2019: WexPOPS
Pop-up garden in Toronto has deep roots in Guelph
By Jonathan Duncan
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“Let’s go hang out in the strip mall parking lot” is probably something you’ve never wanted to say, but that may soon change.
The plazaPOPS project has opened it’s first garden space in Scarborough.
The pop-up parks will feature a variety of plant life, and offer benches and umbrellas to encourage people to embrace the space. It started in the mind of Daniel Rotsztain, with his 2017 masters of landscape architecture thesis at the University of Guelph.
The thesis looked at “pragmatic ways to enhance the public realm for pedestrians,” says Rotsztain.
With the help of U of G professor Brendan Stewart, they concluded there should be a pilot project to gauge the worth of community gathering spaces in private strip-mall parking lots.
“In Guelph, strip malls are kind of dismissed because they’re ugly in architecture, but they’re very vibrant places,” says Rotsztain. “So it was figuring out a way to enhance these places, without erasing the communities that already existed.”
Stewart and Rotsztain say they’ve been working with dozens of people since receiving funding in April 2018.
University of Guelph professor Karen Landman is a co-lead on the project. Stewart says she’s been helping to figure out the planning and research design components of the project.
“Another part of this project is thinking about how it can scale up in future years,” says Stewart. They’ll be measuring the performance, including its impact on parking.
They also integrated the project into a course at the U of G, giving students a chance to add their voice.
The design is intended to be quick to set up/teardown, modular and easy to store, meaning it should see repeated use over the years says Rotsztain.
It was designed and built by Ben O’Hara in Guelph.
The first instalment, WexPOPS, was opened in Scarborough’s Wexford Heights Plaza on July 5th, 2019.
While vandalism is a concern, Stewart and Rotsztain say the community has really embraced the concept, and people will be keeping a close eye on the site.
They’ve been working with a variety of community groups and other local actors, and Stewart says encouraging local stewardship is the best strategy for vandal proofing the site.
“It’s an interesting kind of little community that we’ve tapped into that’s been really supportive and excited to be a part of the project,” says Rotsztain.
Local high schoolers, mostly newcomers from Nigeria, will be employed to care of the garden.
Stewart says they chose the inner suburbs of Toronto because it’s where huge numbers of new Canadians live.
“We need to have strong communities, we need people to be connect and we need people to aware of each other, and not see people as ‘the other’ and all of that kind of thing,” says Stewart.
The project is being funded by the Park People’s Public Space Incubator Grant, which is in turn funded by Ken and Eti Greenberg and the Balsam Foundation.
Others like the U of G, have donated materials and other resources. While the Toronto Region Conversation Authority will take the leftover plants and reuse them in the community.
“We’re trying to think through the life-cycle of everything we use, to minimize waste,” says Stewart.
He says they’ve had a number of inquiries from the U of G, business improvement areas, community groups and others, but they’ll be focusing on the one project for now.
If you’d like to learn more, you can visit the groups website here.
Fun fact: POPS is an acronym for Privately Owned Public Space, says Stewart.
Another concept in the same vein is the “parklet” however those are generally built on public spaces.
