Suburbs Reversed: Reinventing Street Frontage Along Suburban Arterials

The view from many of Toronto’s suburban arterial roads is of a continuous “wall” of backyard fences formed by the residential subdivisions that turn their back to the street. This so-called reversed lot condition is the very representation of an insulated and segregated suburbia. Recently, the City of Toronto has developed a policy that calls for midrise density along its avenues and suburban arterials. Eglinton Avenue, where the city’s first LRT is under construction, has a pre-existing public street front that makes the inserting of urban density with mid-rise development plausible. In contrast, the proposed Sheppard and Finch LRT run along avenues fronted mostly by reversed lots. An alternate scheme for introducing density is therefore required for these suburban avenues where building types, configurations, and patterns of parcelization are varied. This thesis examines latent patterns of these challenging sites and proposes a speculative architectural framework which mediates further urbanization and rebalances the sprawling residential enclaves.