Sudbury’s current spatial figure is visually and experientially dominated by the downtown location and the sprawling footprints of its active railways and train yards, simultaneously operating as urban impediments and dramatic reminders of the city’s industrial past. The presence of these infrastructures pose hard, sclerotic limits on the future livability of the city: not only do they spatially constrain the growing downtown business district and limit available and convenient land for housing and new public functions, but they also segment the city fabric and preclude the establishment of vital connections between residential neighborhoods, industrial areas, commercial zones, and the public spaces needed to make growth sustainable and urban life desirable. This project argues that addressing Sudbury’s urban future cannot be reduced to a singular architectural vision for the downtown core, nor can it be reduced to a site-less, replication of prototypical elements. Instead, the project assumes a series of multi-scalar operations ranging from broad zoning and street grid re-formulations to incentivize new, dense and programmatically hybridized spatial fabrics; to specific and surgical design changes to key junctures of the spatial fabric. Taken together, the multi-disciplinary design strategies add up to a projected vision for 2050 which is but one of a range of potential outcomes. Implemented through six phases, each of which combine large-scale policy and infrastructural changes with more localized fabric manipulations, the project aims to build towards its goals successively, with each step building on the gains of the prior whilst embracing the flexibility inherent to the urban condition. The specific vision illustrated here is therefore one potential extrapolation of the proposed design and planning operations.

URBAN-SCALE CHALLENGES:

URBAN-SCALE STRATEGIES:

NETWORKED CONNECTIVITY

Inherent to the proposal is a focus on linking together formerly disparate fragments of the city through the promotion of human-scaled infrastructures and building fabrics. The metaphor of the synapse invoked by the title suggests a framework for understanding this drive for urban connectivity as a networked condition, one in which mixed-use building fabrics and multi-modal transit infrastructures work in tandem. In the scheme, a network of trails and paths intended for pedestrians, cyclists, and others such as skiers during the winter months, is crafted through the agglomeration of existing trails, street-side bicycle lanes, and the careful threading of paths through the re-purposed rail-yards at the center of the city. Although these trails conveniently converge on a newly articulated “Downtown Junction,” replete with a new train station and public amenities such as a new open food market and esplanade, the broader implication is that this exercise in nodal, programmed place-making is situated as a knot within a larger system of connectivity: a system which could even extend beyond the city itself and to link to other cities, infrastructures, and existing rural trails. Not only does such an armature provide a wealth of new public space for outdoor recreating, connecting to nature, and social gathering, it also functions as an arterial commuter connection for sustainable non-motorized traffic.

RE-PURPOSED INFRASTRUCTURE

To facilitate such a broad campaign of networked connectivity, the city of Sudbury would greatly benefit from productive engagement with the Canadian Pacific Railroad to re-locate the active rail-yards to a location farther from the city center. While this is undoubtedly a difficult position to take from a political standpoint, the spatial and programmatic benefits are immense. This project proposes that the rail yards, if made inactive, could be retrofitted into a unique and vibrant landscape park, even as it abuts an active rail line which is to be maintained for freight and passenger use. Spatially and aesthetically taking cues from a landscape urbanist lineage of industrial landscape regeneration, the design would not seek to paper over the former industrial land with a rosy green paintbrush, but instead re-purpose the old rails as edges of pathways and guidelines for ground-cover and planting decisions. Old rail cars, additionally, could be converted for temporary, tactical uses such as galleries, particularly to showcase local and indigenous artists, or as market stalls for local farmers to sell their produce during farm market days in the adjoining festival plaza. Furthermore, structures such as the engine house and the locomotive turntable could be re-purposed as urban features: the former as a cafe and brewery along its Western frontage, and as a facility for crop harvest and community farm tool storage along its Eastern frontage, and the latter as a central water feature for a new public plaza. Re-locating the yards, while keeping the railway line active, would not only open up a broad swath of land in the middle of the city to new public spaces for social gathering and recreation, but would also make track crossings far easier to integrate into the current city fabric. This increased connectivity would thereby encourage high density and programmatically hybridized districts of new housing, commerce, and industry to develop on both sides of the yard not in spatial isolation, but in productive conversation with one another.

NEW SPATIAL FABRICS

While the potential re-purposing of the rail-yards as an urban landscape is rendered here with great detail and specificity, the surrounding building fabrics, which inevitably will be driven by compromise between public regulation and subsidy and private development, are treated here with a more systemic lens. A range of new hybrid-program building typologies are introduced to help guide the development of two new urban neighborhoods which flank the new railway park: identified here as “North Yards” and “South Yards.” Both neighborhoods are intended to serve a mix of occupational uses (North Yards skewing more towards light industry and loft type spaces and South Yards more toward ground level retail, office, and dining), as well as a diverse range of residents through the provision of urban housing types of different physical scales and presumed price points. These typologies are intended not as proposed prototype architectural solutions, but instead as visual illustrations of potential massing and programmatic strategies to guide the gradual development of these new building fabrics. While any individual building might differ in its specific architectural articulation (with a scheme of this scale, the project argues that such decisions are best left open to individual interpretation by each building’s eventual designer, such ideal footprints, massings, programmatic combinations, and levels of visual porosity can be effectively and flexibly written into a form-based code governing new development in these districts.

Phasing + IMPLEMENTATION: