A team of University of Guelph and Toronto Metropolitan University students recently won the C40 Reinventing Cities [1] competition for Toronto.

The competition invited students to collaborate with global cities to propose holistic planning approaches for more sustainable and thriving urban neighbourhoods. The design competition site featured Thorncliffe Park [2], Toronto, adjacent to the Don River Valleys and Ravines, which is filled with young, diverse immigrant communities with development plans for a new transit hub along the expanding TTC’s Ontario Line.

Flowlines, the winning project, was designed by "SixPod". This multi-disciplinary team included University of Guelph landscape architecture students Emily Pham, Krish Jain, and Ryan De Jong and urban planning students Reid Hega, Bailey Hansen and Rafay Choudri from Toronto Metropolitan University. Afshin Ashari, assistant professor in landscape architecture from the University of Guelph, and Hernán Bianchi Benguria, lecturer in urban planning at Toronto Metropolitan University, were the project advisors.

Image:  SixPod Team and Advisors.

Image: Ontario Line Perspective. 

The design process included multiple site visits and conducting interviews with community members. The project’s interventions were designed after researching the surrounding context, environment conditions, future development plans, and community needs. SixPod’s design reflects the multitude of flows that interweave in Thorncliffe Park. These flows include hydrology, ecology, social/culture, transportation, art and business.

Learn more about the winning SixPod project on the C40 Cities website [3].