A bigger Biidaasige Park is another waterfront triumph for Toronto | Canada Voices

The Atlas Crane was never meant to grab attention; it was meant to grab cargo. The 40-metre-tall crane, installed in 1961, was a tool of Toronto’s working waterfront. Now the structure presides over a landscape where city-dwellers and nature come together.

On Friday you could stand by the crane in a copse of poplars, in a newly opened four-hectare section of the waterfront Biidaasige Park. This is another step in the billion-dollar remaking of Toronto’s old port lands. And it is also a lesson in how governments can actually make good places.

Designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA), Biidaasige is rich in history and biological diversity. It is also studded with public art as part of the Lassonde Art Trail, funded by the Lassonde Family Foundation, which has placed 15 works by leading contemporary artists in and around the park.

The park is a component of the Port Lands Flood Protection Project, a $1.4-billion effort by tri-government agency Waterfront Toronto. That has reshaped the Don River and created the island Ookwemin Minising, which is slated to house 21,000 people. Biidaasige occupies much of the waterfront land, which is both scenic and most vulnerable to flooding. Its first 20 hectares opened last year. The new section, bordering the harbour, includes an “event lawn” that can hold 3,000 people, a waterfront promenade and a new inlet dubbed Canoe Cove. There’s more to do. A proposed destination playground and restaurant await philanthropic support. A new pedestrian bridge arrives in a few years.

But even unfinished, the landscape has a sense of arrival. The promenade is a dignified civic space; it wants crowds of people to fill it up. The hard edges of the port – crane, concrete, building fragments – are flanked by young forests and coves of cattails.

MVVA, who have worked here for nearly 20 years, combine faux-natural plantings and landforms with waterways that are precisely engineered to serve ecosystems and keep cities safe.

Artworks in the Lassonde Art Trail help to tell this subtle story. Artist Ryan Gander’s Stories of Relics depicts different timekeeping devices: a windup clock, a digital alarm clock, a candle. “There are many kinds of time on this site,” said Chloe Catan, executive director of the Lassonde Art Trail. “Ecological, geological, and human. This place is layered with histories.” You can read them in the landscape.

Landscape architects have stacked up limestone of different colours – red at the bottom, fading upward to mocha and then grey – mimicking its order under the ground, as MVVA partner Herb Sweeney explained during a tour last week. From geology to industry, the park also recalls a terminal warehouse that burned down in 2017. MVVA left the edge of its foundation visible, a low ridge of concrete that walks quietly through new perennial gardens. Steel columns along the lakefront promenade evoke the structure of the vanished building.

But the real stars here are nature and views. There is no better skyline prospect in Toronto. The plantings, mostly indigenous, will mature into lush clusters of wetland and upland forest. Nearby, you can get down into the water. Canoe Cove provides a sheltered launch point for vessels into the river and the harbour. This is now a city park, and it will offer regular canoe and kayak rentals, a laudable move – albeit not until next year.

The built landscape is a testament to the vision of Waterfront Toronto. In 2006 the agency held a design competition to solve the problem of the city’s port lands. Built a century ago by filling in the massive Ashbridge’s Bay Marsh, this hard expanse of earth couldn’t absorb dangerous floods of the Don River.

MVVA won with a bold idea: Add a second river mouth lined by green space. Christopher Glaisek, Waterfront Toronto’s director of design, says this actually proved cheaper to build than the previous plan. The park space is a beautiful bonus.

There is a lesson for other governments about how to make a place. Think hard up front, with public input, about what your goals are; then hire excellent designers, give them direction, and rigorously defend their vision.

Jason Thorne, Toronto’s chief planner, who joined a tour of the park, said the design-competition approach here is worth emulating. “We should be driven by processes that, first and foremost, try to get the best possible design,” said Mr. Thorne. “This is a good example of what can happen.”

Mr. Glaisek says success began with decades of public advocacy – the citizen group Bring Back the Don was central – and basics: “We had strong leadership, we had funding, and we had the continuity of an organization that could focus attention for 20 solid years.”

While city staff and others helped realize the project, Waterfront has been at the helm. In meeting after meeting, year in and year out, their staff has defended the idea of “leading with landscape” and the specifics of this huge, complex, fragile project.

Over at Toronto City Hall, none of those conditions exist. The parks department’s output is chaotic and nobody seems to know how its decisions are being made or by whom, much less what the guiding principles and design standards might be.

Waterfront has been different. The expanded Biidaasige invites thoughts of a city that can build great things, and whose greatest times are still ahead of it.

But that future is not guaranteed. As the tour concluded, planes droned overhead on the way into Billy Bishop Airport. A massive expansion of that airport, now being proposed by the Ontario government and the federal Toronto Port Authority, would have jets buzzing the treetops here to land on a sprawling runway. That would be an assault on the optimism, intelligence and skill that are creating this park and the island it stands on. It’s strange to talk about a new park as being endangered, but it is. Biidaasige is the product of two decades of vision and vigilance. Those must continue.