Microcity: Rehabilitating St. James Town, Toronto's First Towers-in-the-Park Community

The 1960s in Toronto marked a turn in the city's housing typology from a "City of Homes" to a "City of Towers." The high-rise apartment typology emulated Le Corbusier's housing form in Europe and was the darling of planners and developers. This new urban vision for high density living adopted the moniker of "Towers in the Park" and was based on the act of setting tall apartment towers in the centre of a city block surrounded by a lush green landscape. What was meant to be a refuge for the middle class, however, soon transformed into vertical villages for the low-income and newly arrived immigrants. The towers have defaulted to crumbling pieces of concrete and masonry, and their parks have diminished to patchy lawns and crumbled paving.