Urban Strategies is part of a team assisting SickKids with its Project Horizon initiative, a campus-wide visioning and master planning exercise. Project Horizon will establish a phased redevelopment program to replace aging facilities, accommodate growth, and guide critical investment at SickKids over the next decade. The new Patient Support Centre (PSC) at 175 Elizabeth is a critical enabling project for broader transformational change envisioned by Project Horizon. The PSC will consolidate education, administration and patient support services, and create integral swing space to allow decanting, demolition and investment in a new Clinical Care Centre on SickKids University Avenue property.

Urban Strategies has been managing the combined Rezoning and Official Plan Amendment Application for the PSC, providing planning and urban design justification, shadow analysis, community engagement, and coordinating other inputs from a large multidisciplinary consultant team. By proactively working with City staff leading up to and after our first submission on February 28, 2018, we were able to expedite approvals and quickly navigate a number of challenging site constraints related to functional servicing, protected heritage views of City Hall, and SickKids’ helicopter flight path, among others. At the time of writing, the project just received initial approvals at Toronto & East York Community Council on July 4, 2018, an unprecedented 4 months after our first submission.

Image by: B+H