These three art projects will welcome the public to Downsview next year — but they can’t be judged solely as art

Downsview Airport, located near the intersection of the 401 and Allen Road, has long been inaccessible to the public. It hosted an airport before becoming a military base and then an industrial testing facility. Now its 600 metres of tarmac will be reimagined with three public art installations.
Northcrest Developments, which is leading the redevelopment of the Downsview site, now known as YZD, launched an open call for installations in April. It announced that the three winning projects are “Runway Rivers” by local artist John Notten; “Street Art” by One Day Creates; and “Wonderful” by Reset x RebuildTO. Each winner will receive $100,000.
It’s part of Northcrest’s ambitious $30-billion plan to turn the site into a network of seven communities housing 55,000 residents, along with commercial and recreational spaces. The art projects will be open throughout the spring and summer of 2025, long before the developer breaks ground.
Notten’s “Runway Rivers,” launching in June, invites visitors to climb into wheeled canoes and “float” along painted waterways on the tarmac.
“The Downsview Airport site has this incredible and important history of aviation,” Notten said, “but I was interested in what was happening on this site before the runways were ever there — in fact, before the invention of flight.”
His project will offer participants a chance to observe the rivers and tributaries that once flowed from the site but are now buried deep beneath the ground.
Along the route, participants will be able to scan QR codes to hear from Indigenous knowledge keepers, geographers and urban historians. Notten hopes the project’s interactivity will reveal the centuries-old relationship between people and landscape.
The other projects also focus on interactive and immersive experiences. “Wonderful” by Reset x RebuildTO, opening in April, will incorporate a guided audio experience of an “imaginative playground” in one of YZD’s hangars.
Beginning in July, Toronto mural producers One Day Creates will invite viewers to the tarmac, where they will host a large street art exhibition featuring “live painting and immersive installations.”
“We are taking a ‘culture-first’ approach to development, creating a sense of place at YZD through activities like arts and culture long before development occurs,” said Mitchell Marcus, Northcrest’s executive director of site activation and programming. “Public art (will play) a major role in shaping this site both today and in the future.”
The ubiquity of public art in Toronto came largely from the city’s Percent for Public Art program. Introduced in 1991, the program mandated that developers dedicate a portion of construction budgets to public-facing artwork.
Thanks to the condo boom, by 2010, “Toronto was regularly generating more privately owned than publicly owned works for the first time in its history,” according to an analysis by researchers at OCAD University and the University of Toronto. Where once it was the stuff of subway stations and war memorials, public art could increasingly be found in the city’s commercial and residential buildings.
With this shift came new priorities. In addition to esthetics and being broadly palatable to the public, public art had to align with its benefactors’ goals of public engagement and goodwill.
Playfulness and immersion are key to the winning projects at YZD. “I do think that my work, hopefully, is more than just purely an esthetic experience, like, ‘Oh, that looks beautiful,’” Notten said. “I hope in addition to that, it offers an opportunity for the participant to really think about things in a new way.”
This aspiration, Notten said, is tied to what he considers public art’s democratic nature: its welcoming of broad participation and wide access. At Downsview, a site that for decades has been closed to the public (aside from occasional events like this summer’s “R.A.V.E.” as part of the Luminato Festival), the projects will “fling the gates open” as Notten said.
Yet it’s important to recognize that the form of these interactive and immersive experiences align closely with the developer’s broader goals. It is precisely the democratic impulse that is meant to attract people to the site, create a sense of community, and ultimately sell future residential and commercial units.
Toronto’s most famous privately funded public work is probably Michael Snow’s “Flight Stop,” 1979, a sculpture of 60 fibreglass geese suspended from the ceiling of the Eaton Centre. “Flight Stop” also aims to democratize art by making it accessible in a public space.
But as a sculpture — an art object — it invites viewers to encounter and interpret it freely and on their own terms. The lack of structure means there are interpretive stakes to the work, an unpredictability to how the viewer will engage with it. This artistic autonomy was notably borne out when Snow successfully sued the mall for adding Christmas ribbons to the geese, arguing that it violated his moral rights and artistic independence.
By contrast, the participatory and immersive experiences at YZD guide the viewer, shaping their engagement with the work and its intended meanings. These structured interactions fit the developer’s goals of fostering community and commercial appeal. Storytelling that emphasizes inclusivity and connection is common to all three winners. So, too, is a sense of placemaking, a claim for viability that supports the site’s future development.
One cannot truthfully evaluate these kinds of installations by traditional artistic standards alone, like the capacity to challenge, provoke, innovate or move. And this is not, ultimately, the purpose of this kind of fare. A slew of different criteria are needed instead, like approachability, playfulness and attendance. The three projects will likely be successful in this respect.
Whether this is a step toward democratic art or a reflection of the developer’s broader goals remains a question worth asking.
This story has been edited from an earlier version that mistakenly said Northcrest Developments would turn the former Downsview Airport site, now YZD, into a network of 15 communities.