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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

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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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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

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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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2019: WexPOPS

When parks pop-up, butterflies pop in

August 19, 2019

By Jake Tobin Garrett

When parks pop-up, butterflies pop in
The coolest thing happened in the middle of a Toronto strip mall parking lot along Lawrence West in Scarborough last month: a monarch butterfly came to visit.

No, it wasn’t looking for lunch at The Wexford Restaurant (though I hear it’s good)–the butterfly was attracted by over 360 native pollinator plants that were part of a pop-up park installation called WexPOPS.

WexPOPS, led by artist and Master of Landscape Architecture graduate Daniel Rotsztain and University of Guelph professor Brendan Stewart, was intended as a project to support community-use and social gathering. It was one of five projects funded through Park People’s Public Space Incubator program in 2018.

When parks pop-up, butterflies pop in
But the design also included lots of native plants, supplied by Native Plants in Claremont, thanks to the collaborative design process between local community members and University of Guelph landscape architecture students.

“We selected a wide variety of native perennial wildflowers and meadow grasses — 29 species in all — and we certainly hoped to attract bees and butterflies and other insects, but we’ve been completely amazed at the results,” Brendan Stewart said.

“It’s been quite dramatic to watch the monarch’s progress from larva to adult butterflies, and to see how much milkweed they eat in the process. The garden is constantly buzzing and visitors tend to be surprised and delighted to experience this much life in the middle of a huge parking lot.”

It’s a striking example of how small pin-pricks of nature in an otherwise sea of pavement — even in temporary spaces — can help support biodiversity and threatened species, like pollinators.

Emerging research backs this up, too. A recent study explored the potential of temporary pop-up parks (cutely acronymed PUPS) to support greater species diversity.

When parks pop-up, butterflies pop in
Large scale green spaces are critical, but the study author points to research showing that the quality and density of ground-level plants — like the native plants populating WexPOPS — can have a greater degree of influence on species diversity than factors in larger green When parks pop-up, butterflies pop in
spaces, like tree density.

The conclusion: don’t discount the importance of small spaces.

This should come as welcome news to Canadian cities who are hard at work trying to restore natural habitat lost to urbanization and increase biodiversity. Supporting biodiversity was a key trend we found in our 2019 Canadian City Parks Report–which surveyed 23 cities–released in June.

In particular, Toronto is doing some creative work with a newly approved Pollinator Strategy. The City just launched its first PollinateTO community grants, which fund small-scale pollinator gardens cultivated by local residents. As WexPOPS shows, these initiatives can have quite positive impacts, when using the right native plant mixtures for local species.
Vancouver is also working to create small pollinator gardens in the city. A pop-up pollinator park planted at 5th and Vine in 2016 on a small 0.3 acre site packed in 1,500 community- planted pollinator plants. A citizen science survey observed the second highest number of pollinator species within the garden compared to other observed park sites.
Red Deer has designated four official pollinator parks where city staff handpick weeds and pesticide use is banned. And Hamilton’s Pipeline Trail features small pollinator gardens along its route tended by local community members.

You can read more about how cities across Canada are supporting pollinators and urban biodiversity by reading about it in our Canadian City Parks Report.

Back in Scarborough, the team behind WexPOPS will be taking down the pop-up near the end of August, meaning the parking spaces it occupies will go back to housing cars rather than plants and people.

A critical question in thinking about the viability and importance of pop-up parks in contributing to urban biodiversity is what happens after the pop-up pops down?

When parks pop-up, butterflies pop in
For the team behind WexPOPS that question was something they thought of from the very beginning. The plants will be transported to a local hydro corridor, which is undergoing its own transformation as a 16km linear park and trail called The Meadoway, where they will be re-planted.

This is a great solution, but there’s also an opportunity here to think about how these pop- up park projects can literally seed change in their own location.

For example, the plants repurposed within the stripmall parking lot itself. It’s these hardscape urban landscapes that require the most attention and care if we are to truly re- green our city, restoring some of the natural habitat we stole when we paved it over.

Some may look at micro-gardens like WexPOPS sitting in the middle of a parking lot and wonder: what good is this actually doing?

But as WexPOPS shows, if you build it butterflies will come.

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2019: WexPOPS

Measuring success in a suburban oasis: U of T students team up with neighbourhood groups to address urban challenges

August 1, 2019

University of Toronto

By Romi Levine

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If you happen to be near Warden and Lawrence Avenues in Scarborough this summer, you’ll likely notice an unusual sight at one the many strip malls that populate the area.

Wexford Heights Plaza is a one-storey stretch of local businesses – including a barber, a Syrian pastry shop and a 61-year-old family restaurant – bordered entirely by a parking lot. But from July 5 to Aug. 18, a portion of the lot has been transformed into a makeshift suburban oasis, complete with comfortable seating, interactive art and hundreds of potted plants.

The installation is called WexPOPS – a temporary, collaborative project that aims to create a place where community members can gather, meet each other and support local businesses.

WexPOPS serves as a pilot project that, if successful, can be replicated in different ways in other business improvement areas (BIAs) in Toronto and elsewhere.

But to prove the project is worthy of future funding means having the data to back up its success. It requires a toolbox of strategies that will help organizers measure the impact of the project on the local community and businesses. That task was given to a group of University of Toronto students.

The U of T students were part of the Rotman CityLab Fellowship, a year-long elective course that pairs MBA students from the Rotman School of Management with urban planning and industrial relations master’s students. Together, they team up with BIAs and community groups, using their expertise to help address issues faced by neighbourhoods across the GTA.

“I was really excited about working with different people from different parts of the university and the tangibility of the project seemed really cool,” says Fifile Nguyen, who graduated this spring from the Rotman MBA program.

“I was also compelled because my parents, for several decades, were small business owners so I was really excited to be able to do something related to the work I had watched them do as I grew up.”

The WexPOPS installation was created by a group out of the University of Guelph called plazaPOPS, led by Daniel Rotsztain, a recent graduate of Guelph’s master of landscape architecture program, and his faculty advisers Brendan Stewart and Karen Landman. The project originated from Rotsztain’s thesis, which was realized when the team secured funding through a number of community grant programs to create its first pop-up installation in Wexford Heights Plaza.

PlazaPOPS was also inspired by the work of Rafael Gomez, a U of T associate professor and director of the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources, and his work on small businesses and BIAs, which he wrote about in his book Small Business and the City. Gomez is also the co-founder of the CityLab course.

“When we reached out, Rafael was very generous with his time and knowledge, and suggested and facilitated the connection with CityLab,” Stewart says.

Gomez developed the CityLab course alongside Neel Joshi, director of Rotman’s office of student engagement.

Joshi and Gomez met by chance over a decade ago in Wexford Heights Plaza where Gomez was hosting a pop-up of his own – occupying a storefront where he ran exhibits that celebrated the history and culture of the Scarborough neighbourhood.

The duo reconnected a few years later when they both coincidentally ended up working at Rotman, and decided to identify an experiential learning opportunity that could benefit both students and BIAs.

“The nature of urban problems is complex and multidisciplinary and at a local level, to assemble that kind of diversity of talent would be really expensive if these organizations were trying to do it on their own,” says Gomez. “We can come in with solutions to a challenging problem that requires all of our insights and training and academic knowledge.”

Since its inception, CityLab has placed students in BIAs across the city, working on projects that included navigating the tensions between long-standing and new businesses in a gentrifying neighbourhood, assisting with entrepreneurship programs in Scadding Court, and working with the Toronto Association of Business Improvement Areas to explore how big infrastructure projects are affecting small businesses.

For the plazaPOPS partnership, the U of T students provided the team with options for evaluating the strip-mall installation – including how WexPOPS affects the availability of parking, its economic impact on local businesses and the level of community engagement, says Stewart.

“They helped us work through the most efficient research data collection strategies that we can utilize in order to measure the performance of the installation,” he says.

“We’re implementing their recommendations, pretty much as we speak.”

Building the right metrics involved a great deal of research and community consultation. Students read up on evaluation methods used by other City of Toronto pilot projects and tapped into their combined academic knowledge of design thinking and urban planning. The students also interviewed local businesses and community members to gain insight into what they felt would make WexPOPS a success.

“[Business owners] were telling us that they were really excited about being the catalyst for people to meet each other,” says Nguyen. The students also discovered that community members felt it was important to raise the profile of the neighbourhood, telling them, “the only time our neighbourhood is ever in the news is when something bad happens … but really there is so much more vibrancy to our neighbourhood than that.”

Similarly, U of T students were keen to turn the spotlight on Scarborough – an area of Toronto that’s often overlooked when it comes to inventive design and planning.

“When it comes to certain planning elements, suburbs are not looked at the same way as the downtown core, especially with regards to investment and doing things that are more innovative,” says Igor Samardzic, who graduated with a master’s in urban planning from the Faculty of Arts & Science.

In neighbourhoods that are less dense than downtown Toronto, strip malls play a much more important role in fostering a sense of community, says Michael Guberman, a CityLab student and recent MBA graduate.
“What they are lacking is the warmth and gathering spaces that you would see in more of an urban landscape,” Guberman says.

Projects like WexPOPS can help those suburban spaces become more of a community hub, he says. “Using what they have already, building on it and getting the community buy-in is important to see that this type of infrastructure is not forgotten and not thought of as a waste of space.”

Stewart says plazaPOPS is currently in talks with a number of potential partners as they determine how the project will evolve beyond the Wexford pilot. Regardless of the outcome, the data collected from WexPOPS with the metrics designed by U of T students will play an important role in defining its future.

“The data and the feedback on how it’s received is really critical to being able to scale this up,” says Stewart.

This September, the CityLab fellowship will enter its fourth year, offering a new cohort of students the opportunity to make their mark on community projects across the city.

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2019: WexPOPS

Wexford Heights BIA partners with plazaPOPS to create urban oasis

July 30, 2019

BIA Kickstarter

By Andrew Seale

Link to article

In the middle of Scarborough’s Wexford Plaza parking lot, an oasis has sprouted. Butterflies and bees encircle wildflowers, edibles and meadow grass, while people from the community chatter on benches shaded by umbrellas, framed in by a mural from local artist Echo Railton.

It’s called WexPOPs, and it’s a demonstration of how Toronto’s vibrant inner suburban strip malls, those privately-owned public spaces (POPS), can be turned into ‘pop-up’ community gathering places.

“It’s interesting (seeing) the contrast of a pretty intense nature experience in the middle of a parking lot,” says Brendan Stewart, one of the collaborators on the WexPOPs project and an assistant professor at University of Guelph’s School of Environmental Design and Rural Development.

The project – a collaboration with local stakeholders, the Wexford Heights BIA, Scarborough Arts, and the University of Guelph’s School of Environmental Design and Rural Development, is supported by grants from the BIA Innovation Fund and Park People’s Public Space Incubator grant.

It’s part of the wider plazaPOPS project, spun out of Daniel Rotsztain, the Urban Geographer and recent University of Guelph Masters of Landscape Architecture (MLA) graduate’s thesis research.

“The whole idea of the project is recognizing the richness and diversity of Toronto’s strip malls as already being the site of community gathering,” explains Rotsztain. “Most strip malls are privately-owned even though they’re already used as public spaces… the pilot is testing the ability to activate (these) spaces.”

The pop-up area combines shaded seating, nearly 500 plants – ranging from herbs and vegetables to local species, and an event area with a small stage and mural. It occupies 10 parking spaces, a key factor given that it required buy-in from the plaza’s owner Tony Kiriakou.

“The Kiriakou family is very community-minded, they’re entrepreneurs and business owners,” says Rotsztain. “Ten years ago if you were to come up to property owners and say we’re going to take parking spots for a public space, they wouldn’t give you the time of day but these are entrepreneurs and business people who see that investment in the public realm and these spaces are good for business.”

The Wexford Heights BIA has helped drive the project since Rotsztain and co. first pitched the idea. Linda Raeside, the BIA’s executive director, says the pop-up, which is only in place for six weeks from July through to mid-August, has already been well-used. She’s looking for ways to re-introduce it next season.

“Because of its modular form it can be adjusted and made smaller,” she says. “We’re thinking about even bringing it back for events like the Taste of Lawrence… you’ve got an oasis basically in an urban area.”

Both the team behind plazaPOPS and Raeside say it’s not a stretch to see these types of pop-ups in other BIAs. That is, after all, the point of WexPOPS, to pilot a wider sweeping solution to public community spaces in urban areas. When the spot is decommissioned in August, the team plans to work through an extensive exit report to measure the impact from local economic development straight through to social benefits.

But Rotsztain says it’s already clear BIAs are a key part of the equation. “This kind of project requires a third party between the residents and the business owners and that apparatus already exists,” says the Urban Geographer.

“Residents have a desire to bring better streetscapes and the BIA has a role in that – one of the theses of the project is that city- building initiatives and the goals of small businesses are one and the same, so how can we overlap those so everyone benefits?”

WexPOPS seems like a good place to start.

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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.