Excerpted from a forthcoming article (currently under peer review) for a special issue of the Journal of Public Space on Parklets, Temporary Uses and Co-creation of Public Space. The article is titled: Ambiguously public space, consensual appropriation and partnered publicisation: co-producing privately-owned public space in Toronto’s multicultural strip malls.

Ambiguously public spaces and Toronto’s inner suburban stripmalls

Ambiguously public space (APS) refers to a variety of spaces that are technically private but that are public facing or are available to the public in some way (Horgan et al 2022),  with many as transitional or liminal spaces between private and public realms. These spaces are publicly accessible, but not fully public. Ambiguously public spaces challenge merely technical definitions of public spaces. For many users it matters little whether a particular space meets a technical, legal definition of public or private (Biggar 2015)—what matters more is how it is and/or might be used. 

For us, strip malls are an example of ambiguously public spaces whose potential as usable and accessible public space is overlooked. In inner suburban communities with underused public spaces or a lack of usable public spaces, strip malls are essential to neighbourhood social and economic life. 

While technically private, strip malls abut public sidewalks, so are instantly accessible to both cars and pedestrians. While often overlooked or denigrated (Linovski 2012), they offer low-hanging fruit for those interested in expanding available public spaces in densely populated areas of cities lacking usable and accessible public space. In this section, we emphasize how the very ambiguity of strip malls and the absence of other public realm options facilitates improvised uses (Horgan and Liinamaa 2023), and provides opportunities for reimagination and intervention.

There are countless, vivid examples of how people use privately-owned strip mall parking lots in Toronto as essential parts of the public realm. Here we include an example from our fieldwork. A group of recently-immigrated Somali men that meets (almost) every night at the Colony Plaza (one of the sites of our 2023 and 2024 projects) demonstrates how critical these spaces are to the social life of the city. The group initially met at Sahan Restaurant, one of the only Somali eateries in Scarborough and as such, a critical gathering place for Toronto’s East African community.

With no formal infrastructure to host their nightly gatherings of talking politics, catching up, and smoking, they took things into their own hands and began to bring their own chairs – camping chairs, folding chairs, dining room chairs, anything they could easily find – to the strip mall’s parking lot. They would set up in the late afternoon shade of the strip mall’s pylon sign to create a comfortable DIY outdoor living room. Their ritual is so consistent that they were captured on google street view, and their presence has become a beloved entity in the neighbourhood, familiarly known as “the Somali uncles”. 

In sum, Toronto’s suburban stripmall parking lots have untapped potential as  public space and social infrastructure in neighbourboods that require more street-level public spaces. The uncertainty of how these spaces fit into the public realm supports informal and creative uses. In the case of the Somali Uncles, they may have asked for permission, or simply started hanging out and encountered no pushback from ownership, but either way, the zone adjacent to the pylon sign demonstrates the strip mall parking lot’s fertile potential as public space, where conditions conspired to create a context for improvisation, creativity and innovation.

Another critical precondition of these informal patterns of public space usage in the parking lot, though, is the adjacency of businesses and services, private and public, and their social role as third places. Strip malls that lack these vibrant uses, charge the adjacent parking lots with a lower voltage of public space potential. The ambiguous nature of the parking lot is critical, but so is having bars, restaurants, barbershops and hookah bars that draw people to the parking lot, and help set the stage for sociability.

Consensual appropriation 
  
The ambiguously public nature of strip mall parking lots and the presence of adjacent establishments that function as third places set the stage for informal public space uses, but formalising and enhancing these uses through a proactive intervention like a plazaPOPS installation is complicated by the private ownership of the sites. To formally enhance the public nature of these sites, a process of what we term consensual appropriation is required.

We define consensual appropriation as negotiations and ongoing relationship management with private property owners to broker the co-creation and stewardship of new free-to-use publicly accessible amenities. While in the case of plazaPOPS, this amenity is a new temporary public space, we do envisage the concept as having wider possible applications.

The process of consensual appropriation can be fraught and fragile. It requires the creation of novel tools, making do with sometimes less than optimal conditions, and continual attention and care. Finalising land access agreements and insurance policies has required simplifying the risk averse, professional and institutional norms required by plazaPOPS’ funders to meet the ‘handshake’ business culture of the land and business owner hosts.

In an article about plazaPOPS’ 2019 pilot project, Stewart (2022) discusses the difficulty of securing a site, and the reality that the sites that landowners are willing to make available may not be the most optimal. The article also shares a story about “a hiccup at the eleventh hour”, where the land access and license agreement that the team had prepared was perceived by the land owner as overly legalistic. The agreement was rejected mere weeks before the site installation was scheduled, calling into question the viability of the project after significant time, energy and money had been invested, requiring a last minute simplification of the agreement that was thankfully accepted. 

Operationally, the team learned an important lesson about understanding and adapting to the local, trust-based ‘hand shake’ business culture, and needing to ensure an agreement is in place early on in the process, but the experience was also like a small tremor; a reminder of the inherent fault-line running under the land plazaPOPS works on and the perpetual risk that the land can be taken away if the land-owner changes their mind about the project because it is privately owned land.

Once signed, land access agreements remove some of this risk, but if land and business owners become frustrated with the project, they may not invite the return of a plazaPOPS installation the following year. There is an overarching need to keep land and business owners happy, and to have them view the project in a positive light throughout the process. 

This example demonstrates how plazaPOPS’ act of consensual appropriation of private land is underpinned by an imbalance of power between the project initiator and the landowner, resulting in a project that must be choreographed and managed very carefully, with very little margin for error. Consensual appropriation is not limited to an initial sales pitch and a negotiated legal agreement; to be sustainable over time, it is better conceptualised as an ongoing process of relationship management, requiring an elevated level of care and attention that needs to be practiced by all members of the team throughout the duration of the project.