A Stay in the Interchange: Regenerative Cohousing in the Greater Toronto Area

Abstract

Satellite cities built around the 1960s across the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) represent the modernist belief in comprehensive architecture. The suburban arrangement of apartment towers, single-family bungalows, and warehouses – that once provided Toronto’s workforce population local access to affordable housing and stable employment – must now adapt to an ever expanding live-work pattern of a global city. Building on Koolhaas and Aureli’s theory of architectural congestion, the thesis reframes Toronto’s infill development of dense suburban homes not simply as isolated objects of market urbanism but more importantly as new pieces towards the possible intensification of pre-existing community relations, towards socioeconomic solidarity.

The thesis proposes a cohousing model to be situated alongside the many underused suburban malls within the GTA, using the sites’ potential as borderland between residential neighbourhoods and employment lands to rebuild new pathways for meaningful socioeconomic interaction. The design thesis relies on a two-part research process of 1) documenting the past – through census data, Google Maps Street View images, and a collection of journal photos that captures everyday suburban social life and 2) reimagining the future – through diagram analysis of analogous projects of urban morphology (Chapter 2) and building typology (Chapter 3) that captures the potential of urban redevelopment to preserve and/or heighten workforce population’s perception of community belonging. The contemporary issue of constant migration-and-outmigration in the GTA due in part to housing unaffordability is tackled in the thesis through cohousing homeownership, with the understanding that a singular architectural response to the concept of housing security – between home and migration, between permanence and transformation – is no final answer. But a key part in the on-going self-discovery of why we continuously decide to stay living-and-working within a specific community, to continuously participate in the political life of our chosen city, and on how the spirit of a comprehensive architecture can evolve in mediating this inner social desire.