Design
The Man-Made Island Jane Jacobs Approved of—But Toronto Never Built
“Harbour City,” according to the famed urbanist, was to be “the most important advance in city planning” of the 20th century.
After decades of turning its back to the waterfront, 1970s Toronto seemed poised for an urban planning turnaround. Soon, urbanists and politicians hoped, 50,000 people would be living on 510 acres of artificial land known as “Harbour City.”
One year after rival city Montreal showed off Expo 67 on a man-made island, Ontario government and architect Eberhard Zeidler proposed to build their own to help fix Toronto’s waterfront woes. “A nice little mid-rise, mixed-use neighborhood would have gone a long way to injecting life back into the downtown,” Toronto writer Chris Bateman tells CityLab.