Quirkiness & Hiaton: In Conversation With The Ookwemin Minising Design Team

DEVELOPMENT PLANNING
June 05, 2026 by Julian Mirabelli   1K 

Quirkiness & Hiaton: In Conversation With The Ookwemin Minising Design Team

It is a very rare opportunity to be able to build a brand new neighbourhood on a brand new island on prime waterfront property near the heart of Canada’s largest metropolis, but that is precisely the opportunity that presented itself to the design team of the Ookwemin Minising Concept Plan. Recently approved by City Council, the concept plan is full of unique and innovative features not yet seen in the city, including a fully pedestrianized main artery, a natural and diverse public realm, flexible and heterogeneous built form, and an Indigenous-inspired concept that fully harmonizes all components of the plan.

A high-angle view looking north to Ookwemin Minising, image courtesy of Waterfront Toronto and CreateTO

We covered the details of the concept plan in a previous article here, and we had the rare opportunity to sit down together with the design team to discuss their innovative approach to the concept plan, and what sets it apart from many others in the city. Below is a transcript of our engrossing interview with Chris Glaisek, Chief Planning & Design Officer at Waterfront Toronto; Rasmus Astrup, Partner and Design Principal at SLA; Terence Radford, Principal Landscape Architect at Trophic Design; and Alfredo Caraballo, Partner at Allies & Morrison. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Axonometric view looking northeast to Ookwemin Minising, image courtesy of Waterfront Toronto and CreateTO

Julian Mirabelli (JM): I’d like to start at the very beginning; the naturalization of the Don River created this new island, an initial precinct plan was put in place, and then you were given this almost blank slate to work with. So how did you approach this site to begin with? What ideas did you pick up on?

Chris Glaisek (CG): Well, it wasn’t entirely blank. The site is a post-industrial site, but it does have some existing roads on it, two of which have already been rebuilt as part of the Biidaasige Park and Port Lands flood protection project. The park, since it opened, I think has proven to be a regional attraction and a really fantastic piece of landscape architecture that has informed a lot of the work that has come after. 

When we started the process of them designing the public streets and thinking about densities and new buildings, one of the principles was we wanted the quality and the approach to nature that had been established in the park to be reflected within the development of the blocks, so that we didn’t want typical-looking city streets. We wanted city streets to kind of extend that attitude towards nature co-existing with urbanism. And that’s where I think this team has done an amazing job of taking that idea and really running with it.

Rasmus Astrup (RA): We had an overall task which was to use the existing plan as a base layer. And on top of that, we were also hired to increase the density with up to 30%, which ended up at 27%. It was also to enhance the quality and contribute to the need of housing in Toronto. We dove into it and I would say that the logic behind our approach was to constantly try to push the boundaries of how you can gain an urban quality of space out of the street, converting them into a positive contributor to daily life. It was all a big collaboration between Trophic and us and Allies and GHD.

Alfredo Caraballo (AC): Yes, we achieved the 27% [increase in density] and the fundamental thing when we talk about density is that density immediately links the mind to, ‘okay this means more tall buildings’. We want to disassociate this, that density is not just tall buildings. We call it virtuous density because more density implies more people, more people implies more activities, more activities imply more active places and more active places bring more people. And this circle of our virtuous density creates cherished places. 

So it’s actually, at the end of the day, more homes in what is one of the top three best sites in the whole of North America. There is a civic duty to make the most out of it, and to create the best conditions possible for living there. So it’s not density for the city’s sake, it’s density to create a density of experiences and a diversity of experience that is, in a sense, what we feel that the current plan has achieved.

Centre Commons, Ookwemin Minising, image courtesy of Waterfront Toronto and CreateTO

JM: You talk about very lively neighbourhoods, a lot of density, bringing people in, and making it a very vibrant community, but the concept plan also really revolves around nature, and I know here in Toronto, those two things don’t always coexist with each other. How did you merge the idea of nature, and then these dense, vibrant communities together into this concept plan?

RA: What we always push is what we call, funny enough, city nature. It’s not real nature, it’s in the city, and it’s not competing with Biidaasige Park, which I actually think may be the only park in the world that deserves to be called real nature. That’s how good it is. But it’s driven by a fundamental belief that nature is what links all of us, but also this belief in that human need of being close to nature and sharing it. We felt that it was the right thing from the very beginning to enhance the quality of life and basically make some of the streets perform almost like a park, but it’s also the legacy of Biidaasige Park, that we need to make a synergy with that park.

Terence Radford (TR): We talked right from the beginning, as we were kind of developing our proposal for the project, about how do you build a community, especially over time, knowing that this wasn’t going to happen right away. As a part of that we talked about this concept of hiaton, which is a Wendat word which is often used to refer to a trail, but it’s also aligned with their word for writing. We had a lot of discussions about this idea that pathways and roadways conceptually for the Wendat are very much aligned with this story that you write on the land, and we had these discussions about what is the story we want to write on the land with this new public realm that we’re designing as part of Ookwemin Minising. What is the legacy that we want to leave for the next generation? What is this story we want to tell?

As an Indigenous firm, we are very much aligned with SLA, it was very much a nature-forward approach to it and the importance of access to land, to plants, and to trees in building community, and providing a public realm that becomes beloved. How do you grow a hundred-year-old tree in the street? That is something that we are trying to meet head on and say we can grow a 100-year-old tree, we can grow a great big oak in a gathering space for community as part of a streetscape.

Sketch of Ookwemin Minising, image courtesy of Waterfront Toronto and CreateTO.

JM: I want to come back to the concept you mentioned of growing streets, because that’s a central idea to this neighbourhood, and one that’s sort of new to Toronto. Could you elaborate a bit more on what that is?

RA: Growing streets have a character where it physically grows a tree, but it’s also a community that grows there. It’s your childhood memories. It’s all of the amazing activities, all the diversity of people that grow relationships and social synergies, so the responsibility of the street is not just to bring a car from A to B.

AC: The framework [of the Precinct Plan] creates ways of crossing, a series of streets that then we manipulated together, creating, with something that might look like a slightly straight road, a series of experiences that then can create a diverse typology. That is one of the most fundamental aspects of the plan. You have this compression and expansion: you have a plaza that opens up toward the sunrise, then you have a point of compression, then the expanse again because there is a heritage building, then there is a tall building that then goes down to a three-storey building that goes down to a mid-rise building. There is literally a choreography of massing, space, and landscape. That is the beauty of how the team have worked together, that you cannot split apart one from another. And that you have that diversity of choice, the way in which we have composed and shaped this growing street provides that diversity.

Centre Commons, Ookwemin Minising, image courtesy of Waterfront Toronto and CreateTO

JM: In the concept plan, there is a section about a kit of parts, where you have this range of building typologies from small scale buildings up to towers. It’s a much more fine-grained approach than I think we’ve seen in a lot of the masterplans here in Toronto. How did you develop that kit of parts?

AC: Because we’re coming from London, that is a very heterogeneous city. You have tall things next to small things next to large things, and this is part of the richness we have there, it comes from that diversity, that they introduce a diversity of choice. We felt it was very important that this new place have that diversity almost in every block. It was one of a few rules that were brought in the plan, that each of these blocks needs to provide diversity because each block will be a phase. So, in every phase, you provide diversity.

What is fixed is the public realm, but the massing needs to have a degree of flexibility. Hence, there’s a kit of parts that each developer and each architect will be working with in the lifetime of this deliverable process. These pieces can go like that, but it could be like that, or like that, as long as you provide a diversity of spaces and a diversity of buildings. And also the gaps in between buildings are super important because they bring daylight to the courtyards and the public realm, but also allow views across different blocks depending on this porosity that we feel is going to be remarkable.

RA: What we are trying to do here is to foster creativity within a certain set of rules while still having enough flexibility for the developer, which we believe is actually an asset. There is a waterfront, there is a high street, there is a a centre spine that is for the community that will feel almost like a park, and then there’s a frontage next to Biidaasage Park. That’s what you need in a city, you need richness and diversity. And then not to forget, there is a whole Indigenous layer that’s another asset and another history.

Sketch of Ookwemin Minising, image courtesy of Waterfront Toronto and CreateTO.

CG: We haven’t talked that much about the two really big moves. One of them is to make Centre Street into a central common and have it be for pedestrians and bikes only, not for cars other than emergency vehicle access. Which is a pretty big change from some of the earlier thinking, and I think a very exciting evolution in the plan. And then the other is Ookwemin Street and the idea of the Sandbar Trail, which is to try to bring back some of the pre-colonial historical elements into view for people.

TR: That is exactly what I was going to speak to. As an Indigenous practice, we always talk about that the land isn’t devoid of meaning. It is deeply embedded with history of the First Peoples of Canada, and this site is as well. We have a sacred bundle that we were gifted when we started this project, and that included Biidaasige Park, that included all the work that’s been done on the island today, that includes the industrial buildings and the remnants of that colonial history and the industrialization of Toronto’s waterfront.

Part of that story is the sandbar that stretches from the Scarborough Bluffs out to the Toronto Islands that formed over thousands of years, as well as a sandbar that sat at the division between the Ashbridges Bay wetland, one of the largest freshwater wetlands in North America, and Lake Ontario, that formed our beloved inner harbour. The richness of that landscape is what drew First Nations peoples to this area. Ashbridges Bay was filled with wild rice, fish, birds, it was incredibly productive and abundant hunting grounds. That trail provided access to all that, as well as access out to the Toronto Islands, which were connected by the sandbars and were an incredibly important spiritual place, a place for healing, a place where births happened. So this land is embedded with that deep meaning for First Nations.

And the reason Toronto exists is because it built off the importance of those landscape features, of those land relations that existed. It provided a safe harbour for ships, and it allowed for the growth of the biggest metropolitan city in Canada. The development of the Port Lands fuelled that industry that was provided by the St. Lawrence waterway and allowed for that connection back to Europe for trade, and that really spurred the development of the country from that point. And so we see this land as being just embedded with a deep, deep history and a lot of meaning that we’re trying to reveal through Ookwemin Street as this heritage corridor, where we’re trying to reveal the history of that Sandbar Trail and tell that story of First Nations land and the development of city and the country.

Ookwemin Street at Ookwemin Minising, image courtesy of Waterfront Toronto and CreateTO

JM: I wanted to touch on the concept of quirkiness that you’ve included as a defining feature, and maybe you can elaborate a bit more on that and how it’s reflected in the concept plan.

RA: We like cities to be a place you can explore, a place where you can meet someone and say, hey, let’s meet at the fountain. It’s never to say, let’s meet 200 metres down the straight line. Quirkiness is not just to make things quirky, it’s to make them more spatially intriguing, and thereby more qualitative, because the quirkiness is also driven by sun, by view corridors, and by physical elements, so we have an approach of quirkiness for the diversity of spaces.

AC: This is something that we have been doing in our practice for decades. That actually comes from a landscape tradition, we call it urban picturesque. It’s the composition of compressions and expansions that create a journey of discovery that you find in cities that are not gridded. There is a balance between rationality that makes something deliverable, but at the same time delight, because it gives you some surprises.

RA: I also want to say that from [the Indigenous collaboration], it’s part of the entire design approach, which is also about the flow, the flow of water, the flow of people, the flow of nature. So there’s a different hierarchy in this plan that actually also creates that quirkiness. We are now making decisions that would influence the next hundred years. So, we need to make the right ones. And we are trying to consider other values than just the rational behind a squared plot.

Sketch of Ookwemin Minising, image courtesy of Waterfront Toronto and CreateTO.

Ookwemin Minising is now moving on through the next phases of the planning and design process, and UrbanToronto will continue to follow progress on these developments. In the meantime, you can learn more about it from our Database file, linked below. If you’d like, you can join in on the conversation in the associated Project Forum thread or leave a comment in the space provided on this page.

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