In this new Toronto neighborhood, ‘sponge streets’ double as parks and flood prevention

To make room for more housing without losing green space, planners in a new Toronto neighborhood flipped the usual approach: Instead of carving out room for parks and plazas, they made the streets do that work instead. “The street is almost like a public courtyard,” says Rasmus Astrup, design principal and senior partner at SLA, the Denmark-based firm that was part of the design team for the new neighborhood, called Ookwemin Minising. The main street will be car-free, “like a linear park,...