of was redevelopment of
shopping centers, which is I think another big, you know,
(20:08):
challenge plus something that you know, lots of people have
talked about, and we're gonna chat about that and other
opportunities for development. Stay with us, everyone, We're back in
just two minutes with Amy Jen talking about redevelopment, master
planning and doing it in an urban environment in our
suburban areas in the Toronto area.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Stay with us.
Speaker 3 (20:26):
I want back into.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
No Radio, No Problem stream is live on SAGA ninety
sixty am dot c A.
Speaker 3 (20:47):
Welcome back everyone to the Brian Crombie Radio Hour. We're
chatting with Amy Young tonight and she was the moderator
of a seminar I went to by the Urban Land Institute,
and she did a really good job of bringing out
from the panelists what were sort of the keys to
success for them in developing large developments sort of not
whole cities, but almost whole cities or little urban environments
(21:11):
of cities in suburban locations. And the four that we
were talking about was Scarboroughtown Center, Downsview, the Jane Finch Mall,
and I think it was what the development that's City
Place just west of Concoork Place, just west of Rogers Stadium.
(21:32):
So it was an interesting comparison of a couple of
different developments. Amy, I wonder if you could give everyone
a sense of you. You've got like a really interesting background.
You've got a bachelor's in engineering from the u OFT.
You've got a Masters of Engineering from UFT. You've worked
for IBI Group as a transportation consultant and then for
BA Consulting Group for fourteen years. You've been with BA
(21:55):
Consulting Group. How does someone get so excited about trap
and engineering and end up where you are?
Speaker 2 (22:04):
Uh? Well, I think I'll start with the engineering. I
come from a long line of engineers. My parents were engineers.
My grandfather was an engineer. I married an engineer. One
of our kids, at least one of our kids, I think,
will probably be an engineer. It runs in the blood.
My parents were booth professors in China, and that's where
(22:25):
I was born, you know, in a very different environment
from what China is today. I think, you know, people
didn't have cars back then, we had ricky old bikes.
I think we still had steam trains to get anywhere
there was don't cars.
Speaker 3 (22:37):
Whereabouts were you born in?
Speaker 2 (22:39):
In Northeast and China? So if you think of China
as looking like a shape like a chicken, and from
the neck of the chicken, so.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
I've been to I've been to Chian that's northwest. I
guess northeast would be close to South Korea and North Korea.
Speaker 2 (22:53):
North Korea and just west of North Korea. That was
where I was born. And so my parents were professors
at the university. We lived on campus, you know, in
this little tiny apartment that was had running water a
few hours of the day and that was considered privileged living,
and you know, that was that was we were lucky.
We were very private, privileged to have those things.
Speaker 3 (23:12):
And when did you come to Canada?
Speaker 2 (23:15):
Well, I am We moved to England actually when I
was when I was seven, my father was I had
moved there to do his PhD because at the time,
Chinese university didn't actually offered PhD programs. I mean, this
is very very long. It was, you know, close to
forty years you now, And when I was fourteen, after
my father finished all of his his PhD and post doc.
(23:35):
We moved here to Canada, to London, Ontario, ironically, and
when I was fourteen, at sixteen, s right, I moved
here to Toronto to go to UFT. So I studied
in engineering science.
Speaker 3 (23:45):
Well you went to UFT when you were sixteen, that's
pretty young.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
It was young, Yeah, I was, as you.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
Accelerated a few times, I did.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
Yeah, I skipped a few years of high school.
Speaker 3 (23:55):
I was a radiac.
Speaker 2 (23:57):
I was very keen. I still am keen and nerdy,
so that that continued. But I had this really inspiring
professor in first year, Michael Collins, and he taught about
the elegance of civil design and it really made me
fall in love with the ways in which we as
engineers could influence the built environment around us, and often
(24:18):
in really practical but also really elegant ways. And I
was really inspired by that. Transportation though I think I
fell into almost by accident. I did a co op
Experience year, like a full year at co op at
Ibi group after my third year of university, and I
really enjoyed. I think of it as solving problems at
(24:38):
a systems level. You're sort of you know, you're both
down and the weeds, but you're also kind of looking
at the problem kind of from a thirty thousand foot
level to kind of understand how the system works and
what you can tweak and change to get to the
results that you want. And so that's kind of how
I ended up in transportation. I was with IBI, which
is now our Kadus for about five years, and after
(24:59):
that I decided to, you know, to do my masters
just for fun. Really, I mean, I think I just
missed school. But at the same time, I also wanted
to be more involved in planning and transportation planning specifically
in policy, and so I ended up at BA and
I think being is probably gonna knock on wood, that'll
be this will be my final job. I've had a
very deeply rewarding career in transportation in general. It allows
(25:26):
me to use I think, all of the detail oriented
parts of my brain, but also the strategic parts of
the brain. It's it's fascinating. It's a fascinating field.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
Well, I tell you, I got agree. I am. One
of my first jobs, I worked for the Walt Disney
Company and I was working with some transportation engineers designing
the ingress and egress into Disneyland in southern California and
the building of what was then the largest structured parking
lot in the world, because they wanted to get rid
(26:00):
of what was called the South Parking Lot and get
into a park instructured parking so they could build the
MGM studio, tours and Epcot Center, et cetera in the
South Parking Lot. And it was fascinating. And at that
point in time, they were talking about double decking the
highway that went there, and rapid transit and a whole
bunch of other things, and it was really kind of fun.
So I think that you probably went into a really interesting,
(26:24):
interesting business. But I understand you're the first woman principal
in fifty one years. What's it like being in what
I would have thought is typically a male dominated field
as the first women principal in fifty one years?
Speaker 2 (26:40):
It's I mean, first of all, it's fun not to
be the first or to be a woman or whatever
it is, But being a principal is really fun. It's
like I said, it's deeply rewarding. I mean, it's no
secret that engineering is a very male dominated profession, particularly
in the civil engineering and the development industries, which is,
you know, that's that's what we're in always operated in
(27:00):
a primarily male dominated environment and with some exceptions, you know,
which I think that brings. It can bring some challenges,
but also some opportunities. And I mean, we can spend
the entire hour, entire day talking about being a woman
than jury, but it's not the point of this conversation.
(27:21):
So I think I'll say three things. I think, first
of all, I stand on the shoulders of others. I'm
not the first woman to come through, and I'm you know,
obviously not going to be the last women woman to
come through, and there'll be many, many more, And every
successive generation of women in this field and in my
firm has faced I think different and I would like
to think fewer challenges. That's not to say that we
(27:45):
don't face them, right, but the women who came before me,
I think, sometimes face more overt forms of discrimination just
for being women in this field. I have faced them too,
but hopefully to a lesser extent, and hopefully it's even
less for those that are coming up after me. So
I think that's that's one thing. It's you know, every
generation is experiencing things differently, and I stand on the
shoulders of others. I think. The second thing that I
(28:07):
will say is that it sometimes discrimination becomes a bit
more insidious when it's less obvious, and that can turn
into something that you know, constantly invalidates your experience or
expertise as a woman. And so more overt forms of
discrimination become a little bit more insidious, and that becomes
(28:29):
you know, constant microaggressions, and that is also equally damaging.
And so that's what kind of I see more of now.
My third point, though, is because I am genuinely positive
and optimistic about this, is that every generation of women
that have met in this field has also cared enough
(28:49):
to help others that have come after them, to open doors,
to mentor to cheer lead. And also women enter in
the industry today are so much or self aware than
I was at that age, I think, and they have
more confidence coming in and so they will grow at
a much faster rate. So it's I may be the first,
but I'm rapidly not the You know that they're rapidly
(29:12):
more and more coming here after me, and hopefully the
experience will get easier.
Speaker 3 (29:16):
So if you were invited to speak to the graduate
and class of female engineers somewhere. What would you tell them?
Speaker 2 (29:23):
Oh, that's a good question. I like that. What would
I tell myself from twenty years ago? I would tell
myself own your difference. I spent the early parts of
my career, I think, trying to fit in, and over
time I recognized that that fitting in versus belonging are
(29:44):
polar opposite things. And so when you're trying to fit in,
you're trying to change elements of yourself to try and,
you know, pretend to be like the others so that
they accept you. But it doesn't actually work out that way.
And the more that I've leaned into the ways that
I am different, the more successful it's been for me,
and also just the easier it is. Why would I
(30:04):
want to hide the parts of myself that a different,
Because honestly, I can't do it anyway, and there are
strengths to doing that. Sometimes it is actually helpful to
have my voice beat a different voice at the table.
I'm collaborative, I have excellent communication skills. I don't bring
a lot of ego to the table. I want to
create space for everyone to listen. And I think because
our field is so multidisciplinary. When you create space for
(30:27):
everybody to speak, you just get a better solution at
the end of the day. So I found that to
be incredibly empowering, and I would have liked to start
that sooner, but it's okay.
Speaker 3 (30:37):
I got there in the end, So be authentic for yourself. Yeah,
so a lot of great differences. That's great. We're going
to take another break and when we come back, I'm
going to ask Amy about some of these other developments
and some of the secrets that she's found both in
her own work but also in talking to other people
that are doing other developments and creating beautiful places that
we all want to live in around the greater Toronto.
(30:58):
Warious stay with everyone. Will be back in just two
minutes with Amy Jong. What a fascinating personal story as
well as as the work that you're doing. Thanks for sharing.
Welcome back everyone to the Brian Cromby Radio. We're talking
with Amy Jong of the BA Group about developing sort
of urban centers around Toronto in some of the undeveloped
(31:20):
parts Downsview Park. Amy has primarily been working on for
the last couple of years, and she shared some of
that with us as well as her personal background, which
has absolutely been fascinating, I think a little bit inspirational,
So thank you for sharing that with us. But also
in the seminar that you put on and moderated, we
talked about Scarboroughtown Center and some of the significant development
(31:40):
that is proposed there. We didn't talk about Yorkdale, but
I understand that Oxford's got some massive development plans for Yorkdale.
We didn't talk about Cloverdale, but I understand that people
have got some big developments for Cloverdale. You did have
someone from the Jane Finch Mall, which I was surprised with.
You know, we have this image of Jane Finch as
not very positive, but the plans that they that they
(32:02):
had for Jane Finch were really quite exciting. And then
we talked about Concord Place, both to the west of
Rogers Place downtown between the old railway lands, but then
also a development they're doing up at what Leslie in
the four oh one that is kind of exciting. So
(32:23):
when you think about those things, they're all sort of
fairly dense environments with a reasonable amount of height, a
lot of population. All of them I think were mixed
use developments. What makes great developments when you think about
taking really a part of the city that was not
developed as a part of the community, was a shopping center,
(32:43):
aura or a or a airport or whatever, and redeveloping
it to part of a city. What are some of
the secrets that you've seen and that you talked about
in your seminar.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
Yeah, absolutely, Well, I guess there's a bunch of things.
I think the the focus of that, or I guess
the thesis of that that the theme of it was
these large scale developments that are happening in not super
urban but still you know, I guess what if we
call it parent urban, that not parent urban, but that
not suburban either, but ex urban ex urban exurban ex
(33:19):
urban parts of the city that have fairly significant transit
investment that we think unlocks fairly significant density in each
of these areas. I mean Downsviews is one example. But
Jane Finch Mall, for example, has the Finch LRT, which
you know opening any day now, Fingers Crossed, Concord Park
Place has has Basarian Station, which is a subway station
(33:42):
online four Scarborough Town Center has I mean it used
to have the Scarborough Ort but of course now it'll
have a new subway line. So each of these I
would characterize as transit oriented development, and that in and
of itself, I think unlocks fairly significant amount of density
for the lands. But what makes each community successful? And
(34:07):
actually I worked on Jane Finchmoll that was one of
my projects, and so I helped to develop the transportation
mass to plan for that. I think each of the
developers that were at that top, they talked a little
bit about the through line or the north star of
what makes each of these kind of successful in the
long run. And so the first is aside from the
(34:28):
kind of the transportation side of things, that the first
there's a place making element of it. What establishes this
place as a community, as a place that you want
to be. And so we already talked earlier about the
park being one of them and a main street as
being the heart of the community. So that's one another
one that I think a lot about is getting the
(34:49):
bones of that community right. What is the street network
aside from just the design of the streets themselves, which
I also spend a lot of time thinking about, but
what what is the bones Because the development time will
change over time, that you know, the buildings will change,
the uses will evolve as the whole thing gets built out.
But honestly, once you set the street structure, that's it.
Once you've given up the land to the city, that's
there in perpetuity. Those are the bones. So you want
(35:11):
to get those things right. You want to get at
the right size, the right orientation. You want to get
people to and from transit as quickly as possible, and
so you want to allow for that movement.
Speaker 3 (35:21):
So to ask you a question on the bones, you know,
I think when we were building suburban developments in you know,
the last twenty or forty years, we had these streets
that curved, we had called the sacks. It was difficult
to get around. And then a couple of minutes ago
you said, recreate the city grid. So what's the current thinking.
Do you want to recreate a city grid or do
you want to have lots of curvy roads and cull
(35:43):
the sacks?
Speaker 2 (35:45):
We definitely don'tant call the sacks those are those are
pretty pretty terrible. The I think the type of development
that we're building nowadays is very different from the suburban
style of single family housing that we were building, you know,
thirty forty fifty sixty years ago. I think what we're
building nowadays is a high rise or midrise buildings. You know,
(36:08):
there might be some townhouses, but for the most part,
it is a higher density style of housing. And for
those what you want is porosity because we're no longer
building these giant towers in the parks. We want people
to be able to walk around, like I said, to
get to transit, but also get to the stores, get
to their retail, get to the parks as quickly as possible.
So it is very much a grid. Grid is maybe
(36:31):
not the right term because it's not always perpendicular. You know,
you can do lots of things, but it is not
about the Kurby streets that prevent people from entering the
community anymore.
Speaker 3 (36:40):
In the session, people talked about the importance of setbacks
and loading design. What are those?
Speaker 2 (36:47):
Ah? Okay, so well, maybe I'll start with loading design,
because that's something that you don't really see. I had
an architect tell me one time that as an architect,
if you can understand loading in a building your set,
you can design a really great building. And it's because loading,
(37:07):
if you're thinking about the bones of a plan, that
the way that you provide for trucks to move around
the inside of your building. That basically sets the bones
of the inside of the plan. And it's because in
the city of Toronto specifically, but also you know, in
the rest of the GTAH as well. Getting a garbage
(37:27):
truck to maneuver in and out of your site and
do all of its backups within the building itself takes
up a huge amount of space. And so one of
the things we talked about in you know, for a
large mass plant development is how to minimize the impact
of loading on your ground floor so that you can
have things like interesting retail spaces, you can have your lobby,
(37:47):
you can have you know, I don't know, like cafes
or something. And so one of the things you can
do in a larger scale development is you could potentially,
you know, a you could share loading between different uses.
You want to write it into the policy to maximize
your flexibility in the way that you provide loading. Sometimes
we managed to bury the loading. One of my projects
(38:09):
from about ten years ago was the well. While it's
a Spadana and front, I don't know if you're familiar
with that particular site, but a lot of my master
plan clients are interested in the weld because it has
this incredibly interesting ground floor plane that is all pedestrianized.
There are some buildings you can walk between all of them.
It's not separated by streets. And it's because we manage
(38:31):
to bury the loading and all of the loading goes
the low grade. There's a cost to that, but the
benefit is that you get this incredible public realm on
the ground floor. So loading is side of this like
really important backa housing that most people don't think about,
but it's a really important consideration.
Speaker 3 (38:50):
So I had a contractor construction guy tell me that
the city of Toronto demands that all the loading be
done internal, but none of the garbage trucks actually do it.
Their unions don't allow them to do so it's a
complete waste of space because they all load outside of
the building.
Speaker 2 (39:07):
That can be true. There are definitely cases where the
garbage truck operator, they'll you know, like when we're designing
loading spaces, we're usually not allowed to, you know, require
the truck to have to back up onto a policy
street for example, or backup even onto a private a
public laneway. It has to do all of its maneuvering
inside the building, which, like I said, it takes up
a huge swath of the ground floor of the building.
(39:28):
I've had some really interesting conversations with about sustainable design
as it relates to loading. If you think about an avenue.
Let's see in the city of Toronto, and the city
wants all of these midrise buildings with really interesting ground
floor planes with retail stores that front onto the street.
(39:49):
They also, though, require loading to be accommodated within the building.
They don't allow trucks to back up onto the street,
even though you know, as you just said that, we
know that garbage truck operators will do it. You know,
they'll do the loading on the street. But what that does, though,
it takes up the majority of the space on the
ground floor, so you don't actually get a successful retail
(40:09):
environment anymore. So it's kind of this I guess class
is that the right word. There's a bit of a class.
Speaker 3 (40:15):
That needs we need you to take over the planning
department's attitude toward loading. I actually was at a presentation
by the CEO of Allied, that is, one of the
developers of the Well, and he said one of the
secrets there was that they had parking that went underneath
numerous different buildings, and therefore he said designing a mixed
(40:36):
use development as a whole rather than one by one,
was critically important. It made for better ingress and egress.
It made for a better movement in the parking that
maximized the parking. But other people said, that's very difficult
to do, So tell me about that if you could.
Speaker 2 (40:54):
It is. It is incredibly difficult too. So my firm
designed the loading and the parking and all of those
facilities for the Well, and so we're intimately familiar with it.
The incredible thing about the Well is that it's seven
buildings in an entire city block, and they were all
built at once, and that almost never happens. And there
were three developers. Allied was one of them, and a
REO Can was another. There were different developers that were
(41:16):
responsible for the different types of uses in there, like
there was an office developer, a retail developer, and a
residential developer, but they also came together. They put up
the funding upfront to build this giant parking garage and
the seven buildings all at once. And there's a huge
amount of efficiency that can happen when you can share
the parking because you know, it's a very efficient layout.
All of the loading. If you're a semi trailer, you
(41:37):
go straight down into the P four level of that
garage and you can get semi trailers down there, and
all of the loading happens in this one facility. The
problem in most master plant developments is that the money
and the market are not there to build your entire
block at once, and so oftentimes we have to carve
up a single block into let's say three subblocks or
(41:57):
two sublocks, and so you don't get the efficiency in
the parking layout anymore. It's really I mean, it's money
and also market absorption, like usually the market doesn't absorb
some buildings all at once.
Speaker 3 (42:10):
He also commented about the vibrant to retail. He said
he was disappointed that they couldn't have more exterior retail
because it was interior retail that they ended up having,
though he was happy that they had some retail on Wellington,
not on front but on Wellington. What makes for good retail?
You mentioned drugs, booze and what was the third one
(42:33):
and vegetables. When you're designing retail, what is it you
want to do to make it a great main street
because I think that you know, regional walls did a
bad job of creating nice main streets, and we've destroyed
a lot of our main streets because of that. What
makes for designing a good main street?
Speaker 2 (42:53):
That is the That is probably what I spend about
twenty three percent of my time thinking about. And it's
it's very content specific, but well, I mean yes and no,
there there. I think there are commonalities across all of them.
A good main street is a place where you want
to linger, where you can. If I'm sort of starting
from the inside out, if you think of your favorite
(43:14):
main street, think of what is there that you like,
but also think about what isn't there? Is there? For example,
are there you know what's probably there is. There's probably
relatively fewer lanes of traffic. It's probably not a very
busy thoroughfare. Maybe it's two lanes. Sometimes it's for maybe
(43:35):
there's on street parking that supports the main street. And
and you know, developers and retailers really like on street parking.
There may may not be cycling, and you know that
gets a little controversial, like I won't get in time
too much. There's probably decent sidewalks, most main streets probably
don't have a giant, uh you know, landscaping zone because
that makes the street really wide. So and it probably
(44:00):
is a fairly intimate street. It's probably not a super
wide street. The width of the street is probably in
line with the scale of the buildings and the retail decided.
The retail probably has narrow storefronts because every you know,
twenty meters or so, you kind of a as a walker,
you kind of want to experience something new, and so
(44:20):
it's the built the built form, and also the size
of the retail units and the street itself. There are
always trade offs to be made in designing for a street,
because if you put everything that you want into a street,
it's kind of the kitchen sync approach. You end up
with like a street that looks like, I mean, I
don't know, like Highway seven in North York. You know,
(44:40):
technically that's a complete street. It's got every single element
you could possibly want, but it's massive, and you don't want.
Speaker 3 (44:45):
To spend time there if you could never cross it, and.
Speaker 2 (44:48):
Exactly you can't cross it. I think I've heard that
that for a retailer, you know, a retail consultant has
said to me, a successful main street is if you
stand on one side and you can almost touch the
stores on the because you want to be able to
bounce between the stores. You want to feel like there's nothing,
you know, disconnecting you from the other side. That's a
good main stream.
Speaker 3 (45:08):
I used to work, as I mentioned, for the Walt
Disney Company, and I did some work on Epcot Center
and then also in Disney You're Disney, and what they
said there was you need bookends to the street. And
what they wanted was the railway station at one end
and Cinderella's Castle at the other end. And so they say,
(45:29):
too many people focus on the middle of the street,
when really what you want to do is focus on
the two ends. You want to have two bookends because
that's what gets the circulation. What do you think of that?
Speaker 2 (45:37):
That's a really that's that's an interesting That is interesting.
I'm not sure that I specifically thought about having bookends before.
Most of the main streets that we work on, they
don't necessarily I mean that most of the main streets
they have kind of an entry. I guess there's like
this is this is kind of the moment in which
you enter.
Speaker 3 (45:55):
Well, I think the well has bookends because you've got
that entrance and then you got the nice courtyard at
the other end, at the west end.
Speaker 2 (46:01):
Yes, yeah, for something like that, yes, but that's kind
of an internal pedestrianized street. But for a public street,
I think it could work either way. Frankly, I think
if there's enough interest and if it's long enough. I
do think you need it to be kind of long
enough and enough that you want to spend time. I
like the idea of the book ends though, because I
think we were talking earlier about the idea of a path,
(46:23):
like you want to be able to walk to one end,
not get bored, and then have a different way to
experience your walk and come back on the other end.
Speaker 3 (46:31):
So you've got all these potential developments and shopping centers
and other places around Toronto. Do you think they're actually
going to get built?
Speaker 2 (46:37):
Oh? Yes, yes, I think so. I mean I think
the historic, the old types of shopping centers are an
incredible land bank, Scarborotown Cunder being one of them, Jane
Finch Maall being one of them. They were built as
kind of these low rise, primarily low rise shopping centers
with a sea of parking around them, and over time,
(46:58):
what's happened, I think is that the parking demand sometimes
has come down, and so there's a whole bunch of
parking that really just isn't used. And in the case
of Jane finn Small for example, I mean I did
parking studies that showed, look, there's like huge swath of
parking that really isn't necessary anymore, and so that's exactly
where you should build your early phases of development. I
think retail demand within the shopping centers is also dropping.
(47:21):
I mean, you've got these anchor you know, the big
no longer no longer exists, target no longer exists, and
so they just don't need that kind of space anymore.
The retail experience is kind of changing towards more smaller
scale of retail, and I think that does better in
kind of an urban street environment than in a big
enclosed shopping center.
Speaker 3 (47:40):
We've seen, you know, all these big towers, whether they
be downtown or frankly at you know the in Vaughan,
the Von Metro Center, these big forty fifty sixty story towers.
I was surprised that there were a bunch of comments
that were made at your session that projects need to
be right sized. Densities are being reduced, and buildable density
matters more than maximum density. High towers are over effective.
(48:02):
Rental operations work best in twenty five to thirty story ranges.
Phasing and constructive constructibility are critical. Smaller, more buildable buildings
make more sense. What's with all that?
Speaker 2 (48:14):
It is interesting. I've seen that kind of pivot in
my work as well. I would say even five years ago,
we were working on buildings that were routinely forty fifty
stories tall. I mean I worked on one Young which
has the tallest buildings over one hundred stories tall. And
in fact that's a construction right now. In the last
few years, particularly in the current economic climate that we're in,
where the development industry is very much in crisis, there's
(48:37):
not enough of a market to absorb so many units.
I am seeing developers they're cutting down the size of
their buildings even I mean, I think one of the
I think what you just quoted, I think that came
from someone from a homemark who bought Jane Finch Maall
(48:57):
and are about to build the first phases it. And
what they're saying is that they would like to instead
of building the forty some odd story towers that we
had approved. They're actually looking at something in maybe the
twenty five story range. I don't pretend to know the
financial aspects of it, of what makes that kind of
project pencil. I think what he did say is that
(49:18):
from an operational perspective, it works better to operate that
as a rental building than as than a much taller tower.
And that's one of the pivots that we're seeing, is
that a lot of residential condos are pivoting to rental
because that is a more economically feasible thing to build
right now. And I think that could be one of
(49:39):
the drivers of that change.
Speaker 3 (49:41):
We're having a fascinating conversation with Amy Jang tonight of
the BA group of urban centers in our suburban or
ex urban areas Scarborough, North York, Total Co, etc. It's
a fascinting conversation. We're going to take a final break
and come back to some concluding comments in two minutes.
Speaker 4 (49:56):
Stay with us, everybody, stream us live at SAGA nine
sixty am dot CA.
Speaker 3 (50:16):
Well, this has been a really fascinating conversation today with
Amy Jang of the BA group, who's got twenty plus
years of experience as an engineer. She's the first female
director of her firm. She's a brainy actually accelerated a
couple of years and went to her university career at
age sixteen. When I went at nineteen, my gosh, you're like,
(50:37):
you're one of the smart ones around. And she moderated
this session and did an incredibly good job that I was.
I had the privilege of attending a couple of weeks
ago where people were talking about building up these high
density urban environments in our suburbs around Toronto so that
not just downtown Toronto would have all the density, but
Scarboroughtown Center at Downsview, Jane Finch, et cetera have some
(51:00):
of the dancing. And I thought it was really quite
an interesting, interesting discussion and Amy did a masterful job
of moderating it. So thank you. You've had a chance
to work on a bunch of different developments around Toronto
and think about the greater Toronto area. What's your vision
for Toronto? If you had to sort of describe to
me where you think Toronto's going. You know, we've had
(51:20):
people talk about tunnels under the four one, We've talked
about more subways, we talked about LRTs, We've talked about
trains going right through the middle of the city. You know,
in nineteen fifties we talked about five expressways, and three
of them didn't get built, Thank god. What's your vision
for the transportation engineering design of the Greater Toronto area.
Speaker 2 (51:43):
That's a great question. I think that's what the ten
point one billion dollar question. That's the cost of congestion
in the GTA alone. I think the I mean, I
think the big flashy project's got a lot of press.
I don't think at the end of the day, those
are the things that are going to see us, certainly.
I don't think building you know, a tunnel under the
(52:04):
highway is the thing that's going to save us necessarily.
But I think continued investment, I mean, it's gonna sound
a little bored, but continued investment in transit infrastructure is huge.
Finding ways to finance that infrastructure is huge. Finding ways
to design our communities to be more walkable in human scale,
I think that is huge. Building building communities that are
(52:27):
not just residential but have as much kind of mixed
of uses and range of uses is key. I think
maybe I'll leave you with something that Jane Jacobs said, actually,
at this this this the session that ULI session that
you and I met. I quoted something that Ken Greenberg said, sorry,
(52:51):
it was actually Jane Jacob's quote, which is that new
ideas need old buildings. And what that means is that
the things that make our communities vibrant are new ideas,
and oftentimes that it's the artists, it's the entrepreneurs, it's
the mom and pop shops. Is the people with the
really you know, interesting ideas that make our communities lively,
(53:15):
but they need kind of these affordable spaces, these small
scale spaces in which to innovate and to test out
their ideas, and those are the things that end up
being kind of the heart of our communities and give
it that character that makes us want to stay. And
I think that is a really compelling vision for what
(53:36):
we want Toronto to be.
Speaker 3 (53:38):
I agree, because I think that affordability is probably the
number one issue, and it's it's not just new ideas,
but it's new people. It's new vibrancy. It's the people
that you know are there, the culture of our city,
the service workers of our city, the people that you
know make our city a wonderful place to be and
if they can't afford to live here, then we're not
(54:03):
going to be a great city. And so we can't
be you know, people have talked about the Manhattanization of Toronto.
I don't think we want to go there. We want
to make sure and so it's not just old buildings,
but it's it's affordable buildings, and it's for both, you know,
use for commercial purposes that are going to be creating
that innovative incubator ideas, but it's also for people to
(54:25):
live in. And so I think that's the biggest challenge
that we've got to have. Now that said, good transit
makes it easier for us to get around, and so
therefore I think easier to build more affordability into our
city because we don't all have to be all stuck
in one spot. Any John, thank you so much for
joining us. I really appreciate it. I thought the seminar
was excellent, and I thought tonight's discussion was very good.
(54:47):
And congratulations for all the positive work that you're doing
in our city.
Speaker 2 (54:49):
I appreciate it.
Speaker 4 (54:51):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (54:51):
I appreciate that that's our show for tonight. Everybody, thank
you for joining. I remind you I'm on every Monday
through Friday at six o'clock on nine sixty am. You
can stream me online at TRIPLEWS, Saga, sixtym dot cl.
My podcast and videos go off on my website briancrimeby
dot com, and on social media and on LinkedIn, on
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