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The Riverwalk Brampton Project Analysis Session was one of the three programs the ULI Toronto Outreach Committee prepared with local municipalities for the now postponed Spring Conference 2020.

In anticipation of the one-day panel, ULI Toronto volunteers met with the sponsor, Alex Taranu, Senior Adviser with the City of Brampton, to clarify the objectives and put together an agenda. This preparation stage also included a meeting at the Brampton City Hall and a site walk in December.

Due to the sponsor’s investment in the subject and the interest the theme generated from the panelists, ULI decided to follow through with the program and condense the PAS format into a half day virtual session.

The day started with introductions and sponsor presentation, followed by clarification questions, panel deliberations and a final report to the sponsor.

The five volunteer panelists’ backgrounds combined academic, development and consulting expertise to provide objective recommendations. The panel was led by Alan Razak, Panel Chair and  Principal at AthenianRazak LLC in Philadelphia. The panel was rounded out by Kathryn Firth, Director of Design at NBBJ in Boston; Uwe Brandes, Faculty Director of the Urban & Regional Planning Program at Georgetown University, Washington, DC; Eric Larson,CEO of Downtown Detroit Partnership in Detroit; and Lisette van Doorn, Urban Land Institute’s Europe CEO from the Netherlands. The ULI staff organising the meeting were Kelsey Steffen, Director, Advisory Services, and Georgia Gempler, Senior Associate, Advisory Services.

As a dynamic and diverse municipality located near the Pearson Airport, Brampton wants to urbanize its sprawling suburban landscape and densify the downtown area. Downtown Brampton was marked as a Provincial Urban Growth Centre and hopes to capitalize on its young population and evolving transportation system to support redevelopment and revitalisation.

The Etobicoke Creek runs through the center of Downtown. Although an 1980s intervention transformed parts of the natural river bed into a diversion channel, it still poses a flood risk on the upstream and downstream. That formed the basis of an existing Special Policy Area and Downtown Brampton Flood Protection Environmental Assessment.

The city found the constraints of building in a flood area as a deterrent for future development and identified potential solutions for flood mitigation, planning and urban design, and placemaking opportunities that would be part of the Riverwalk Program.

The timeline of the Riverwalk program is approximately 10 years, starting with Special Policy Area Amendment in 2014, Flood Protection EA in 2018, Economic Impact Study in 2019, Urban Design Open Space Master plan to be finalized in 2020 and a potential start of construction in 2024.

The sponsor asked the ULI panelist 3 questions that highlighted that Riverwalk is an opportunity to revitalize and increase Downtown Brampton’s resilience, improve open space and generate interest in an enduring place through multi-disciplinary engagement and partnerships.. The questions asked were:

• How to best leverage the Riverwalk to maximize Downtown revitalisation efforts?
• Recommended tools and approaches to stimulate governance and development in the area?
• What are the resilience, programming and placemaking features the panellists recommended?

The panel’s recommendations can be summarised as follows:

• Community engagement was identified as crucial for a long-term capacity and confidence building project. Creating a culture of stewardship would see civil leadership and the business community engaged as project champions. Building on the strengths of the existing demographics will create an identity and long-term vision that the broader community can embrace as their own.
• As a placemaking strategy, an iterative process involving the full community to create a sense of place and embrace its individuality was recommended to start right away. The permeable boundaries of Riverwalk should be considered as part of a network of routes that lead you to the river.
• Land value capture and infrastructure to support development are seen as the best tools to achieve the development goals, as well as developing strategic partnerships and incorporating social equity through incentives. Funding opportunities generated by the increasingly critical role of natural open green spaces in the current COVID-19 situation should be explored.

The panellists congratulated the sponsor for their great work on the Riverwalk program and expressed their interest to visit the site and further advance the subject at the 2023 ULI Spring Meeting in Toronto.