Fanshawe students reimagine St. Thomas rail “brownfield”
Students participating in Fanshawe College School of Design’s 2024 Environmental Design Competition are being credited for generating not only fresh ideas to redevelop St. Thomas downtown railway lands but also for kick-starting the process to create the city’s secondary plan for the downtown brownfield.
“This is a start to that,” Mayor Joe Preston said after the students’ presentations at Caso Station on April 6. The mayor said he wants to move “fast” and promised to share copies of all the students’ projects with council members and city staff, with hopes the secondary planning process gets underway this year.
“We can’t doddle,” added Mayor Preston. “We didn’t doddle on our strategic plan that got us huge industrial great gains. We didn’t doddle on what we’re already doing on housing growth and road growth.
“As a city, we have to move everything forward at the same pace,” he added. “We have this great big empty piece of land in the middle of our city. Now, it could just be green, or it could be more. What we’re seeing here today, it could be more.”
Environmental design and planning students Ethan Eansor and Stuart MacGregor won first-place honors and a $2,000 cash prize for their Connection project, reimagining railways lands bounded by Talbot Street to the north, First Avenue to the east, Wellington Street to the south, and Ross Street to the west.
First Runner Up and Peoples Choice honors and $2,500 went to Andrew Akins, Hannah Glinz, Catherine Holmes and Bryar Pace for their On Track project. Third Place and $1,000 was claimed by Carlie Price, Emily Scappin and Liam Zelinski for their St. Thomas Central project.
Fanshawe Professor William Pol organized the competition. About 25 entries were received and a panel of independent judges considered presentations by finalists at CASO Station on April 6. Cash prizes for the ninth-annual event were sponsored by Doug Tarry Homes.
“In this case, it’s all railway land, owned by the Railway Museum and the Railway Group,” Mayor Preston explained. “They’re having deep conversations with Doug Tarry. So we’d love to put them all together, and that’s kind of where this starts, and say what would the secondary plan look like. It has to be a mixture of urban uses.”
The railway lands in the city core are a prime example of the 30,000 to 64,000 sites across Canada – including some 25,000 in Ontario – that are classified as brownfields, or vacant and underutilized properties contaminated by past industrial or commercial activities.
St. Thomas railway history dates to the completion of the London and Port Stanley Railway in 1856. It culminates with railway developments in the late 19th and early 20th century, when up to eight different railway companies ran over 100 trains a day through what was then known as the 'Railway Capital of Canada'.
Today, the cost to remediate the downtown railways land is estimated to surpass $5 million. Restoration of historic buildings on the site may also carry a hefty price tag.
“This property is a gold mine,” said Walter Kehm, the competition’s lead adjudicator and principal at Walter H. Kehm and Associates. Mr. Kehm was director of the School of Landscape Architecture at the University of Guelph from 1986 t0 2000. “Every developer wants to get into this downtown property.”
Mr. Kehm and others admired how the students’ presentations imagined the creation of family oriented green spaces, a connection to Elgin County’s trail system, and mixed-use development.
“We have such a need for affordable housing,” said Mr. Kehm. “When these Fanshawe students graduate, their starting salaries may be $48,000-$58,000.
“If they have to put 20 percent to 30 percent down in cash, how long is it going to take a student to save $200,000 to $300,000 to be eligible for a mortgage,” Mr. Kehm asked. “Forget traditional suburban models. There’s a desperate need for rent-geared-to-income, for affordable housing, for co-operative housing, different housing types.”
Doug Tarry Limited (DTL) is in the process of acquiring an eight-acre triangular portion of the downtown railway lands from Elgin County Railway Museum. The firm has already dedicated three years of planning to the project, although it has yet to submit formal plans.
“What I love is the fact that the students have an open palette,” Mr. Tarry said after considering the presentations. “They had no pre-conceived notions … it’s just how can we re-envision this space.
“What I’m seeing today is that we’re clearly getting the greenspace concepts and the trail concept,” Mr. Tarry continued. “What I am a little bit concerned about is that we still have to have densification. So how do we do it, where do we do it, how do we do it cost effectively because we have to consider affordability and we still have to make a profit too.
“Part of the challenge now is how do you tell them (bordering property owners) you’re going to do this,” he said. “This is a once in a century opportunity to reimagine what’s going to happen down there. That’s probably why the secondary plans becomes important: this is the preferred use for these lands. So, you want to have all these ownership stakeholders at the table to go through the process because you want buy-in.”
Joe Konecny, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Aylmer Express
