Urban Corridor LTR

Sheppard Line. Toronto, Canadá. 2015

COMPETITION

Aerial view. Sheppard Urban Corridor. Year 2050. 

Urban islands in a suburban ocean.

The future is urban, and our cities need to be rethought. Toronto is a green city, and that is good, but it has a last century suburban structure excessively dependent on private vehicles.

Sheppard LRT future is presented as an excellent
opportunity to rebuild the city through a city model TOD (Transit Oriented Development). The LRT is the main component for the recreation of a more lively and human city.

Our strategy is to use the LRT infrastructure to create new urban islands in the suburban ocean of Toronto. For this, the Sheppard line stations act as catalysts for urban life, and through the art project we transform the unstructured spaces of post-industrial city in a civic places for relations and exchange.

Urban surgery in contemporary city.

The contemporary City of Toronto needs a careful urban surgery. S.S.S. go through this action applicating tree surgery strategies:

REDEVELOPMENT. Cities are alive and change every day. Toronto is mutating, and urban planning can foster their values and minimize their deficiencies. Through redevelopment we got the ability of monitoring and guiding these changes with the aim of improving our urban environment and avoiding its degradation.

MIXTURE. Concentration and use mixture is good for the city and the environment. By intensification we manage to do a closest an more profitable city for the citizens. Our proposal sets out to raise the peak of urban density in strategic points and reduce the ecological footprint of their users.

PASSAGES. To create, to modify, to enhance and to strengthen the relationships between citizens and their urban environment is essential for a healthy city. Passages are the way to connect with our neighbour, shopkeeper or theatre of our nearest neighbourhood. Our great urban corridor, as a large human artery, receives the flow of pedestrians and it leads them to the vital urban cores.

Pedestrian force against motor power.

The third strategy we present has to do with the idea of “proximate city”. The new Sheppard centers will be places for community life and authentic public spaces belonging to the pedestrian.

The new urban islands are havens for the traveler, will be areas for the free expression of ideas and art. They surely will lungs creativity and exchange.

The plane of the street will be a continuous space that will balance the use of the various modes of mobility. This time S.S.S. is against a multi-layer and vertical public space, and is in favor of the coexistence of the different modes of mobility horizontally and in a single plane. That will be the key for the success.

Urban Island. Re-drawn by S.S.S. from RPA's 1969 sketch. "Urban Design Manhattan. Times Square."