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What we have been able to do here is take a wasteland that's
on the edge of downtown and connect it into the fabric
of the city as a real genuine Toronto community.
It's going to be full of people and shops.
It's going to have bars and restaurants on a sunny Northern
side of a big wide Queen's Quay and a beautiful park,
which is what we're standing in here, Corktown Common,
which is really the central feature for the community.
This is a new neighborhood,
created essentially from scratch.
There's a balance within it.
It has residential.
It has affordable housing components.
It has student housing for the college.
It has a YMCA, and so on, and retail and commercial spaces.
This was not a simple project in that this has to be
a functioning flood-protection berm that protects not only this
neighborhood, but actually protects downtown Toronto
from a hurricane event.
These brownfields have sat historically in the flood plane
of the Don River and found to be, over time,
less and less useful.
And at the moment we're at about 1.3 billion dollars worth
of development that we've been able to attract
into the West Donlands.
The residential community will be able to flow quite nicely
into the central lawn area here and it really
is framed by a lot of trees.
One of the great features is that Corktown Common connects
to the Lower Don Trail System underneath the railway and that
makes it part of the entire ravine system of Toronto,
directly down to the waterfront.
There's an extension of the streetcar line.
We have bicycle systems, pedestrian systems,
and we have play systems for children.
Recycling the stormwater on site to feed the marsh.
Photovoltaic cells on the pavilion behind me.
Reuse of recyclable materials in the actual construction
of this project.
We planted native trees and shrubs.
That's why we put in the kind of upland trees and forests,
because it's an extension of the Don River ecosystem.
We have a marsh ecology here that's already thriving.
We have fish and frogs in that space.
We've been able to, in fact, tremendously create economic
value in what was a wasteland.