A brownfield turned Olympic bid site turned Pan Am athletes' village
The West Don Lands
Long an industrial brownfield, the West Don Lands was rebuilt for Toronto's 2015 Pan American Games as an athletes' village, seeded with flood protection infrastructure decades in the making.
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The West Don Lands, adjacent to Corktown and the Don River, sat as a largely vacant industrial brownfield for decades, its redevelopment repeatedly delayed by the site's flood risk — much of the land sat within the Don River's floodplain, making large-scale residential construction impossible without significant flood protection work first. Toronto's unsuccessful bid for the 2008 Summer Olympics first proposed the site for an athletes' village, and although that bid failed, the planning groundwork it generated was later revived.
Built for the Pan Am Games
The West Don Lands was ultimately redeveloped as the athletes' village for the 2015 Pan American and Parapan American Games hosted in Toronto, with new mixed-income housing, parks and infrastructure built specifically to convert into permanent neighbourhood housing after the Games ended. The project also included flood protection landform work along the Don River corridor, finally addressing the flood risk that had stalled development on the site for generations, and paving the way for the neighbourhood's continued growth since.
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