Super Eco

Photo credit: jbcurio, flickr

According to the City of Toronto, over half the people in the city live in concrete highrises. Unfortunately most of those buildings are reaching the end of their lifespan, creating environmental wastelands.

But there's hope for these monoliths in the form of a two-year pilot project that will retrofit a handful of buildings to create environmentally and people focused neighborhoods out of areas that many people fear might become gang-ruled territories. 

Called the Mayor's Tower Renewal project the four-site pilot project aims to "drive broad environmental, social, economic, and cultural change by improving Toronto’s concrete apartment towers and the neighbourhoods that surround them."

Some of the specific problems and solutions include:

• Concrete towers waste energy, so they will be encased in external cladding with high-speed Internet wiring and garbage separation chutes.
• A 200 unit building emits 1200 tonnes of greenhouse gases a year, so the project is considering green energy installations, grey water recycling and "smart" metering.
• With energy costs are rising, the goal is to eventually take buildings off Toronto's energy grid altogether using on-site renewable energy.
  

• Since the green space is underutilized, it will get converted into urban agriculture, using the Federation of City Farms model as an example.
  
• Many of the neighborhoods are outside the city center and require the use of a car, but the city is exploring new high speed transit to connect all of the city's neighborhoods.
• Traditionally these concrete neighborhoods are isolated, so the city will allow development and construction of small businesses to give neighbors a place to congregate and interact.
• Many new-Canadian families cram themselves into small spaces, so the city may allow vertical and horizontal expansion of the buildings to open up the units and create more space for families.

Toronto has the second highest number of these types of developments in North America. Looking to what London, Berlin and Moscow have already done, the city hopes to turn an environmental wasteland into a green paradise.