Jane's Walk

The final report is here! 
Walkability in Toronto’s High-Rise Neighbourhoods, by Professor Paul M. Hess, and Jane Farrow of Jane’s Walk. These walkability studies are the first of their kind in North America. They were jointly funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Toronto Community Foundation (TCF).
Click here to download PDF versions of the Walkability Executive Summary or the Walkability Full Report.

For the past three years, the Jane’s Walk team has been conducting unprecedented studies of walkability in suburban highrise neighbourhoods in Toronto, and has developed an acclaimed research model and resource toolkit in the process. The overall goal of this research project is to help better understand the ways people get around Toronto’s high-rise apartment neighbourhoods, especially by walking. Building on the arguments Jane Jacobs espoused more than 40 years ago, the importance of creating good places for people to walk is now increasingly being recognized by transportation experts and public officials. Planners and architects have pushed the idea of “New Urbanism,” arguing that new neighbourhoods should be built more like the Annex or Cabbagetown neighbourhoods of downtown Toronto, with connected streets and houses that directly front sidewalks. Public health researchers and officials even suggest that the ways we are designing our cities has contributed to the recent rise in physical inactivity and obesity because people no longer walk as part of their regular, daily activities, and there is an increasing move toward the idea of “complete streets” that consider all modes of travel in street design.

These discussions, however, are usually focused on downtown areas or new developments in the outer suburbs. This study is intended to put more focus on the many people living in Toronto’s inner suburbs.  As people interested in making better walking environments, we believe that Toronto’s high-rise neighbourhoods are enormously important.

These types of places were planned and developed in the 1960s and 1970s. At that time, it was assumed that most of the people living in the new apartments would not have children, would move to houses as soon as they could, and would be able to drive to the places they needed to go. The single-family subdivisions in these areas were, at least, designed so that children could walk to school, but the apartments on big arterial streets were not places designed for walking.

Today, however, a different population is living in them, often people with limited incomes, people with children and complicated travel needs, and people who do not own a car or who only have access to a car part of the time. In other words, neighbourhoods that were designed for cars now house people that must rely on walking and transit to carry out their lives. This study is intended to better understand how these residents get around their neighbourhoods, especially by walking. Our goal is to share this information with the people who live in them so they can better advocate for improvements.

This is a good time for residents to make clear what they want and need because of policies and programs being developed by the City of Toronto. The City is working with local community organizations and developing policies and programs for 13 Priority Neighbourhoods that include many of the high-rise apartment areas. It is adopting a “Walking Strategy” to “make Toronto a great walking city” that explicitly includes these areas.  It is currently developing a “Tower Renewal” program that also promises to bring improvements to apartment areas. Finally, the City has an ambitious transit plan, “Transit City,” that could bring light-rail and other transportation improvements to some of these neighbourhoods. All these initiatives offer some potential for changing apartment neighbourhoods into better places to live.

The authors do not represent the city and we do not know what will become of these various initiatives, but we strongly believe that better information about how residents use their neighbourhoods is crucially important to making positive change. For these efforts to be successful and make Toronto a better place for its residents, we believe that the residents themselves must have a strong voice and play a central role in decision-making. We are doing this work to provide both residents and the City with information to help foster this objective.