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.