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GuelphPOPS

Community gathering space and garden pops up at Shelldale Centre

July 13, 2023

By Mark Pare

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plazaPOPS has popped back up in Guelph.
The makeshift gathering place is being set up in the parking lot at the Shelldale Centre, thanks to a collaborative effort from a number of different local organizations. But it’s more than just a gathering space, it’s meant to promote a circular food economy.

It’ll include garden boxes, and accessible seating facing a garden and forested area. Shade structures are also going up. The project, as a whole, is taking up five parking spaces.
The pieces being used have been stored in Guelph since 2019, when a pop-up pilot project – called WexPOPS – ran in Scarborough.

“We’re missing those (gathering) places in many places,” said Ashlee Cooper, the manager of food equity and community resilience with Our Food Future.

“It can be in a parking lot of a park like this, it can be a parking lot in some other location in the city.”

She said we’re in need of connection, and places like this help accomplish that goal.
Looking around for a location, Cooper said taking up shop outside the Shelldale Centre was a natural fit with all the activity happening nearby, including the garden and the amenities of Norm Jary Park.

“I’m so happy and proud (to) coordinate nice people from (different backgrounds),” said Omelnisaa Giddam, the coordinator of the Shelldale Farm Park.

The Guelph Community Health Centre, Kindle Communities, Habitat for Humanity Guelph Wellington, the SEED and Shelldale Farm Park are all working together in the venture.
The project, Giddam said, supports the Onward Willow community, and hopes it builds community resilience.

“plazaPOPS donated all of the materials,” added Brendan Stewart, a landscape architecture professor at U of G, and one of the two brainchilds behind PlazaPOPS.

“We’re thrilled that they’re being reused, and this is an amazing community project.”
Stewart said he’s just watching from the sidelines, as community groups take the lead on the build. But he admits there’s a feeling of nostalgia to see the pieces back out and being used.

“It’s kind of actually emotional right now, because there’s a lot of blood, sweat and tears put into this project in 2019,” he said, adding five sites are also going up in Scarborough.

“I spent a lot of time working on the design, and the build of this the first time, and I’ve moved it five times and I’ve got the paint still in my basement, so it’s very personal. It means a lot, it’s awesome.”

“We’re super grateful that they entertained the idea of letting other people use it,” Cooper added.

The pop-up will be open to the public this weekend, and closes around Thanksgiving.
“We’re trying to demonstrate circular food economy principles, so that’s looking at the whole food system,” Cooper said.

“Once PlazaPOPS is taken down, all of the soil and all of the plants will be distributed to the community, to be re-planted somewhere else. All the pieces will be re-used for the next installation.”

She said they’re going for “absolutely no waste.”

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GuelphPOPS

Guelph to open pop-up space at Shelldale Centre

July 11, 2023

By Ken Hashizume

Link to article

Something is popping up at the Shelldale
Centre.

The City of Guelph is bringing back the plazaPOPS program this summer with the help of Our Food Future’s Reimagine Food initiative.
The project will see a gathering space and garden boxes installed inside the parking lot of the centre.

“It’s benches, garden boxes with fresh herbs and pollinator plants, shade structure and umbrellas,” said Ashlee Cooper, manager of food equity and community resiliency at the City of Guelph.

“It’s really taking an underutilized public space, making it inviting, making it a place where people can gather and enjoy their time outside together.”

Work on the installation of the benches and garden boxes will begin Wednesday. Volunteers with Habitat for Humanity Guelph Wellington, the local Onward Willow community will be putting together the space.

The SEED at Guelph Community Health Centre and Shelldale Farm Park community gardeners will be planting the herbs and maintaining the garden boxes. Access to the space is being provided by Kindle Communities.

Cooper said the space will situated next to the Shelldale Community Gardens.

“It is meant to be an addition to the Norm Jarry Park and the Shelldale Centre, ” Cooper said.

“Folks who are growing food can take a rest. They can also take some of the herbs that will be growing there.”

PlazaPOPS was developed by University of Guelph professors Brendan Stewart and Karen Landman, both part of the U of G’s Landscape Architecture program. They along with Daniel Rotsztain, an artist and landscape designer, first introduced the pop-up space concept in 2019 that turn small spaces in strip mall parking lots into a “human-friendly oasis.”

“The infrastructure was sitting in storage at the University,” Cooper recalled. “It was available and we thought it would be a wonderful addition to the Guelph community.”

Rotsztain, who also serves as executive director of plazaPOPS, said: “We’re thrilled for this installation to be coming to the Onward Willow neighbourhood.”

The plazaPOPS Shelldale Centre location is scheduled to open this Friday until mid-October.

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2023: Wexford Blooms

‘Good for the spirit’: Pop-up mini-paradises coming to Scarborough’s Wexford Heights as plazaPOPS returns

June 21, 2023

Scarborough Mirror

By Mike Adler

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Picture this: you’re walking carefully through plaza parking lots in Scarborough’s Wexford Heights and you find hammocks to lie down in.
And a then three-wheeled tuk-tuk you can sit in while eating takeout food.
And an oasis of plants around a small stage.

It can only mean WexPOPS is back.
The first experiment in creating privately-owned public spaces (POPS) brightened Wexford Heights Plaza in 2019. After turning up in North Etobicoke’s Thistletowne last year, it’s returning to Wexford with five plaza installations, not one.

“These are publicly accessible, no-pay-to-play spaces for gathering,” Daniel Rotsztain, executive director of plazaPOPS in Toronto.
“It’s good for the spirit.”

What Rotsztain tells plaza owners is that they are sacrificing a few parking spaces temporarily — 10 at Wexford Plaza for the project’s event hub, three at Colony Plaza for the tuk-tuk — to draw more customers and boost local businesses.

Four years ago, volunteers built an oasis at Wexford Heights Plaza stacked with 300 planters filled with vegetables, herbs which were given away and native plants transplanted to The Meadoway later.

“It really demonstrated what else you can do with the extra space we have in our neighbourhoods,” said Rotsztain, though some people “thought we were a garden centre.”

Other WexPOPS locations are ready to pop up between Warden and Pharmacy avenues at strategic spots where they are being welcomed.

Rotsztain’s group staged a design process at the Working Women Community Centre (Victoria Park Hub) to decide the focus of each site.

The plan was to have the installations ready for the Taste of Lawrence 2023, the area’s annual street festival, on July 7 to 9.

Being experimental, WexPOPS is running late but should be up for a three-month period from August through October.

“If other groups want to do this, we kind of have a manual,” Rotsztain said.

The hammocks will be set up in a space outside the Arab Community Centre of Toronto.
WexPOPS wants to hear from community groups interested in hosting events, Rotsztain said.

One design process suggestion was a drive-in movie at Wexford Heights Plaza, he said. “We might even show Wexford Plaza, the movie.”

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2022: ThistlePOPS

plazaPOPS Aims to Enhance Community in Suburban Landscapes

November 10, 2022

University of Guelph

Link to article

Strip mall parking lots have never been renowned for their ability to entice passers-by to gather and mingle. But that has been changing in parts of Toronto in the last few years thanks to a University of Guelph-led project called plazaPOPS.

The project has transformed barren parking lots in Toronto’s outer boroughs into inviting spaces where residents can sit and chat between shopping errands, or where entire neighbourhoods can gather for day-long community and cultural events.

This year, the first in a three-year grant-funded program of new plazaPOPS, saw a new expanded approach, with four parking lots throughout north Etobicoke repurposed into plazaPOPS spaces through the Albion Islington Square BIA, in partnership with the Rexdale Community Hub.

Each plazaPOPS site featured shaded benches and planters filled with trees and native perennial plants to attract pollinators, as well as murals, a stage and street art projects created by local artists.

A local church hosted a weekly free BBQ and concert at one of the sites, while several large community-led events were held throughout the summer, including carnivals with music, free food and local entertainers. The season ended with a fall harvest festival featuring music and Diwali performances.

Daniel Rotsztain, a U of G graduate whose master of landscape architecture thesis helped launch plazaPOPS, says wherever the team goes, they have insisted the local community lead the event planning.

“We want to create an authentic relationship with community members so that each installation expresses their local culture and their vision for the neighbourhood,” he said.

Enhance spaces that have no space for communing

A parking lot might seem an unusual locale for a neighbourhood party, but as landscape architecture professor Prof. Brendan Stewart explained, the point of plazaPOPS is to create a “main street” atmosphere in parts of the city that are dominated by large lanes of traffic.
“We aim to provide a publicly accessible space where there are already lots of things happening and where people are spending time,” said Stewart, a professor in the School of Environmental Design and Rural Development (SEDRD) within the Ontario Agricultural College. “The point is to enhance spaces that are already buzzing but have no space for communing.”

Many of the plazaPOPS have been in strip mall parking lots where locally owned businesses have agreed to give up parking spaces to create a community meeting place.

“We go to where we are invited. We want to support small business, not push anyone out,” Stewart said. “And we always go back to the idea that what’s good for the community tends to also be good for local businesses.”

Attendance at the community events was high this summer, with families and locals gathering. In place for three months, the installations were well used throughout the summer by people looking for a place to sit amid some greenery.
“We had a local artist named Wong who spent several weeks on the site creating some of the pavement art and he is full of stories of how people used the space, how there were regulars who come every day,” said Rotsztain.

“It feels like it was very appreciated,” he added. “This part of the city often doesn’t get as much investment in the arts and culture realm as other areas, so it was a refreshing thing for them to have a public space.”

plazaPOPS recently incorporated as not-for-profit organization

With the aim of creating a sustainable, long-term initiative, plazaPOPS was recently incorporated as a not-for-profit organization with an executive and board of directors.

The project received three years of funding from the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev) through the City of Toronto’s Main Street Recovery and Rebuild program, as well as a Partnership Development Grant. Next year will see an enhanced research project involving U of G sociologists Drs. Mervyn Horgan and Saara Liinamaa, SEDRD’s Dr. Karen Landman, University of Toronto economist Dr. Rafael Gomez and other collaborators.
Local community members will be trained to participate in the research, which aims to understand the economic, social and environmental impact of the plazaPOPS project.

Along with community partners, the team will discuss sites for next year’s installation during the U of G community design studio course to be held in the winter 2023 semester, Stewart said.

“We are trying to create a vibrant city that everyone has access to and are really excited about how this project has grown.”

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2022: ThistlePOPS

Barren Toronto parking lots have been transforming into inviting pop-up parks

September 14, 2022

By Jack Landau

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Congested suburban strip mall parking lots are the last place one would expect to encounter pockets of foot and cycling traffic, but for the past few years, some of these car-dominated pedestrian wastelands have been shedding that identity thanks to an ongoing initiative known as plazaPOPS.

The brainchild of Brendan Stewart and Karen Landman, who are both professors of Landscape Architecture at the University of Guelph, as well as author/cartographer Daniel Rotsztain, the project was spearheaded in a 2019 pilot transforming surface parking at Wexford Heights Plaza in Scarborough into an inviting pedestrian environment.

This first installation, known as WexPOPS, occupied just ten parking spots, but its success has created an appetite for even more community pop-ups in other suburban neighbourhoods across Toronto.

In the years since, plazaPOPS — named in a fusion of the strip plazas being transformed with privately-owned public spaces, or POPS — has taken its community-led, low-cost process to lots with an aim to create free and accessible spaces to address a lack of amenities for pedestrians and transit users.

This group of four parking lots spread throughout the Albion Islington Square BIA in North Etobicoke has been repurposed into community spaces until Oct. 24 in a partnership with the Rexdale Community Hub and local BIA.

It may run counter to trends of urban intensification, but pop-up spaces like these actually embrace the conditions of the inner suburbs. Instead of drastically changing the engrained way of life, they open up areas not necessarily designed with foot traffic in mind to new users while supporting businesses hard hit by two years of rolling lockdowns.

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2022: ThistlePOPS

plazaPOPS looks to create a community hub in Thistletown

August 5, 2022

By Anita Li

Link to article and video

Live in Toronto’s inner suburbs and have no place to hang out?
An innovative new initiative called PlazaPOPS feels your pain, so it’s building unlikely gathering spaces in one underserved community at a time, and in this case the focus is on Thistletown.

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ResearchPOPS

plazaPOPS receives SSHRC and FedDev funding for new round of pilots!

June 20, 2022

University of Guelph

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plazaPOPS, a collaborative research initiative that enhances the public realm through publicly accessible pop-up installations within the privately owned parking lots of commercial strip-malls, has received two significant new grants!

Led by Landscape Architecture Assistant Professor Brendan Stewart, in collaboration with MLA’18 graduate Daniel Rotsztain, the initiative has grown over the past three years. The seeds of the idea were developed in Daniel’s Master of Landscape Architecture thesis which led to a 2019 pilot in Wexford Heights, Scarborough — known as ‘WexPOPS’ — funded by Park People’s Public Space Incubator Grant (with financial support from Ken and Eti Greenberg and the Balsam Foundation), as well as the City of Toronto’s BIA Kickstarter grant, and supported by the School of Environmental Design and Rural Development.

Following the success of the pilot, staff from several divisions of the City of Toronto expressed interest in further development of the initiative, and in 2020, joined the research team in a successful Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grant with a goal to develop a framework for the creation of a sustainable plazaPOPS program. The SSHRC research involved a working group of ten City staff from multiple divisions, who provided input and oversight through a series of virtual workshops in fall 2020 and spring 2021. The partnership led in July 2021 to a $1M grant from the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev). Part of a larger ‘Main Street Recovery and Rebuild program’

that responds to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the FedDev project involves the planning, design, fabrication, installation, and programming of a number of new plazaPOPS installations from 2022 to 2024, with the design of an initial cluster in the north Etobicoke neighbourhood of Rexdale planned to open in July 2022.

A second SSHRC grant, providing three years of funding, was just announced, which will evaluate, document, and communicate the social and economic benefits of this new round of plazaPOPS pilots. To oversee the execution of the projects, plazaPOPS has incorporated as a not-for-profit, and has recruited a board of directors who bring a diversity of perspectives and experiences.

The new SSHRC will involve University of Guelph sociologists Mervyn Horgan and Saara Liinamaa, University of Toronto economist Rafael Gomez, as well as SEDRDs Karen Landman, among many other collaborators. The project will bring numerous opportunities to landscape architecture students within SEDRD, including research assistantships, and the possibility of integration into community design studios. As an initial output from the SSHRC funding, plazaPOPS is aiming to launch a refreshed website in fall 2022. See UofG news release for additional information.

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2019: WexPOPS

plazaPOPS Converts Unused Parking Into Lively Public Space

March 26, 2020

By Nicolas Carvajal

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Parking minimums or obligatory parking spaces for developments are part of the reason why North American cities and towns struggle to maintain vibrant atmospheres. Daniel
Rotsztain, a former Pop-Up City team member developed the idea of regenerating strip malls in his Master’s thesis, under the guidance of Brendan Stewart, professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Guelph. The first plazaPOPS popped up in the Toronto neighbourhood of Wexford Heights as a pilot project to demonstrate the benefits of community-based design process.

The innovative part of plazaPOPS is that it recognises privately-owned strip mall parking lots as an essential part of the public realm. This low cost, high impact project demonstrates how public spaces such as parking lots can be greatly improved to serve as community gathering spots, and contribute positively to local businesses. A guide for Toronto on how to enhance its parking lots can be found here.

The planning and making of public spaces need to consider their users through community-based processes like plazaPOPS. Doing so will serve to enhance a city’s streetscape and create stronger local identities in large urban areas such as Toronto.

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GuelphPOPS

plazaPOPS Installation Adds a Pop of Colour to Reynolds Walk

September 30, 2019

University of Guelph

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If you’ve strolled Reynolds Walk on campus this September, you may have noticed a pop-up relaxation spot installed next to Branion Plaza. The WexPOPS installation is a portable public gathering place that was relocated to U of G from its initial installation earlier this summer in a strip mall parking lot in Scarborough, Ont.

WexPOPS is the pilot installation of the plazaPOPS Initiative – a design and research project led by master of landscape architecture grad Daniel Rotsztain and U of G landscape architecture Profs. Brendan Stewart and Karen Landman.

“Neighbourhood main streets need accessible gathering spaces to support community life and individual well-being,” says Stewart. “PlazaPOPS is testing a high-impact, low cost model to create such spaces in areas that need them most, all in partnership with local businesses who own the land.”

This summer’s POPS (privately owned public space) installation in Wexford Heights Plaza in Scarborough hosted musical acts, workshops and community events.

Designed with community in mind

WexPOPS features a series of modular planters, benches, tables and umbrellas, all clad in marine plywood and trimmed in cedar. The original installation created a comfortable and sheltered space that framed views of the strip mall.

Ben O’Hara, an MLA grad and sessional instructor in the School of Environmental Design and Rural Development, managed the installation’s carpentry. All components were designed as modules that can be reconfigured to suit varying future site conditions and that can be packed flat for easy assembly and storage.

The original installation featured almost 500 plants, which were installed in colour-coded pails recycled from U of G:
> red for native perennials
> orange for annuals
> yellow for edible plants

Most of the native plants were donated to the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority and planted in a stretch of the Meadoway — a utility corridor naturalization project that runs through Scarborough — this September. The annuals and edible plants were brought back to Guelph and incorporated into the installation on campus.

A year of community consultation, planning and design

Retail strip mall plazas are everywhere in suburban North America, Stewart explains. While privately owned, he says, these plazas define main streets and serve as important settings of community life for millions of Canadians. Finding ways to humanize these areas can positively impact many people.
The WexPOPS project was part of a second-year master of landscape architecture design studio this past winter. MLA students worked in teams to develop concepts that were presented and refined through workshops and open houses with Scarborough community members. WexPOPS resulted from more than a year of community consultation, planning and design work.

Stewart and Landman hope to roll out a broader plazaPOPS program across the province.

The reinstallation is supported by the School of Environmental Design and Rural Development, the Sustainability Office and Physical Resources. Learn more about plazaPOPS at www.plazaPOPS.ca and on Instagram and Twitter @plaza_pops.

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2019: WexPOPS

How turning parking spaces into tiny parks could ease Toronto’s public space shortage

August 19, 2019

By May Warren

Link to article

In a weekly series the Star seeks simple, affordable solutions to the problems faced by Torontonians and the city as a whole.

The problem: As Toronto’s population grows and becomes more dense, parts of the city are suffering from a shortage of parks and public space.

In the Mission neighbourhood of San Francisco lies a tiny oasis made of bent pipes and reclaimed wood — complete with benches for weary pedestrians and plants that give the sidewalk a pop of green. It’s squeezed into two former parking spots.

The “Pipelet parklet,” across from a high school, was designed and built by students through the non- profit Youth Art Exchange and installed in late 2017. It’s one of 59 “parklets” across the Northern California city, the result of a push to turn street parking into micro parks.

“The city kind of embraced the concept of creating small public spaces,” said John Francis, manager of the parklet program, over the phone from San Francisco.

“We’re just storing cars in those places otherwise.”

As Toronto deals with a growing population, sky-high prices, and fierce competition for land, finding room for large public parks is increasingly difficult, especially downtown. This well-documented lack of parkland is coupled with a large city investment in parking. The Toronto Parking Authority is the biggest supplier of municipal parking in North America — managing 19,000 on street parking spaces and 22,000 off-street spaces offered at below-market rates.

Toronto has some parklets, mostly as part of the King St. transit priority project. But as part of its Pavement to Parks program, San Francisco has streamlined the process for getting them on the ground, co-ordinating across silos and providing a handy manual complete with notes like “consider the rainforest, no tropical hardwood.” The city, unlike Toronto where parklets are divided between public space and expansion for restaurants, is also determined to keep them open to everyone, not just customers of a particular business.

“In San Francisco we’re very clear that you don’t have to buy something from the sponsor’s business to sit in a parklet or enjoy the parklet. We have signs that say ‘this is a public space,’” said Francis.

It started with “guerrilla” pop-up parks — citizens took over a parking space or two for a few hours, put down some grass and fed the metre — which led to a 2010 pilot program.

In 2016 the board of supervisors — San Francisco’s governing body — passed the Places for People Ordinance, legislation designed to help correct an imbalance in access to public space, by making it easier to create parklets and other urban parks, according to Robin Abad Ocubillo, senior planner and urban designer with San Francisco city planning.

“Not all citizens have equal access to open space and that is a historical structural problem that we face in our cities and in our country,” he said.

From environmental activism to the LGBTQ rights movement, the city has “always been a pioneer in terms of civic engagement and civic participation” and “the expression of our country’s democratic ideals in public space,” he said.

For Abad Ocubillo parklets are “part of a long tradition in San Francisco around empowering citizens and empowering the public to shape civic life and shape our civic commons, our public realm, by making it easier, less expensive, less process-intensive, to go ahead and make these projects.”

Many are sponsored by restaurants and cafés, and customers are encouraged to enjoy a coffee or a bagel in street seating, as long as non-customers aren’t kicked out. They can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $150,000 Francis said, but are usually around $20,000 (U.S.).

They are technically temporary, and some have come and gone over the years. Others have changed in design.

There’s not a maximum size but they usually don’t take up more than two parking spaces, and the parking doesn’t have to be replaced. Francis doesn’t have any hard numbers but anecdotally has heard they’re good for business.

“It couldn’t not be,” he said.

“It kind of does act as an expansion of your square footage, in a way.”

The Mission’s Pipelet Parklet cost about $35,000, said Reed Davaz McGowan, executive director at Youth Art Exchange, and was funded by corporate sponsors and grants. It’s one of three the non- profit organization has worked on, providing high school students with an opportunity to leave their mark on their communities.

“We tend to work in neighbourhoods that are not the most well known parts of San Francisco and so otherwise might not able to get the glory of having a parklet,” said Davaz McGowan.

“We see them as opportunities to create gathering spaces, community spaces, cultural spaces.”People do complain about the loss of parking, she said, and there are also concerns about them becoming sleeping spaces for San Francisco’s large homeless population. The parklet manual touches on this — not to the level of “putting pigeon spikes or anything on it, but they are concerned about long stretches of benches into the design and so those are things that do inform what the designs of the parklets are,” Davaz McGowan said.

In Toronto, parklets are divided between “parklet cafés” (there are 15 including 12 that are part of the King St. project and “public parklets” (19 with 15 part of the King St. project), according to city spokesperson Eric Holmes.

A new bylaw for both types will be enacted in September.

Under it, café applications must be submitted through Municipal Licensing and Standards, and once approved owners can serve customers food and drinks in them. Public applications must be submitted though Transportation Services. A permit is required in both cases, but the fee for the public ones is lower as they’re meant as space for everyone.

Jake Tobin Garrett, policy and planning manager at non-profit park advocacy organization Park People, calls parklets a “delightful” idea and “really interesting way of adding public space.”

But they are not an “end solution to public space in busy areas.” The four small parkettes planned on side streets along Bloor St., as a partnership between the Bloor Annex Business Improvement Area and the city, are on example of a Toronto twist on it, he said.

“They’re a way of expanding seating and trees and greenery and gardens in these sort of key locations along intersections along these streets.”

A pop-up public space in Scarborough’s Wexford Heights Plaza parking lot this summer, funded by Park People and a city grant, “basically takes the idea of a parklet and adapts it to a suburban strip mall context,” Garrett said.
Owners of businesses in the strip mall gave up a few parking spaces “to create this public space for people in the community to use that now has seating and pollinator plants that have attracted butterflies and caterpillars to this parking lot.”

It’s not an either or situation, and different kinds of urban space are needed, he said. But they all take political will.

“The cities where you see these parklets and other kind of street plazas become more prevalent and dynamic are the ones where the city has put a lot of effort both in their own time and in funding to actually put these together,” Garrett said.

Francis agreed parklets aren’t a perfect or permanent solution. But they do offer a small way to “clawback space from the automobile” and make car-centric streets slightly more livable.

“In my perfect world we wouldn’t need them, because our streets and public realm would be designed to a much higher standard,” he said.
“But in the meantime we have this great program that let’s us do that.”

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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.