Operating in the Grey Area
Consider an aerial view looking west along Lawrence Avenue toward the Don Valley, with the recognizable CN tower and downtown Toronto visible at the far left of the image. With three eastbound, three westbound and a centre turning lane, Lawrence is a typical strip mall main street. The publicly owned right-of-way, where the City has the most direct opportunity to implement public realm improvements, also includes a shallow median strip above the curb and a 1.5m (6ft) wide sidewalk on both sides. Strip-mall parking lots, located between the commercial buildings and the sidewalk, are on either side of the right-of-way. Toronto’s Planning and Development division can shape the evolution of this privately owned zone in the long term through zoning and site plan controls when properties are redeveloped, but in the more immediate term, has few tools to encourage the enhancement of these portions, which often make up much of the public realm.
In addition to operating in a literal grey area —asphalt parking lots are a hard, grey environment with a harsh micro-climate — plazaPOPS’ location on private property requires the initiative to operate in a policy, funding, and governance grey-area; an ill-defined and under-supported category of public realm planning and design, where invisible barriers pose challenges to implementation in addition to those posed by the often-hostile physical conditions. From negotiating access with landowners to ensuring insurance coverage and figuring out avenues for public subsidies to make the initiative financially viable — the idea is that there is a social and economic benefit to the initiative that may justify public investment — the intangible challenges are many, and new contractual, insurance, funding, and governance tools need to be developed to support the model.
Making-Do Urbanism
‘Making do’ typically refers to managing with less-than-ideal circumstances, but the concept also encompasses proactive efforts at improvement, a step beyond simply managing or making the best of the situation. Implied in this notion is that a making-do project improves parts of the whole, but largely works with inherited conditions, doing so resourcefully, but leaving the fundamental framework intact. A making do approach might therefore be applicable where a comprehensive redo is not viable or even desirable for one reason or another, and where making minor adjustments or tweaks can yield significant improvements.
Applied to the field of urban planning and design, making do can describe a pragmatic, relatively quick and impactful approach to city-repair, where the economics, complexity and messiness of the post-modern city might otherwise lead to inertia. We see plazaPOPS as a making-do project — in the proactive effort at improvement sense — in that it proposes a modest tactical intervention that minimally impacts or disrupts how the existing system operates. It employs a low-cost, low-friction strategy, but plazaPOPS has high-impact ambitions.
plazaPOPS follows the model of tactical urbanism, drawing especially on the notion that temporary experiments are easier to get off the ground and can propose otherwise radical ideas, and that systematically measuring and evaluating the performance of the intervention is critical to building the model into something larger and more impactful than a one-off demonstration. plazaPOPS’ exclusive focus on enhancing the public-ness of private property, its making-do approach of harnessing and repurposing local resources, and the ambition of creating a city wide program, may create a point of differentiation from many tactical urbanism projects, however.
At the individual site level, plazaPOPS is informed by a making-do attitude. It doesn’t seek to fundamentally restructure the physical environment, but rather, it develops a new type of community gathering space and inserts it within a less than ideal existing physical environment, introducing new uses, increasing accessibility, and fostering new types of social and cultural connections. The model also prioritizes identifying and working with existing cultural resources and systems, forming a dense web of local partnerships, and adapting to local ways of collaborating and collectively getting things done.
Our experimental 2019 pilot project made do with the physical and cultural environment of the suburban strip-mall, drawing on tactical urbanism, principles of co-design, and a collaborative spirit of pragmatic and positive opportunism to realize the project, which we have written about elsewhere.
As a product, WexPOPS made do with the under-utilized space and particular geometry of our hosts strip-mall parking lot, with recycled materials, and donations from local businesses. The siting of our pilot was determined by what the landowner, our host, would allow, and the form ‘made do’ with existing site patterns and elements, such as drive aisles, speed bumps, and access to water and electricity. Creating a safe, accessible, and comfortable gathering space in the middle of a busy parking lot is a novel design challenge. WexPOPS was designed to balance a sense of enclosure, creating a physical barrier between the interior and cars navigating its exterior; and openness, featuring three clear points of entry and exit. The result was an ‘island’ condition with an ‘inner room’, whereas different circumstances will result in future plazaPOPS of different shapes and sizes, and with different relationships to the street and adjacent buildings.
As a process, WexPOPS created a design, programming and maintenance program that responded to the embedded knowledge, resources, skills, and contributions of the local community. We made do with the existing cultural networks in the community to find a site, assemble our working group, and to find a pool of willing and able employees to take care of the installation. We encountered this last group fortuitously. Through early engagement with a local social service agency kitty corner to our site — the Arab Community Centre of Toronto (ACCT) — we learned of an after-school program the organization offers for local new-comer high school students. This led to recruiting and employing twelve of these students to serve as our ‘site stewards’, who watered plants, managed waste, and served as ambassadors of the project.
Our partnership with the ACCT serves as an example of what we would start to refer to as the dividends of an attitude of ‘positive opportunism’. We couldn’t have planned it, but by being open and flexible to new developments that promised to add value to the project, we were slowly weaving the project into the fabric of the community and creating spin-off benefits that added layers to the ‘good news story’ aspect of the project. Not only did we find a group of mature young people who were excited at the opportunity to contribute to their local community; now the project was actively contributing to youth leadership development and newcomer youth employment – two welcome but unforeseen dimensions when we started the process.
