Kensington, located in downtown Toronto, is a dynamic and culturally diverse community. The result of years of successive waves of immigration, the community also boasts a mixture of residential, commercial and institutional land uses. The redevelopment of the George Brown College site in the heart of the market area provides an excellent example of how Kensington citizens participate in local planning decisions, and the challenges and obstacles ethnocultural diversity pose to that process. The redevelopment of George Brown College, and the Kensington community, are the subjects of this chapter.

Defining Kensington is in some ways a very personal task. Kensington is like a small, old-country village within the City of Toronto. It is primarily a low- income neighbourhood that has long been an immigrant settlement reception area. The community is also a popular tourist destination for visitors to Toronto, as well as Torontonians themselves. It is a handy market area for people in the surrounding neighbourhoods. It is also a trendy, bohemian, urban enclave that attracts artists and professionals. At the same time, Kensington is "just" a neighbourhood set against other neighbourhoods within Toronto’s urban core (see Map 4.1). The definition of what Kensington is, therefore, ultimately depends on your perspective.

MAP 4.1: Kensington in the former City of Toronto

Physically, Kensington is bounded by Bathurst Street, College Street, Spadina Avenue, and Dundas Street West (see Map 4.2). The community’s interior is dominated by a shopping artery that has evolved along Kensington Avenue, through Baldwin Street and along Augusta Avenue. Here the shopper can find everything from bulk beans, whole fish, fresh cheese, fruit and vegetables, to vintage clothes and fine tailored men’s suits. Like many older downtown communities, parking is at a premium on the narrow streets. This closeness is further accentuated by the canopies and displays of goods from the various shops that spill into the sidewalks. The result is a jostling, dense and lively community.

The diversity and life of the Kensington market neighbourhood are owed in large part to its multicultural mix. This multiculturalism evolved with the changing immigration patterns Canada as a whole has undergone over the last century, and today is seen in the juxtaposition of cultures in the local shops, housing and street life found in Kensington. With each wave of immigration came new businesses and new neighbours, while at the same time evidence of previous groups lingered in the community. What has evolved is a layered multiculturalism that can be peeled back and discovered with an understanding of Kensington’s history as a diverse community.

The Kensington neighbourhood, as its British name suggests, started out as an Anglo-Saxon residential community on what was then the western edge of the City of Toronto. Rows of middle class homes were built in the 1870s along streets with typically British names: Oxford, Kensington, St. Andrews, Baldwin. "For thirty years streets were kept tidy, lawns kept manicured, and the eventual conversion of the neighbourhood into a street market could not have seemed less likely" (Markson and Clarke, 1977: 50).

The community underwent a major transformation in the early 1900s, as Jewish immigrants from Central and Southern Europe moved westward from an earlier immigrant receiving area into Kensington. British residents were moving to more affluent parts of the city, and this made room for newcomers and what became a very swift ethnic shift in the community. To provide but one example: in 1901 Kensington Place (a dense, narrow lane of row houses that formed the core of Kensington’s residential area), was 80 per cent Anglo-Saxon. By 1911, it was 100 per cent Jewish (Harney and Troper, 1975: 26). Why large numbers of Jewish immigrants were attracted to the area is wrapped up in the complex causes of internal immigrant settlement patterns. Prejudice from the Anglo-Saxon business community (Markson and Clarke, 1977) and changes in commercial and street railway patterns (Harney and Troper, 1975) were likely contributing factors.

The most notable legacy this Jewish migration into Kensington left was the creation of what has become Kensington Market. "The Market was born, having its beginnings in the hand carts pushed through the streets of the area by Jewish merchants. Eventually the hand carts came to rest on the postage stamp lawns of the homes on Kensington Avenue" (St. Stephen’s, 1980: 4). This cart-style market evolved into shops, often created out of the existing living rooms and parlors of the old British row houses, with the store owners living behind or above their businesses. The market quickly became known as the Jewish Market, and indeed some older residents and patrons still refer to it as such.

By the 1920s, 80 per cent of the city’s Jewish population (35,000 at the time) lived in or around Kensington (Myrvold, 1993), and Jews continued to dominate the Kensington neighbourhood until after World War II. Postwar immigration brought large numbers of Ukrainians, Hungarians, Italians and Portuguese into Kensington. Aside from the Portuguese, though, the majority within these new groups lived on streets surrounding Kensington, and therefore had a more limited influence on the community’s development. By the 1960s, many of these post-war immigrants had moved north and west, leaving Portuguese from the Azores as the major ethnic group in Kensington (Myrvold, 1993: 7). The Portuguese influence on the community had a lasting effect on the area, characterized by the shops and restaurants they opened as well as their settlement in the surrounding residential area (St. Stephen’s, 1980). During this period, the Portuguese newcomers repaired many houses and repainted them bright primary colors of blue, red, green, and yellow. Evidence of this infusion of color can still be seen on some of the houses in the neighbourhood.

By the 1970s, Chinatown was expanding westward. Although Chinatown itself centres around Spadina Avenue and Dundas Street today (an area adjacent to Kensington), this migration introduced another layer of diversity into the Kensington community. Over the years, the proximity to Chinatown, along with the presence of high density housing populated by Chinese seniors, has meant that Chinese have become a dominant group in Kensington.

Kensington continued to be an immigrant reception area for Toronto throughout the 1970s and 1980s, adding further to the diversity of the community. As was explained in Chapter Three, federal immigration policy had significantly changed by 1975, allowing the entry of immigrants from a wide range of countries previously considered undesirable. New immigrants from the Caribbean, India, southeast Asia and Latin America settled in Kensington at this time. Diverse immigration into the community continues today, with newcomers mostly from Africa and Asia.

The community that has evolved over the last century in Kensington is noteworthy for its ethnocultural diversity. In Kensington, the immigrant population outnumbers the Canadian-born by nearly a ratio of 2:1 -- 60 per cent are immigrants, 33 per cent are Canadian-born and 6 per cent are non-permanent residents (Statistics Canada, 1998). Of that immigrant population, half (50 per cent) are newcomers, arriving after 1981 (see Figure 4.1).

Consistent with the increased diversity that more open federal immigration policies fostered after the 1970s, the immigrant population that resides in Kensington comes from a variety of countries. As Table 4.1 illustrates, the largest group of immigrants in Kensington comes from China. With the exception of Portugal, Asian countries dominate the top half of the list of places of birth among immigrants in Kensington. This corresponds with immigration data for Canada in general, where European immigration has been steadily declining in favour of Asian immigration. When recent immigrants are isolated from the immigrant population in Kensington, immigration patterns are even more concentrated -- over 70 per cent of recent immigrants are from China or Viet Nam.

Three other important indicators of Kensington’s ethnocultural diversity are ethnicity, visible minorities and language. In Kensington, over half of the residents claiming a single ethnic origin were Chinese (63 per cent), with Portuguese a distant second (15 per cent), followed by Vietnamese (4 per cent). The balance of the population is scattered in small proportions among a range of ethnic groups. Data on ethnicity is complemented in the most recent 1996 Census with data on visible minorities. In Kensington, 63 per cent of the total population is a member of a visible minority group (Statistics Canada, 1996).

With respect to language, 40 per cent of residents primarily speak English in the home. Of the remaining residents, a large proportion speak Chinese -- as might be expected given the large proportion claiming Chinese ethnicity in the community. Corresponding to the data on ethnicity, Portuguese is the next most common language spoken at home (see Figure 4.2)

Income 

Kensington has long been an immigrant reception area, in part because of the availability of rental housing in the community and the range of goods offered within the Market. Although Kensington’s earliest beginnings were as a middle class suburb, Kensington today is largely a working class neighbourhood. In 1995, the average household income among Kensington residents was $28,684 -- $30,000 less than the average for the Toronto CMA (Statistics Canada, 1996). While household income is fairly evenly distributed in the middle to upper income levels in Kensington, there is a notable peak in the low income range. Half (50 per cent) of all households claim an income under $20,000 (see Figure 4.3). According to Statistics Canada’s calculations, the incidence of low income among the population in private households is 54.8 per cent in Kensington (Statistics Canada, 1996).

These income figures are further illuminated when data on education are examined. Within Kensington, almost half (47 per cent) of the population in 1996 over the age of 15 did not have a high school certificate (Statistics Canada, 1996), and 57 per cent of the population over the age of 15 had not obtained any education beyond the secondary level (see Figure 4.4). By comparison, 31 per cent of the Toronto CMA population over the age of 15 did not have a high school certificate, and 44 per cent had not obtained post-secondary education (Statistics Canada, 1996). In Kensington, university educated residents accounted for 28 per cent of the population, likely accounting for the scattering of household income levels in the middle to upper ranges of Figure 4.3. This mixing of income and education levels is not surprising: although the community is primarily an immigrant and working class neighbourhood, the urbanity and diversity of the Kensington area is something that has also attracted middle class professionals.

Kensington was originally built in the 1870s, populated by middle class Anglo-Saxons. Despite redevelopment since then, the majority of dwellings (54 per cent) were built prior to 1946 (Statistics Canada, 1996). Kensington Market grew out of what was an exclusively residential area, so the combination of narrow streets, shops, restaurants and older residential housing stock has created a dense (9500 people/ km²), mixed-use area. As is common in older urban communities, the Kensington residential neighbourhood is dominated (93 per cent) by attached housing forms and low-rise apartment buildings (Statistics Canada, 1996). Almost three quarters (73 per cent) of Kensington residents rent their dwelling. (Statistics Canada, 1996).

The redevelopment of the George Brown College site captured the attention of the Kensington community in the mid-1990s. Physically, the three buildings that made up the Kensington campus occupied 1.29 acres of land, contained 200,000 sq. ft. of space and had a gross floor area of 3.5 times the area of the lot (City of Toronto Planning Board, 1978a: 49). Due to the density of the site, the building complex was a visual barrier, creating a very different environment on each street the property bordered (interested party A-K, 1997). On the south side, or Baldwin Street, the College is located on an important commercial artery for the active Kensington Market. On the north side, or Nassau Street, the College shared a relatively quiet residential street with mostly Portuguese residents (resident A-K, 1996).

In some ways, the potential redevelopment of the site was typical of urban planning in well developed areas. The planning process required an application for rezoning, and the demolition and/or retrofitting of the existing buildings was necessary before alternative uses could be applied to the site. What made this particular redevelopment opportunity so interesting from a planning perspective, however, was that it was located in a community with a long history of activism, and some strong ideas about what they collectively wanted to see replace the College.

Kensington’s ethnocultural diversity and dense mix of commercial and residential uses attract visitors and shoppers to the area on a daily basis. From the City of Toronto’s perspective, the unique character of the Kensington market area is something to be preserved, so as to benefit both the surrounding neighbourhood and the City as a whole. Although planners in the past have referred to Kensington as "a somewhat unstable mixed use area" (City of Toronto Planning Board, 1973a: 2), the neighbourhood has long been recognized as having something unique and worth preserving amongst Toronto’s other downtown communities.

Kensington has retained its Low Density Residential zoning designation, but in acknowledgment of the commercial uses that have evolved along select streets some industrial and commercial uses have also been permitted (see Map 4.2). Lands designated Institutional are occupied by the Toronto Western Hospital (to the west) and the George Brown College (to the east). According to the neighbourhood Official Plan for Kensington, the Market area is designated a Low Density Mixed Commercial-Residential area.

The Market is also designed an Area of Special Identity according to the Plan. With this designation, the City of Toronto aims to conserve and strengthen the area, in recognition of its special identity and character. In such Areas, "Council will employ its available powers to enact regulations, review plans and drawings, and make requirements so as to ensure that new development is consistent..." (City of Toronto Planning and Development, 1991).

Despite the value placed on the "unique character" of Kensington, the relationship between the community and the City of Toronto planning department has had a long, and somewhat acrimonious history. Not unlike other downtown neighbourhoods, Kensington has faced extreme pressures of redevelopment and renewal that threatened its existence, especially during the 1960s. In 1962, a Market Study was done by planners to look at the feasibility of "a properly planned open market" for the Kensington area (City of Toronto Planning Board, 1973a: 3). As the only intensive regional retail area in the City of Toronto not located on an arterial street (City of Toronto Planning Board, 1978b: 12), the narrow streets, lack of laneways and the proximity of residential uses have long been the source of traffic congestion, parking, and servicing problems. According to the Market Study’s recommendations, a "properly planned" market required three things: preservation of the market and enhancement of its unique attractiveness; provision of adequate off-street car parking; and the improvement of circulation for pedestrians, cars and trucks. In the end, only the second recommendation was implemented -- two new parking lots were built, but at the cost of demolishing a number of residential buildings (City of Toronto Planning Board, 1973a; 1973b). The other recommendations were shelved in recognition that they required a change in the existing zoning for the market and would create significant problems for the rest of the predominantly residential area surrounding the market.

From 1966-1969 Kensington was the subject of another planning study, although this time with potentially more serious consequences. The neighbourhood was targeted for "urban renewal" by planners under the federal government’s renewal program. The objective was to create low-cost housing and remove downtown urban decay, or "blight" as it was known. Alexandra Park, the neighbourhood to the south of Kensington, had been cleared and rebuilt as public housing. At the time, it was considered a success by planners and Kensington was slated for the same fate. Residents, however, were determined to prevent the demolition of their neighbourhood, arguing it would destroy the social fabric of their community (City of Toronto Planning Board, 1973a: 3).

In 1967 the Kensington Area Residents Association was formed, providing coordination for residents fighting to save the community and individual homes (City of Toronto Planning Board, 1978a: 16). Although opposed to wholesale expropriation and demolition of existing housing, Kensington residents did see the need for renewal efforts in the community. They lobbied for a more community-oriented approach to renewal that would maintain the historical streetscape and identity of the neighborhood (St. Stephen’s, 1980: 5), and won the establishment of an Urban Renewal Committee as part of the City’s governing structure. The committee was composed of residents, business people and the Ward Alderman, and was to advise City Council on matters affecting the Kensington area. Out of this committee came a fourteen-point program the residents felt would be significant to any urban renewal scheme for the area, and a ten-point program business people developed relating specifically to the future of the Market. What the community articulated was a vision of Kensington where solutions could be found to "stabilize the Market, protect residential properties, and buffer the residents against the unpleasant conditions produced by Market activities" (City of Toronto Planning Board, 1973b: 3). This was a tall order, and has proven to be a challenge that planners continue to wrestle with. At the time, though, nothing was done about these concerns. Due to opposition to the urban renewal program across the country, the federal government cancelled the project in 1969, and no further funding was made available for Kensington’s community-oriented approach.

City of Toronto planners were aware of the need for some sort of renewal in the Kensington area so in 1971 Kensington was proposed as a priority area for the successor federal government funding initiative: the Neighbourhood Improvement Program (NIP). Money from this Program was targeted to community facility improvements (e.g. parks, street lighting). An interesting requirement was that the Program had to be approved by the local community, and area residents had to be actively involved in setting planning priorities for the use of NIP funds (City of Toronto Planning Board, 1978a: 30). The Program was not immediately initiated in Kensington because of community opposition to what was seen as "yet another ‘renewal’ scheme" (City of Toronto Planning Board, 1973b: 6), but was eventually implemented from 1976 to 1978. Kensington was allocated almost one million dollars in NIP funds, and planners set about completing minor improvements in street lighting, public lane paving and transit shelters. The majority of their spending was on the implementation of three initiatives: block-by-block termite control; land acquisition to buy up land parcels with non-conforming uses in residential areas to be redeveloped as park land (such as the parkette on Oxford just off Augusta); and improvement of park facilities, especially at Bellevue Square (City of Toronto Planning Board, 1978a: 30).

In recent years, planners have once again approached Kensington with plans for renewal. Through what is called the Kensington Revitalization Plan (discussed more fully later in this chapter), the City of Toronto has been working with the community at every stage of the Plan’s creation with the aim of creating something the community would support. Acknowledged to be a vocal community regarding local development issues, planners are aware that even technically legal options for renewal will not work in Kensington unless they are supported by community leaders.

The Kensington Revitalization Plan’s consensual community approach fits with the neighbourhood style of planning the former City of Toronto took pride in. According to Toronto’s Official Plan (known as CityPlan 91):

Toronto is a City of neighbourhoods. The neighbourhoods are identifiable geographic areas which provide a focus for the daily life of the City’s residents. Many neighbourhoods express unique characteristics based on the City’s varied natural features and its diverse multicultural makeup (City of Toronto Planning and Development, 1991: 36).

Under the Plan, the City’s general goals for all neighbourhoods are: to provide a pleasant, supportive, safe and healthy daily living environment; that there be adequate services, open space, urban design and built form; and that a wide diversity of individuals be accommodated through a range of housing types and social and economic activity. Moreover, it was the policy of Council to regard all existing and emerging residential areas in the City as "neighbourhoods". In terms of the planning process itself, neighbourhoods figure prominently. As the Plan explains:

Council recognizes the tradition and practice of public participation in the neighbourhood planning process. Council shall seek the views and participation of the public during the preparation and prior to implementation of the following: Part I and II Official Plan Amendments, Zoning By-law Amendments, Community Improvement Plans, Community Services and Facilities Strategic Plans, neighbourhood traffic plans, heritage preservation policies, social planning and other planning initiatives (City of Toronto Planning and Development, 1991: 38).

The over-riding dilemma that continues to occupy planners in regard to the Kensington neighbourhood concerns the balance between residential and commercial uses. Since the 1950s, the expansion of the market has put internal pressure on efforts to preserve the surrounding residential area. As the market was never planned but rather evolved out of a low-density residential neighbourhood, an uneasy relationship between the two uses has also evolved. While some business people from the Market see the need to enlarge laneways, widen road allowances, and provide additional parking, these commercial improvements could very likely accelerate the absorption of residential properties into the Market. Mostly through legal non-conforming zoning changes granted by the Committee of Adjustment over the years, the Market has in fact slowly spread into adjacent areas that were once only residential. In efforts to ensure the Market is a "good neighbour" to the residential uses in Kensington (City of Toronto Planning Board, 1978b: 13), planners are conscious of the need to protect the integrity of Kensington as a residential community, while at the same time supporting the Market as an Area of Special Identity and being flexible enough to allow the Market to adapt and change in order to survive.

In the next chapter, the change instigated by the redevelopment of a significant piece of land adjacent to the Market area will be explored. Chapter Five examines the redevelopment of the George Brown College site in Kensington in the context of the research question: How does ethnocultural diversity challenge the way we participate and belong in our communities, as seen through urban and suburban planning processes? The criteria introduced in Chapter Two are used to shape the details of the case.

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