The Globe and Mail

Concrete mixing and cross-country skiing: It's a strange recipe for an urban neighbourhood, but that's what the near future of the eastern waterfront is going to look like. And if James Corner has his way, it just might evolve Toronto into a city that lives on the water rather than ignoring it. The New York-based landscape architect is overseeing the creation of the ambitious 965-acre Lake Ontario Park. Breaking ground this year, it will tie 37 kilometres of shoreline land, from Cherry Beach to Ashbridges Bay (including the Leslie Street Spit), into a new public area with room for all sorts of recreational and conservational uses. The site "is all edge," Mr. Corner says. "It's remarkably diverse. And it's got a kind of wildness, which is rare so close to a metropolitan centre. So the art in the design is to make something of all this edge, all this diversity."