Cornell Town Centre, Markham, Ontario.

The Town of Cornell is a new town with a projected population of 30,000 people. It is currently under construction on a 1,275 acre parcel of land located in the north east corner of Toronto and is to be served by Highway 407, Canada's first privatised toll highway. The Town's overall "new urbanism" design concept has been described as "the mother of all orthodox neotraditional communities in Canada". It also has the distinction of being master planned by town planners and architects Duany and Plater-Zyberk (DPZ). Ultimately the town will contain 11 neighbourhoods, each with parks and open spaces. The approved plan also calls for a 90 acre mixed-use town centre consisting of approximately 1 million sq. ft of commercial development which has to be designed to be compatible with the design concepts of new urbanism. Talbot Consultants International Inc. was retained as the retail planning consultants for not only the Cornell Town Centre but also the neighbourhood facilities scattered throughout Cornell.

Our initial tasking was to prepare a market feasibility study to determine the optimum positioning, merchandising and sizing of such a town centre. Our next task was to seek out international architectural and design firms who had demonstrated the vision and experience to create a new urbanism town centre and then recommend a preliminary list of 12 to the developer. We were then instructed to reduce these to a short list of 3 and set up half-day workshops with each of the short listed firms. At the conclusion of this process Development Design Group of Baltimore was selected. Our next task was to co-ordinate a thorough site and trade area tour and briefing for the Design Group and then set up a series of interactive workshops, in both Toronto and Baltimore, to translate our market driven recommendations into macro and micro design concepts. This process eventually resulted in the selected concept for the Cornell Town Centre being a 1 million sq. ft. Entertainment Focused Centre (EFC) anchored by a 100,000 sq. ft multiplex theatre and complemented by approximately 900,000 sq. ft of other entertainment venues, retail, food & beverage and services. The requirement to preserve the uniqueness of Cornell's new urbanism design was achieved by configuring the Cornell Town Centre as a series of traditional streetscapes all focused on a huge man made water feature. The construction of the residential portion of Cornell is proceeding quickly, sales have been extremely strong and, as a result, the infrastructure for the town centre is now being installed.

(The Cornell Town Centre, Markham, Ontario, Canada has been one of the projects where TALBOT CONSULTANTS INTERNATIONAL INC. has provided consulting services for the retail operations. For more details on this and how we can help you, please contact us at info@talbotconsultants.com )