With little room left on the ground, Toronto’s developers are looking above street level to find homes for public space. An urban park proposed by the Oxford Properties Group on Wednesday marks the third public space to be proposed above the Union Station Rail Corridor in recent years. It’s part of Union Park, a $3.5-billion proposed development to transform four acres of land just north of the Rogers Centre and CN Tower into a 4.3-million-square-foot mixed-used development. It follows similar proposals such as the Rail Deck Park, proposed by the City of Toronto in 2016, and CIBC Square, an office complex developed by Ivanhoé Cambridge and Hines.Union Park, considered the largest mixed-use development in Toronto’s history, would include a range of office space, about 800 residential units and nearly 200,000 square feet for retail space. The proposal devotes two acres of land to the park above the rail corridor, spanning between Blue Jays Way and the John Street Bridge. In its press release, the Oxford Properties Group said that public green space in the heart of Toronto’s downtown core is “much needed” — and Toronto’s green-space advocates tend to agree. “The reality is that there’s very little public space left in the downtown core,” said Jake Tobin Garret, manager of policy and planning with Park People. “Developers and the city alike now need to find creative ways to build public spaces — and sometimes this means going above ground.”Read more:Oxford proposes four-acre megaproject near Rogers Centre — including a second rail deck parkA study from the Ryerson City Building Institute in 2017 found that parkland in Toronto comprises 6.9 per cent of all land in Toronto’s downtown, with only seven parks larger than five hectares (12 acres) in size. Building over the rail corridors comes with challenges of its own, including issues of accessibility and co-ordinating ...
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