The water had not yet arrived, but the way across was already there. In Toronto’s Port Lands recently, I walked through a vast trench where the Don River will one day flow underneath the Commissioners Street Bridge.

The bridge’s two sections – smooth arcs of white steel with accents of persimmon orange – stretched above an expanse of muck, boulders and somebody’s white pickup. The whole assembly was, for the moment, low enough to the ground that someone could bang their hard-hatted head on it.

Which I did. “The river will be 200 metres wide at this location,” David Kusturin, an executive with the public agency Waterfront Toronto, shouted over the beeping of a bulldozer as I rubbed my temple. “And up there,” he said, pointing, “in the fullness of time, you’ll have retail, you’ll have patios, you’ll have room for development.”

That future, and the flow of the river, will come quite soon. By 2023 the Port Lands Flood Protection Project will completely re-engineer the Don’s mouth, protecting 240 hectares on the doorstep of downtown Toronto, and opening a huge area for new building.

To get there, workers led by EllisDon are moving 1.4 million cubic metres of soil and placing boulders and logs in a precisely designed pattern to manage the flow of the river and the health of the species that will occupy it. They are installing three new bridges (designed by the English architects Grimshaw, with engineers Entuitive). They are building roads, moving hydro infrastructure, relocating falcons. (Falcons? “If they set up shop in a building we need to demolish,” Mr. Kusturin said, “that wreaks havoc with the schedule.”)

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