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Messy Cities: The Ballet of the Parking Lot

By Brendan Stewart and Daniel Rotsztain

This chapter appears in Messy Cities: Why we Can’t Plan Everything, published by Coach House Books, and is reproduced with permission of the publisher.

A group of neighbours chat on benches while taking in a spontaneous performance of dancers twirling to a distant beat. Passersby stop to catch what’s going on; some lean on their bikes, while others line up to get street food from one of the many nearby vendors under brightly coloured tents, the savoury aromas of grills wafting through the crowd. Children run and weave as their parents rest their legs on a nearby set of loose chairs under a shady pergola.

It’s the kind of chaotic scene that defines the vendor-lined streets of Mexico City, the bazaars of Istanbul, and the piazzas of Rome, a convivial messiness that underpins robust social networks and is crit- ical to the health of urban communities. But this isn’t Mexico City, or Istanbul, or Rome: it’s a parking lot in Etobicoke North, in the sprawling northwestern suburbs of Toronto.

More precisely, it’s a typical afternoon at ThistlePOPS, an installation by our plazaPOPS initiative at the heart of our 2022 project in the Albion Islington Square Business Improvement Area (BIA). And while it feels as though the vivid richness of this scene evolved spontaneously, in the context of Toronto’s regulated urban environment, it was quite the opposite: a painstaking effort involving the coordination of a vast number of partners, local residents, business owners, and City officials.

plazaPOPS has a simple enough premise. It begins with a fascination and admiration for a particular part of Toronto – the earliest postwar suburbs that ring the older parts of the city, a landscape defined by car-oriented residential neighbourhoods of bungalows and lawns next to modern ‘tower in the park’ high-rise apartments, with wide arterial roads lined by vibrant commercial strip malls that we call ‘strip mall main streets.’ Designed for the car, today many strip malls bustle with pedestrians and transit riders, creating an unofficial type of community hub, attracting people to patronize and hang out at the diverse, mostly locally owned businesses.

The strip malls of Toronto cover over 1,400 hectares of land and are located within a five-minute walk of more than 900,000 people, over 350,000 of whom live within the City-designated Neighbourhood Improvement Areas, which are lower-income and underserved by public and private amenities.

Demographically, these districts map onto what University of Toronto geographer David Hulchanski has identified as the ‘Third City’ of Toronto – areas where income levels are below average and trending downward, and where access to services and infrastructure is lacking. They also tend to be neighbourhoods that urban affairs journalist Doug Saunders describes as ‘Arrival Cities,’ where large concentrations of new Canadian immigrants are settling and building their lives in Canada.

There is great beauty here, in the vibrancy of the community life that strip mall businesses generate, but typically this vibrancy is spatially constrained to building interiors – the restaurants and hookah bars and barber shops – and their immediate edges; the colonnaded walk- ways, for example, that sometimes serve as a type of community porch where people lean on the columns to smoke or have a chat.

The parking lots that front these businesses could be fairly described as a rather hostile physical environment. Cars and trucks loudly whiz past paved expanses that can be hot, dry, windswept, and lacking in shade and places to sit. Yet the wide swaths of asphalt that surround these sites sometimes host improvised uses, where you might find groups gathering in the shade of a free-standing strip mall sign, sitting in a circle of lawn chairs they have brought and arranged on the asphalt on a long summer evening, simply to hang out.

Strip malls are structured as follows: Starting at the curb, you’ll find a narrow sidewalk zone with bus stops, bollards, poles for electric wires and street lights, and waste receptacles. Next comes the parking lot between the sidewalk and the front doors of the businesses, a space to move through quickly, rather than to linger. Sometimes you’ll find a grassy verge between the sidewalk and the curb, or, when there isn’t a rear alleyway, a collection of dumpsters. But the important consid- eration is that most of the space between the sidewalk and the strip mall is privately owned either by a single landlord or, less frequently, by multiple owners.

The strip mall ‘plazas’ of peripheral Toronto are quite different in nature from the traditional plazas found in city centres around the world. Their parking lots may be unappealing, yet they anchor the city’s social life. Should strip mall plazas be considered part of the public realm? In the walkable high streets of older streetcar suburbs, the public sidewalk – where Jane Jacobs’ observed the ‘sidewalk ballet’ — is understood to be enriched by this physical interface and would certainly be considered an important part of the public realm of its neighbourhood.

Strip mall plazas are probably best understood as a type of Privately-Owned Publicly Accessible Space, or POPS. They are the defining spaces of the strip mall main street. Should their ubiquity be captured in how we think about their significance, and enable their enhancement?

We launched plazaPOPS in 2018 to address this opportunity. We aimed to create public spaces for gathering within these plazas as a form of social infrastructure that responds to the unique conditions, needs, and desires of the strip mall main street, and to develop a sustainable model for delivery. As may be evident at this point, plaza- POPS refers to the locations we are focused on, strip mall plazas, as well as the idea that these plazas are a distinct but important type of POPS. The name also references the idea that the spaces we create, at least at this point, are temporary in nature. They pop up for the summer and fall, and then pop down, relinquishing space back toparked cars. Given the novelty and experimental nature of the idea, we’ve found that it’s much easier for our partner land and business owners to say yes to something temporary.

Funded by a number of research and infrastructure grants, plazaPOPS has created four projects, has developed into a not-for-profit organization with an engaged board of directors and a growing staff, and features a research wing that studies the economic, social, and public health outcomes of the initiative.

Since so much of the public realm of strip mall main streets is privately owned, realizing what might otherwise appear like a relatively simple public realm project – a place with benches, shade, plants, lighting, and public art, where people can gather and hang out outdoors, and that is open to anyone, not just patrons of the mall’s businesses – is immensely challenging.

Because plazaPOPS is primarily working to enhance public access to privately owned space, a web of trusting and reciprocal relationships needs to be woven, and tools like new types of insurance policies and land-access agreements and other types of contracts need to be created, all to bring land and business owners into the process as partners – absolutely essential partners, as there would be no land to use without them. These relationships require degrees of time, atten- tion, and care that expand well beyond the boundaries of conventional forms of community design practice.

On top of that, because strip mall plazas are not conceptualized as part of the public realm in official policy, the restrictive and car- centric zoning and municipal code bylaws that govern their use create additional barriers, requiring extra time, costs, and support from our City partners to gain permits and approvals. Happily, the City of Toronto recognizes the importance of strip mall main streets. plaza- POPS has received immense support from numerous City divisions through the course of our projects, including the launch of a temporary-use zoning bylaw pilot within the Wexford Heights BIA that permits outdoor sites of assembly in place of lawfully existing parking spots.





From a spatial-justice perspective, these added complexities are an overlooked barrier that needs to be acknowledged and addressed if we are to build more equitable cities. Our experience has taught us that in Toronto we need to expand our conception of the public realm to include privately owned strip mall parking lots and develop prag- matic tools to make enhancing their public benefits easier and cheaper.

In response to the invisible complexities of the context we work in, we’ve developed plazaPOPS as a process as well as a product. We’ve come to think about plazaPOPS as something like a quilt, and the collective, community-based act of creation and care as a form of community quilting.

Quilting is an ancient and diverse traditional practice, but one that persists as a counterpoint to our globalized, mass-produced, and disposable material culture. Our appreciation for quilts, and the meaning(s) they carry, are as associated with the processes that brought them into being – the practice of quilting – as they are with the object itself. Quilts often involve more than one person: a ‘community quilt’ is the collaborative effort of a group, with individuals each contributing a portion that gets stitched together to make the whole. And a quilt may be mended by its later users and caretakers, after the initial maker is long gone.

Visually, quilts are made of a patchwork of pieces, organized into a coherent pattern and stitched together to create a unified whole. plazaPOPS installations are composed similarly: created out of a system of modular elements – planters, benches, tables, and shade structures – and layered with custom elements like murals, locally sewn shade fabrics, and interactive signage. These elements are selected for prag- matic purposes – for instance, to be quick and easy to install with minimal disruption to local businesses, to be associated with values such as sourcing materials and labour locally to keep money in the community, and to be organized into patterns dictated largely by considerations of function, safety, and comfort.

The thread that stitches plazaPOPS together is the most important component: the network of trust-based relationships that are created through the process. Connected over time through workshops, meals, stories, hanging out, handshake agreements, creative contracts, novel insurance policies, celebrations, and hard work, the thread has to hold up across cultural divides, balance public access with the interests of private landowners, and be repaired quickly and compassionately if and when a portion of it begins to fray.

This act of community quilting involves a lot of people. To borrow a medieval term used to describe trades working in unison, the diverse and nimble group that cooperates, creates, and nurtures plazaPOPS installations is something like a guild.

The urban scene described in the introduction – the ‘parking lot ballet’ – results from the trust, passion, and care of our guild of community quilters. Working together, the impossible becomes possible and a wonderful messy urbanism is created where you’d least expect it.

These metaphors of quilting and guild are illustrated by the plazaPOPS installation located at the Ghadir plaza in the summer of 2023, at the northeast corner of Lawrence Avenue East and Pharmacy Road in the eastern part of Toronto known as Scarborough. The plaza is home to a meat market, fish market, grocery, and takeout restaurant that serves Middle Eastern foods like shawarma, falafel, manakeesh, and kafta. An institution within the neighbourhood that also attracts a regional clientele, Ghadir is open seven days a week, serving from 8 a.m. until midnight, extending to 2 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. It buzzes with energy day and night, and, as you might imagine, the parking lot can be chaotic and is nearly always at capacity. We devel- oped an installation of shaded, booth-style seating along the sidewalk facing Pharmacy Road, imagining that it would become a node of vibrant activity, animated largely by diners.

As we’d hoped, the installation was an immediate hit, and we started to receive very positive feedback from the owners of Ghadir. But there were other, less positive forms of evidence of our success. Waste recep- tacles were filling up more quickly than our site stewards could empty them, and bees were moving in, making the job even less appealing. The surfaces of our tables were becoming sticky from sauce drippings, and cigarette butts were evident in the grass and along the sidewalk. All signs of success, but clearly a problem that required an upgrade to our operations to ensure that the space remained attractive and safe. This was an undesirable form of messiness.

To show how this problem was identified and addressed, a bit more context is required. A team of five local youth site stewards had been hired and trained to take care of our sites through the summer: watering the plants, managing waste, tidying, cleaning, and being ambassadors of the project. In addition, our team of community- based researchers was conducting fieldwork during the summer, including a public life study, surveys, and an in-depth ethnographic study that included observations and, ultimately, semi-structured interviews with visitors to the sites.

Collectively the researchers and site stewards were a very diverse group in terms of age (ranging from teenagers to retirees), gender, and ethnic and linguistic background, and the majority were local to the neighbourhood. To manage both teams, we set up WhatsApp groups and encouraged a culture of regular reporting, including notifications about when team members were on-site, updates about trends of use and surveys and interviews completed.

Our researchers flagged the garbage, litter, and cleanliness issues at the Ghadir site very quickly (during an evening shift), and we were able to address the issue more or less overnight: purchasing more robust scrubbers and cleaning solutions, implementing more frequent waste removals, and providing further training and supports to our site stewards. The experience inspired longer-term responses as well. In 2024, plazaPOPS partnered with Scarborough Zero Waste and Good Futures Collective, as well as several local restaurants, to develop a community-based research project to understand practical strategies to reduce takeout food waste in the neighbourhood.

This example illustrates the types of challenges that arise, and the reach and strength of the collaborative guild of people involved in creating and caring for a plazaPOPS project – a group bonded across disciplines, sectors, and lived experiences and identities. Because plazaPOPS are publicly accessible, and we have invited ourselves onto private property to do the project, the sustainability of the initiative depends on remaining in the good graces of our landowner and business partners and ensuring that the public perception of the project remains positive. We continuously work to refine and simplify the model, but to date, investing in the development of our ‘guild of quilters’ has created the thread that stitches the whole project together.
 
Over the years, plazaPOPS has proven both easy and difficult to talk about. It’s easy when there is time to unpack the various layers of the project, to tell stories of the complicated process, the constant learning, the setbacks, and the moments of unique and messy beauty. Communication becomes difficult when trying to sum up the project quickly. The gestalt of the project is difficult to meaningfully capture when limited to an image or soundbite.

This community-based model is a direct response to the complexities of the physical, political, economic, and legal conditions of the neighbourhoods we are working in, and an ongoing commitment to place-keeping – rather than place-making – practices. The resulting spaces we create and care for, we hope, create places where both the mundane and the sublime of life unfold, and where people encounter each other and grow as individuals and communities.

It takes a village to ‘pop’ a plaza and unleash the ‘parking lot ballet.’ The circuitous, trust-based process is fun most of the time, always enriching, and absolutely worth the painstaking effort. Hopefully we can figure out how to make it just a little bit easier, so this essential messiness will spread throughout the city.

COMING SOON

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PlazaPOPS is funded by the City of Toronto’s Main Street Recovery and Rebuild Initiative, as part of Government of Canada support through the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario).

Research for plazaPOPS is funded through a SSHRC Partnership Development grant, in partnership with the City of Toronto and the University of Guelph’s School of Environmental Design and Rural Development (SEDRD) in the Ontario Agricultural College.