EDITOR’S NOTE: Call to Earth is a NCS editorial sequence dedicated to reporting on the environmental challenges dealing with our planet, along with the options. Rolex’s Perpetual Planet Initiative has partnered with NCS to drive consciousness and schooling round key sustainability points and to encourage optimistic motion.
Downsview Airport, in northwest Toronto, has undergone a few transformations in its time. About 100 years ago, the primary airfield was constructed: a brief runway and an industrial constructing amongst farmers’ fields. It was the location of De Havilland Canada, a pioneering world aviation firm.
It turned a hub of warplane manufacturing throughout World War II, and within the early Nineties, the airfield was acquired by Bombardier, a Canadian aerospace producer. In 2024, it was shuttered, because the agency relocated.
But in early 2026, building begins on what would be the website’s largest evolution but. The 370-acre space is being developed into an city district housing greater than 50,000 residents and 75 acres of inexperienced and open house. It will turn out to be “YZD” –– a nod to the previous airport name signal –– a 30-year, $30-billion growth and one of many largest initiatives of its variety in North America.
The 2-kilometer (1.24-mile)-long runway, the location’s centerpiece, will turn out to be a pedestrianized park that hyperlinks seven neighborhoods. Each one might be distinct, with its personal housing, libraries, retailers, faculties and group facilities, however the airstrip will act because the “connective tissue” — tying all of it collectively whereas “respecting and celebrating the aerospace legacy of the site,” stated Derek Goring, CEO of Northcrest Developments, the agency main the undertaking.
He informed NCS that sustaining the historical past of the location was a key a part of Northcrest’s imaginative and prescient — and likewise a enormous benefit. “One of the biggest challenges with large-scale urban redevelopments is when you don’t have anything to start with, they can feel generic,” he stated. “We want to lean into what’s there and make as much use of it as possible. It helps bring character and it makes it more interesting and unique.”
Preserving the location’s historical past is not simply a sentimental resolution, it’s a sensible one by way of its environmental footprint.
“There’s a lot of embedded carbon in the existing buildings and rather than tearing them down and building everything new, there’s a big carbon benefit to retaining those buildings,” stated Goring.
In images: the second lives of former airports
The huge, industrial airport hangars, constructed between the 1950s and 1990s, might be maintained and repurposed into business buildings, serving movie manufacturing, mild manufacturing and clear tech. Their roofs might be coated in grass and crops, which the developer claims will assist to soak up rainwater and scale back the chance of flooding, whereas enhancing biodiversity inside the city middle.
While the runway is not going to be retained in its present kind, the concrete and asphalt it’s made out of will be reused as mixture for roads or pavements, stated Goring. Some different airports and military bases across Canada have been discovered to comprise “forever chemicals” that would contaminate groundwater. The builders stated that whereas a small a part of the YZD website “reflects its historic industrial and military past” they’ve employed specialised environmental consultants who will “help us understand and mitigate any legacy conditions,” and they’ll proceed to evaluate the location in collaboration with native authorities.
Landscape structure agency Michael van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA) is tasked with creating a design idea for the runway, after profitable an international competition for the undertaking in October. Its aim is to convey nature again into the house.
Emily Mueller De Celis, accomplice at MVVA, harks again to the historical past of the location earlier than it was an airfield, or agricultural land, and when it will have been a part of the Carolinian forest in southern Ontario. They wish to recreate native habitats and invite wildlife again into the location.
“The nature within the existing site had to be suppressed so that it was safe for aviation operations,” she defined, which meant deterring nesting birds regardless of its location alongside the Atlantic Flyway, a main migratory route.
“Re-naturalizing” the location can have massive advantages by way of water administration too, she stated. The YZD website is positioned on the excessive level of Toronto, between main watersheds. Through the design, MVVA desires to seek out methods of absorbing as a lot water as doable in order that it reduces flood danger downstream. This might be finished by strategic planting and the usage of bioswales (vegetated channels that acquire, filter and take up stormwater).
Environmental sustainability feeds into Northcrest’s larger image. The enormous growth will take three a long time to finish, so it must be forward-thinking and put together for extra excessive climate and the potential results of local weather change, stated Goring.
He added that Northcrest has been working with Danish panorama designers SLA — famed for his or her work on initiatives reminiscent of Copenhagen’s waste-to-energy plant turned ski slope — on the idea of “City Nature,” which is about creating a number of inexperienced house in city environments to enhance high quality of life.
The YZD website is already surrounded by a community of practice stations and subways, so the design will make use of those and encourage pedestrianization and car-free alternate options. There might be huge cycle lanes and a last-mile bus system.
“It doesn’t mean there won’t be cars — the runway is really the only car-free area,” stated Goring, “But we’re trying to (make) walking and cycling the easiest, safest and most convenient ways to get around.”
Repurposing deserted airfields into inexperienced parks and sustainable residing areas has turn out to be one thing of a world pattern, with examples reminiscent of Tempelhofer Feld in Berlin and the Ellinikon Metropolitan Park in Athens.
YZD is completely different, claims Goring. “The fact that our site sits at the geographic center of the largest metro area in Canada, with existing public transit infrastructure, means that it’s more of a city-building exercise than a park,” he stated.
Construction of the primary neighborhood, the 100-acre “Hangar District,” together with 3,000 new houses, will start early subsequent yr — with completion earmarked for 2031. It would be the first section of a 30-year transformation, with the districts constructed one after the other and the runway slowly evolving between all of them.
One of the most important challenges of the undertaking is its sheer scale and the time it would take to construct. Goring says they don’t have $30 billion on faucet, which is why they intend to construct in phases, investing, getting a return, and re-investing.
Over such a lengthy growth interval he expects present concepts and designs to evolve. The aim is to not be overly prescriptive from the get-go: “The world’s going to change a lot … (we’re not) trying to decide in 2025 what the future should be 20 or 30 years from now,” he stated.
“Ultimately, it’s about delivering a really high quality of life,” he added, and merging into the present city. “We want it to feel like a part of Toronto.”