Projects
About
Located in the former suburb of North York, just north of the 401, the Don Valley Village is a neighbourhood that has experienced rapid urban sprawl in the last couple of decades. One of the neighbourhood's most iconic features is the Peanut, a Queen's Park-esque urban pattern.
This project focused on analyzing the pedestrian experience at varying scales of urbanism, and how existing public transportation strategies, pedestrian navigation design, and landscaping are critical factors to keep in mind.
This undergraduate design studio course focused on the development of standard architectural drawing and representational techniques to interpret and convey a selected message and intent. Students were randomly given a 2km squared site within the Greater Toronto Area to use as the medium of both site analysis and the development of representational skills to present findings from said site analysis.
When looking at the Don Valley Village orthographically, one can say that it is far from any traditional suburban development in the Greater Toronto Area. With several sub-neighbourhoods distributed in and around the Peanut, the Don Valley Village is a place of great cultural diversity and varying land uses. Unsurprisingly, there seems to be a trend of increased urbanism towards the southern region, initiated by Fairview Mall.
Both the variety and gradual change in building typologies, in addition to unique moments of the pedestrian experience are made clear when focusing in on specific plots within the neighbourhood. There also appears to be a strong public transportation presence at several of these key intersections.
Through careful examination of specific areas that are pedestrian dominated, there appear to be several moments of inconsistency. For example, intersections that are missing a dedicated pedestrian crosswalk force people to have to cross the street twice in order to reach a bus stop on the opposite island. More concerns that impede the pedestrian experience involve questions of landscaping that separate pedestrians from the street, as well as the placement and design of public transportation infrastructure.
