21st Century (2000–present)

Toronto Port Lands Flood Protection / Don Mouth Naturalization

2017– · Canada · North America – Canada · Ecological, landscape-led, and resilience planning · Planned by Waterfront Toronto; MVVA
Historic 1932 map of Toronto's Port Lands showing the Keating Channel and Don River mouth, the area being naturalised and flood-protected.
Historic 1932 map of Toronto's Port Lands showing the Keating Channel and Don River mouth, the area being naturalised and flood-protected. · Public domain

Core idea

River re-naturalization unlocking urbanization

Why it matters

Large-scale climate adaptation enabling city-building

Description

A large flood protection and river engineering project on Toronto's waterfront, led by the tri-government agency Waterfront Toronto with landscape architects Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, under construction from 2017. The project carved a new naturalised mouth for the Don River through the derelict Port Lands, creating wetlands, parkland and a new island district (Villiers Island) while removing flood risk from a wide swathe of the eastern downtown. It is among North America's largest urban river re-naturalisation works.

Significance

The project is a leading example of climate adaptation deployed as city-building: ecological infrastructure is the precondition that unlocks long-blocked urban development land. It carries forward the landscape urbanism ideas rehearsed in the 2000s Lower Don competitions into built form, and it is widely cited internationally as a model for governance and financing of large-scale resilience works on post-industrial waterfronts.

What shaped it

Sources

Open it on the interactive timeline →
hub.toekom.st — History of Urbanism · an interactive timeline of 850 planned cities across 6,000 years.