Mission
Our mission is to nurture a collaborative city-building model to empower effective collaboration and alignment among public sector, private sector, non-profit and local communities. Through an integrated design-based strategic framework facilitated through a Professional Walkshop + Public Townhall combination, the program aims to shift development culture and accelerate implementation by amplifying synergies, creating new combined benefits, and fostering lateral thinking where solutions to one problem may reside in a different area.

Program Overview
The Greater Golden Horseshoe (GGH) is the fastest growing Global City Region in North America, with two thirds of the growth anticipated outside of the Toronto core, connected by rapid transit investments and lands owned by the province. TOC is the leading direction to expand healthy, convenient, high-quality live-work-play along subways networks, Light Rail Transit (LRT) and across existing GO networks, creating a new form of “Healthy City Region”, an affordable landing ground for new families to meet GTHA’s unprecedented population growth, where more than half of the new population are expected to be new immigrants.

With the right design, planning and execution, these TOC’s have the potential to provide the value of a “26 hour City”, where the ability to walk to daily needs eliminates the high cost of commuting and car-ownership, providing “extra hours” everyday that improves our quality of life and productivity, creates a nesting ground for high-quality jobs and employment, and moves our region towards a carbon-neutral future.

The coordinated delivery of a “20-min Walkable Neighbourhood” with a complete set of community facilities, parks and open space, affordable housing and high-quality live-work-play provides the secret sauce to unlock these values. The adjacencies and interrelated nature of these components have the potential to amplify synergies and create new combined benefits, but also requires a new way of problem-solving that involves concurrent decision-making, intense cross-sector collaborations and unprecedented innovation.

Focus for 2020-21
A 4 part series to investigate best practices to reinvent under-performing suburban and urban areas in health-promoting and affordable ways. As part of ULI’s Building Healthy Places Initiative, ULI Curtis Infrastructure Initiative, and ULI Toronto’s Getting To Transit-Oriented Initiative, a series of TOC Professional Walkshop + Public Townhall will take place across the Greater Golden Horseshoe at locations connected by Rapid Transit.  This work will help advance efforts to foster communities that promote health, improve competitiveness and quality of life, and move the Greater Golden Horseshoe (GGH) to reach carbon neutrality in innovative, inclusive and affordable ways.

Program #1: Uptown Brampton TOC – Implementing “20-min Walkable Neighbourhood with Community Hub” as the New Growth Model for Transit Oriented Communities

The Urban Land Institute (ULI) Toronto, in collaboration with the City of Brampton, City of Helsinki, Greenberg Consultants and University of Toronto School of Cities will bring this subject to life through exploring the invisible hands that shape the 100,000 people and jobs expected at Uptown Brampton Hurontario-Steeles TOC. With the LRT coming in 2024, this area is experiencing substantial transformation into a high-density, mixed-use, family-oriented, healthy and walkable transit-oriented community, taking shape through the combined interests of Provincial, Regional, Municipal, Private Sector and Community interests.

Download “Transit-Oriented Communities Toolkit.