In the Daniels Faculty's Integrated Urbanism Studio, students picked "design action zones" — areas of the city of Toronto where environmental, economic, and social pressures demand some form of design intervention. Working within those zones, student groups produced master plans that responded to the requirements of the international Green New Deal Superstudio. Lucy, Priyanka, Ashlin, and Jeff chose a site that was a little unorthodox: an uptown neighbourhood where the majority of the developable area is taken up by one of the city's largest graveyards, the York Cemetery and Funeral Centre.

"We were given the task of overlaying a bunch of maps and seeing how all of them coincided," Ashlin says. "Once we had chosen to look at open space, mobility, transit, and housing, we noticed one area that converged with all four of those layers. That was Yonge and Sheppard."

The group's Design Action Zone. (Click here to see a larger version.)

The group was captivated by the potential of the cemetery's vast green spaces. They decided to develop a master plan that would unlock that potential by opening up the cemetery to the surrounding community. Their intention was to make the cemetery the centre of community life for a new mid-rise neighbourhood, all without disturbing gravesites. "We wanted to respect the cemetery as a space and emphasize the threshold between it and the residential zone that was surrounding it," Priyanka says.

But that's not to say they left the cemetery completely untouched. The boldest proposal in the group's master plan is the addition of a series of new towers within the cemetery grounds. These wouldn't be residential towers; they would be vertical mausoleums, for high-density storage of human remains. "There needs to be some density for the dead, because there's only so much you can bury underground as the city continues to grow," Priyanka says.

The cemetery, with high-rise mausoleums.

Beyond helping solve capacity problems in the cemetery, the towers would serve another function: they would be tall enough that they would be visible throughout the surrounding neighbourhoods. Residents would constantly be reminded of the cemetery's presence. Lucy, Priyanka, Ashlin, and Jeff hoped this would help foster a healthy reciprocity between the living and the dead. "The idea was that if we create this holistic view about the circle of life, wellness, and health, that we could break down the fear of death by immersing people in it, in a positive way," Priyanka says.

Beneath the new mausoleum towers would be a suite of new public amenities designed to transform the cemetery from a single-purpose memorial site into a place where residents and mourners could coexist. The group split the site into four different focus areas, each with a different theme: fitness and recreation, food and nutrition, ecological health, and mental wellbeing.

Section view of some new mid-rise housing alongside the cemetery.

Within each zone, they proposed new residential density around the periphery of the cemetery. The new construction would consist of a mixture of different housing types — primarily midrise apartments and townhomes — in order to ensure that the local population would always be made up of people of different ages, cultures, and backgrounds.

An architectural folly mimics the look of the new mausoleum towers.

Each zone would also contain a series of interventions designed to blur the line between the community and the cemetery. In the "ecological health" zone, for instance, a series of pocket parks would extend south from the cemetery out into the community, creating a green boulevard that would draw residents into the cemetery space. The "mental health" zone contains architectural follies that mimic the visual language of the mausoleum towers.

Vendors operate market stalls alongside the cemetery.

The group also took pains to add new public amenities in the centre of the cemetery. Without trampling any gravesites, they found room in their master plan for a new greenhouse, an amphitheatre, a community garden, and an upgraded funeral home.

Instructor: Dina Sarhane