Concord Adex - the masterful marketers that they are - have selected Canadian author Douglas Coupland to design a three-hectare park (that's a piece of land 100 metres wide by 300 long) near Spadina Ave and Front Street. What's Coupland's solution for this urban park site? He envisions bringing 20,000 truckloads of soil to build a toboggan hill.

"I think maybe what [Concord Adex is] hoping for is a little bit of a shock," said Mr. Coupland, "Or they want to be shown something that they really wouldn't have come up with otherwise." The post-modern device of taking a literary reference and giving it built form may just play out well in this context if only, as Coupland points out, that a hill here will give people views of what they really want to see - the waterfront.

Coupland, the author of the much acclaimed book, "Generation X," works as a sculptor and painter. For this project he is working with Vancouver-based landscape architect Greg Smallenberg.

Image from www.trekearth.com