Renaturalizing the mouth of the Don River to unlock a redevelopment decades in the waiting
The Port Lands Flood Protection Project
A multi-billion-dollar project to give the Don River a new, naturalized mouth through the Port Lands removed a century-old flood risk and opened up hundreds of acres for redevelopment.
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The mouth of the Don River was straightened and channelized into an artificial concrete-lined path in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as part of industrializing Toronto's harbour, a change that left the surrounding Port Lands vulnerable to flooding severe enough that large sections of the area were effectively undevelopable for residential use for the following century, restricted instead to industrial uses that could tolerate the risk.
A new river mouth
The Port Lands Flood Protection Project, a multi-billion-dollar undertaking led by Waterfront Toronto and the City, re-engineered the Don River's mouth into a new, naturalized river valley running through the Port Lands, creating a new island — named Villiers Island — in the process and finally removing the flood risk that had constrained the area for generations. The project, substantially completed in the mid-2020s, is expected to open hundreds of acres of previously unusable land to new mixed-use development, one of the largest waterfront naturalization projects undertaken in a North American city.
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