Led by PUBLIC WORK, in partnership with The Michael Young Family Foundation and Evergreen, this unique city-building initiative seeks to revitalize University Avenue as the defining civic landscape of Toronto. First envisioned through PUBLIC WORK’s TOcore Parks and Public Realm Vision, the proposal demonstrates how strategic street redesign can create significant new parkland, balance mobility, and reshape the daily experience of the city. The result is a bold and timely plan rooted in today’s urban priorities: social equity, climate resilience, public health, community wellbeing, and urban vitality.

University Park transforms the east side of the avenue into a generous linear park featuring new public gathering spaces, a continuous multi-use trail, and a rehabilitated urban tree canopy. This is achieved simply by consolidating traffic to four lanes on the west side of the avenue. North of College Street, traffic around Queen’s Park Crescent is consolidated to the east side, enabling the removal of the west roadway. This strategic move creates significant new park space and seamlessly unites Queen’s Park North with the University of Toronto’s campus public realm into a singular, cohesive civic landscape. New plantings are designed to be ecologically rich, climate-adaptive, and immersive, using resilient native species that bring year-round texture, colour, and enhanced outdoor thermal comfort through all seasons.

The core project team is working closely with the City of Toronto, local institutions, and community stakeholders to bring this transformative vision to life. Public life surveys are shaping a detailed understanding of how the existing space performs, and traffic modelling and access analyses will confirm the feasibility of proposed network changes to the street. University Park is poised to become Toronto’s next great civic space—an ambitious and inspiring public realm that brings nature to the city to enrich the environment, strengthen community life, and energize downtown for generations to come.