Sherbourne Park: Forest, Water and Green Lawns

Sherbourne Common is both major civic amenity and poetic stormwater treatment infrastructure, and a key component of the renaissance of Toronto’s waterfront. The park seamlessly interweaves stormwater management, landscape, architecture, program, and art and is the first Canadian park to integrate a UV purification facility for neighbourhood- wide stormwater treatment.

Sherbourne Common, transformed from a brownfield site along a neglected stretch of Toronto’s waterfront, transcends the conventional definition of a park by interweaving a stormwater treatment facility with landscape, architecture, engineering, and public art. As the newest addition to Toronto’s revitalized waterfront, Sherbourne Common is both an outdoor living room for the new emerging mixeduse and residential East Bayfront community and a multi-faceted urban park that is intended to serve the broader constituency of downtown Toronto.

Conceived as a catalytic node along the waterfront, Sherbourne Common was built in advance of private development. The commitment to public realm was paramount to the client’s vision for the regeneration of Toronto’s waterfront. Sherbourne Common along with other waterfront public realm contributions are becoming well used beautiful moments along the lakeshore strung together with a new waterfront promenade and a future grand boulevard. This is strong evidence of the significance and power of building public realm in generating new vibrant urban communities on postindustrial lands.

In absence of the future community that will regularly occupy the park and the future buildings that will eventually provide the park with enriching edges, Sherbourne Common has already become a wildly popular waterfront park, proving out the importance of flexibility and diversity as essential principles in the design of the park. Directly adjacent to the park, a new 3,000 student campus has just opened and the first of several mixed-use/ residential buildings that will begin to bracket the park is now under construction.

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Materials provided by American Society of Landscape Architects