Do you work in urban energy?

You’re invited to participate in the Renewable Cities Global Learning Forum. The pressure on cities and city staff to provide affordable energy services to citizens while ensuring livability and reducing emissions has never been greater. Cities now face unprecedented pressures to provide affordable energy to their citizens, while at the same time ensuring livability and reducing emissions. But what are the best practices and affordable models to transitioning to renewables and energy efficiency in the electricity, heating, and transportation sectors?

Renewable Cities is a new global program that supports cities through the transition to 100% renewable energy and energy efficiency and will be launching through a Global Learning Forum from 13-15 May in Vancouver. Leading cities, private sector innovators, NGOs, and researchers will be gathering in one of the world’s greenest cities to take part in a solutions-focused dialogue. Join them for an inspirational opening night event, small group capacity building sessions, panel discussions, networking, and site visits to clean energy projects around Vancouver.

Secure your spot by registering at forum.renewablecities.ca

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Copenhagen is often praised for its commitment to cycling and infrastructure. With 41% of all trips citywide done by cycling it is the Golden Standard Cycling City that many municipalities aspire to. Often times you will hear North American Urbanists singing its praises with statements like “…well in Copenhagen they do this”, “Did you know they time their traffic lights to optimize cycling flow?”, etc.

Having recently visited Copenhagen I was naturally impressed. Perhaps, what has impressed me more about the Danish capital is its commitment to building successful and inviting public spaces. Practically everywhere you look, you see Copenhageners spending time in public space, taking in the delights of their city.

An empty Churchill Square, Edmonton. Source: Wikipedia

Perhaps, the most interesting feature of public space in Copenhagen is that the informal public spaces are also well used. This stands in contrast to public space in North America, where public space design often emphasizes very large and formal spaces.

These spaces often look pretty, but fail to attract people to actually occupy them, especially because they are so large. When people do use these spaces, it is often because there is programming such as festivals, events or farmers markets. There are a few exceptions in North America like the Pioneer Courtyard Square and Director Park in Portland, or Bryant Park in New York City.

In Copenhagen, people are hanging out everywhere: on the sidewalk, on a bridge, the corner of The Lakes, the edge of a river, in the City Centre parks, the pedestrian only Stroget, the Super Kilen, and the conventional public plazas.

What is the key distinction that makes Danish places so successful? Why do Danish spaces attract so many people? A few key observations:

1. Make Public Spaces Inviting and Engage People

Steps in a public space.

The overarching factor that makes these spaces so people-friendly is that they are comfortable and quiet, thus inspiring people to stay on their own volition. The design emphasizes the size and scale of the human within the public space. They do not alienate people with grand or gargantuan and unpractical gestures. They do not make a person feel small or insignificant by virtue of the size and scale of the human. This human scaled approach to urban design invites a mix of different activities and has many diverse edges.

Public spaces do not have to be large. In North America, we often opt for a singular, large public space in our cities (because often only one of them exists). Smaller can actually be  better, as the space will seem fuller and more attractive when compared with larger spaces. Many of the informal spaces in Copenhagen were on the smaller side. In other cases, large spaces were oriented to seem like a collection of smaller spaces.

Offering a space for a few people to stay is better than none at all. The key is to engage people and invite them to use these spaces. Often in North America, people will be discouraged from hanging out in these spaces because it is often associated with loitering, panhandling or the consumption of elicit substances.

A Bridge is a Popular Hangout – Dronning Louises Bro

Many of the more, unconventional and informal spaces in Copenhagen were occupied since they were noticeably quieter. For example, the sidewalks were full of people on the Dronning Louise’s Bro, a bridge spanning over the Lakes in Copenhagen. This is only been possible because of the low vehicular traffic volumes it currently has. While the bridge sees several thousands of people cycling and the occasional bus crossing everyday, its sense of place isn’t eroded by the extraneous noises of high volumes of fast moving automobile traffic.

2. Anchor Public Spaces With Food

A small food kiosk in the Central City.

Almost all of these spaces are anchored by some form of restaurant or Café. People need to eat and drink, and having an anchor, no matter how small or large that serves food, invites people and suggests that they are welcome to stay.

3. Offer Places For People To Sit – Whether Formal or Informal

A temporary seating solution.

All of these public spaces also have seating; whether informal like the steps of a staircase, or the rim of a planter or actual street furniture like benches and chairs. People like to sit. If you provide seating in a comfortable space along edges and there is something to watch (like other people), people will use them.

4. Allow People To Relieve Themselves

Public bathroom.

Often neglected in designing public spaces in North America is the bathroom. This usually means people must go to a nearby restaurant or café and spend money to use the bathroom. The Danish make no fuss about public spaces having free public washrooms. People are human, and if you treat them with respect by acknowledging their need to relieve themselves, they will feel welcome and will more likely choose to spend more time in a space.

5. Let Public Spaces Self Regulate

Often skateboarding is prohibited in public spaces in Canada.

None of these spaces had signs telling people what they couldn’t do. Spaces will never work properly if you create them, only to put up a sign listing 10 to 20 rules of prohibited actions. Public spaces need people in them to be successful. Spaces full of people have a sort of self-regulation about them. Creating spaces that invite people and letting them figure out how to use them, demonstrates a striking lack of patronizing oversight. It tells people ‘we trust you’ and we want you to use our spaces. This lack of paternalism is inviting – as a consequence, people use the spaces and seldom misbehave.

6. Give People Things To Do

A wrestling ring in the Super Kilen.

On top of this the Copenhagen spaces also invited the more “rebellious” activities such as skateboarding.

Often the needs and activities of youth in North American spaces are often neglected, opting for a basic definition of a public space. The greater variety of people you invite and accommodate for,  the more successful your public space will be. Offering a wide diversity of activities attracts a wide diversity of people.

7. Don’t Be Afraid To Be Eccentric or Bold

One part of the Super Kilen.

The Super Kilen is one of the most incredible spaces I have seen, it was an inspiration with its outlandish colours and details. Cities should not be afraid to be bold when designing public spaces. Something as simple as a coat of paint can radically change the aesthetics of a space.

8. Be Good To People

A simple and inexpensive concrete curb allows people to sit.

If you don’t think this can be done in your hometown, let me leave you with this. Jan Gehl is one of the key actors in the humanizing of Copenhagen – spending over 50 years of his life studying public life. Gehl is often quoted saying that 40 years ago the people of Copenhagen also said that they would never hang outside, they cried “but we are not Italians”. Strategic and thoughtful designs can engage and invite people in a relatively inexpensive way.

Another quote from Gehl, “It is so cheap to be sweet to people.” And it pays off in spades, as a result of a few inexpensive details, people stay outside and make the public spaces attractive. As a result of more people being outside, safety is improved with more “eyes on the street.” Great public spaces will also generate spin-off activities, where people are more likely to support adjacent businesses.

9. People Attract People

People relaxing in the park.

People are the lifeblood of our cities. Successful urban places require their presence. The canary in the coal mine for a successful public space is the presence of people, it’s that simple. Successful public spaces offer people a ‘third space’ – a place to meet with other people outside of their home or work.

A public space full of people will inevitably attract other people. Perhaps, the most remarkable thing about humans is that we are happiest when we are around other humans.

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Slow Streets is a Vancouver-based research group providing evidence for slower & better streets.

The post Lessons From Copenhagen: Key Ingredients For A Successful Public Space appeared first on Spacing National.

Beautiful Users: Designing for People is the latest work by writer, curator, and designer Ellen Lupton, which explores the evolving relationship between designer and user through a discussion on design practices and methodologies. Given the complexity and scale of the relationship she’s investigating, her study is impressively concise, thorough and an enjoyable read.

Lupton begins with a survey of design process history, focusing her discussion on well-known household items, such as the telephone and the thermostat. Through these familiar design examples, Lupton is able to emphasize that the relationship between users and designers is constantly evolving, and how simple ideas of architecture and ergonomics have naturally led the way to new, more complex, design practices, such as interface design and user experience design.

For example, ergonomic design combines the knowledge of bodily dimensions with an understanding of psychology. This body of knowledge became more and more refined and eventually evolved into interface design, which focuses on the relationship between the object and the user, looking specifically at the “the plane of connection between human and machine.”

Lupton continues along this historic journey by highlighting the natural evolution from interface design to interaction design (a deeper look at the point of contact between humans and machines), to experience design (using narratives to script the experience between user and a product or service), and finally to open source or maker-culture (the final shift away from passive user). She manages to distill a very complex story into a few vital points – explaining not only what the relationship between user and designer looks like at each point, but how it came to be, and where it might go next.

Quoting Bill Moggridge, she implies that the next level of design goes beyond the individual and extends to all living things: “we are moving towards a more holistic view of design and its impact on the larger person, community and world.”

To further support her argument, Lupton selects a small number of appropriate and compelling case studies and catalogues them as ‘Measures of Man,’ ‘Handles,’ ‘Mobility,’ ‘Interface’ and ‘Revenge of the User.’ Arguably, these categories are where the relationship between designer and user has seen significant changes.

The Measures of Man case study, a project created by Thomas Carpentier at the Ecole Speciale d’Archietcture Paris, challenges traditional approaches to design and the body by de-standardizing previously accepted norms. By designing spaces for users such as a vampire, a body builder, a Borg Queen, and a genie in a bottle, Carpentier’s project pokes fun at the idea of normal, while brilliantly designing creative solutions for the most unexpected challenges. Lupton also includes Carpentier’s design for a man who has had a translumbar amputation–a more serious example of how simple and thoughtful design changes based on the unique needs of a user has the potential to positively influence his experience.

The Handle and Mobility case studies also support the idea that the changing relationship between designer and user has led to design that better suits human need. She pays particular attention to medical devices such as wheelchairs, grab bars, 3D printable prosthetic limps and the possibility of bionic arms.

The most compelling aspect of Lupton’s latest work is the clear path that she draws between the traditional hands-off approach to design, and the contemporary nature of design in which the designer and the user play a more equal role in the design process. She concludes quite cleverly and elegantly, by introducing the reader to the new lexicon of the relationship between user and designer. Through this small gesture she empowers the reader–much in the way that design can empower a user–by creating a short glossary of key terminology, breaking down language barriers and further strengthening the conversation between user and designer.

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Ellen Ziegler has a Masters in Advanced Studies of Architecture. She lives in Toronto and spends most of her time biking, exploring the city, drinking coffee, and writing book reviews.

The post BOOK REVIEW – Beautiful Users: Designing for People appeared first on Spacing National.

This post by Natalie Corbo is part of Spacing‘s partnership with the Toronto Cycling Think and Do Tank at the University of Toronto. Find out more about the think tank, and the series, here.

Google Maps is not the best tool for mapping out a bike route. Not only is the software an unreliable judge of what makes a good cycling street, but it also turns out that scrawling all the relevant intersections on my wrist in Sharpie is pretty confusing. And yet, in many places, trying to memorize a route from Google Maps is the best choice cyclists have for wayfinding.

Although wayfinding broadly refers to all the different ways that people navigate the space they inhabit, most wayfinding initiatives in cities are focussed on designing low-tech systems that make the city easier to navigate without a smartphone. The split-second decisions that cyclists must make are particularly well-suited to good signage, rather than reliance on an app.

There are at least two components to cycling wayfinding. One is having a legible cycling network that is both predictable and easy to navigate on it’s own. At a recent talk on Metrolinx’s new transit wayfinding initative, Applied Wayfinding founder Tim Fendley emphasized the importance of consistency and certainty to make transit, pedestrian or cycling networks accessible and inclusive. He argued that if you can improve predictability and coherence of a network, you can gain the user’s trust, which will then increase transit, pedestrian or cycling use. At the Cycling Think and Do Tank, there is an emphasis on promoting cycling among people who are new to the city and even new to the country. If you constantly get lost, or have to back track, or can’t figure out how to easily get from the Richmond cycle track to Shaw St., then it’s less likely that you will perceive cycling to be a reliable and easy way to get around.

In Toronto then, where the physical bike network can be unpredictable and has significant gaps, the other component of wayfinding is to make it easier to find these disparate routes via signage. In Vancouver, where I have lived most of my life, I can usually be certain that any time a designated cycling route ends, there will be a big, green sign pointing me in the direction of a different bike route. I also know exactly what size, style, and colour of sign to watch out for along my journey. When I moved to Toronto, despite my route-planning efforts I have on a few occasions ended up on streets that I felt so uncomfortable cycling on that I’ve walked my bike a few blocks. I’m a committed cyclist, and very little could ever discourage me from riding my bike every day. But to a new, more tentative cyclist, the uncertainty of knowing whether or not you will end up on a street you aren’t comfortable riding on may be enough to discourage you from getting on your bike in the first place.

Toronto and Vancouver have their own unique challenges in terms of network legibility. Connecting the gaps in the network is a long-term fix that will hopefully be prioritized in the future. As for signage, Vancouver doesn’t have all the answers, but they have implemented some strong ideas that could work for other cities like Toronto. One aspect of Vancouver’s design is simply following good signage guidelines: the colour and size of cycling signs is consistent across the city, and the signs are large enough to be visible and legible from a distance. Unlike the few numbered routes here, the cycling routes that cut across different streets are named to be indicative of their path or destination. For example, the “Seaside” bike signage gives a lot of information in just a single word. The street signage is also included in bike wayfinding, as each designated cycle street has a little bike next to the street name at each intersection. This is a good signifier for both cyclists and drivers, who are reminded that the road is for multiple users. Added clarity to cycle crossings at busy intersections is also both a wayfinding strategy and a part of good lane design. Beyond signage, we can also think bigger and look at lighting schemes, pavement treatments and planters as part of the wayfinding strategy.

Toronto has a very high bike mode share in some parts of the city, an embedded cycling culture, and is topographically blessed with a relatively flat road network. Along with these gifts, an effective wayfinding strategy could encourage tons of new cyclists who will support network growth, and cement an even stronger cycling culture in this city.

The post Finding our way by bike appeared first on Spacing National.

Reclaiming Spaces/Places is an ongoing series written by Lacey McRae Williams that shares stories of Indigenous resurgence through public art and planning across Canada, Turtle Island (North America).

I would like to introduce two themes that are continually a point of contention in my own mind that I feel need to be discussed more often, with more people and to a deeper degree: 1) the city as a visual narrative of time and place, and 2) significant historical site selection, which includes the means of commemoration and preservation.

The following artist’s work reevaluates these ideas and shares voices that are less likely to be heard in a contemporary public realm; voices of the Anishinaabek, one of the First Peoples to inhabit areas of Ontario pre-contact.

I met Jimson Bowler at the One of A Kind Show in Toronto, March 2014. He had his art on display alongside a hand-selected group of Indigenous Artists as part of the Thunderbird Marketplace. Jimson’s art at the show was a combination of contemporary sculpture, silverworks, jewelry, and painting. Having been inspired by Norval Morrisseau myself, the grandfather of the Woodlands style of painting, I was instantly drawn to Jimson’s provocative, political, and revelatory works. After a few minutes of talking with him, he explained that all of his pieces are constructed from reclaimed materials found in Ontario, adding depth and meaning to each one. Each piece tells a unique Anishinaabek story – of creation, belonging, survival, community, and spirituality – emphasizing the extreme need for all persons to connect to place. He blends traditional Woodland’s line and shape work with a contemporary streetart-esque technique to reclaim visual space otherwise conquered by colonial values and perspectives.

He notes, “My inspiration comes from the Peterborough Petroglyphs, using the story of the anishinaabe/trickster/nanaaboozhoo as teacher lessons and stories… My sculptural work combines traditional mediums such as bone and turquoise with discarded modern materials. I take inspiration from the traditional ways that respectfully use all materials from mother earth and I seek to create objects that keep the stories alive, motivate us to learn the culture and realize that Aboriginal people are not relics of an ancient past.”

To explore these ideas further in his work, I have chosen to highlight two public pieces that exemplify notions of reclamation, resurgence, and the importance of place.

Source: www.jimsonbowler.com

‘Big Loon Portage’ depicts the 5000 year-old Anishinaabek Chemong story represented in a modern-day setting. This bus-wrap in Peterborough was selected by Artspace as a part of their ‘Art is Everywhere’ initiative. Jimson’s submission was selected from 22 artists to make its way through the city like a big canoe. The canoe is one of the many iconic symbols of Peterborough and Canada at-large, but more than existing as a symbol encased in traditional history and locked away in a museum, this piece creates a wonderfully layered metaphor as it navigates Peterborough’s city streets. The bus is transformed into a canoe – its wheels the paddles, its roads the rivers, and its daily commute the larger migratory journey. ‘Big Loon Portage’ invites an intricate public discourse on the modes of transportation used across space and time while reflecting upon the sentiments of belonging and community.

The public transit of the Chemong story addresses the first theme mentioned above – city as a narrative of time and place. It does so by interjecting a highly visible traditional Indigenous world-view on top of a classical Eurocentric depiction of landscape, and into our modern colonial world. This image travels through Peterborough sharing the story of the people who first inhabited the land, while welcoming viewers of all backgrounds and beliefs to partake in the contemporary narrative.

“I know of no other stronger image in this town than the canoe, or a better way to honour the people than together.” – Jimson Bowler (Source: www.trentarthur.ca)

The second example of his work that exists at the confluence of urban planning, public art, and Indigenous resurgence is the piece he calls ‘Place at the End of the Rabbits’ a playful appropriation of ‘Place at the End of the Rapids’ or Nogojiwanong in Anishinaabemowin. He combines multiple paintings hung outdoors with petroglyph public art, and artistic signage to commemorate and celebrate Anishinaabe perceptions of place. This is particularly interesting from a heritage standpoint, addressing the second thought-hurdle mentioned above – what we tend to view as significant at any moment in time.

Source: www.jimsonbowler.com

Now I know this is not a new topic, and many municipalities and organizations struggle with determining what is historically significant, how significant it is (listed versus designated classification for example), and how it shall be preserved or commemorated. But to provoke some alternative streams of thought on this topic, think about a history book. The books we read in Social Studies in elementary school, we read as fact. The explorers, the fur trade, the War of 1812 as examples, shaped our perceptions of our society over time. We’ve since learned and are continuing to learn that many facts were missing, providing us with an incomplete and heavily glorified story of our past. Let’s translate these stories into our daily commutes throughout our cities. Which stories are being shared visually from generation to generation, influencing our perceptions of the places we live, work, and travel to?

What are we remembering as significant?

Is it art deco buildings, distillery districts, and Victorian neighbourhoods?

Or is it burial sites, Indigenous place names, and cultural trails?

The images below speak to two very different versions of heritage commemoration, highlighting the chasm between Western and traditional Indigenous worldviews.

BEFORE
Source: www.jimsonbowler.com

AFTER
Source: www.jimsonbowler.com

Jimson’s work reclaims these spaces and places by transcending time, overlaying the past on the present, and the present on the past, reminding us of our wholly complex and layered history. His work reinforces the need to embrace and celebrate the Indigenous legacy  alongside the colonial one.

This series has been heavily influenced by the many talented, determined, and wise indigenous activists, artists, academics and friends who ignite a fire in me to dig deeper into our true history, recognizing colonialism is still pervasive today, and to take steps to decolonize a practice I have been privileged enough to belong to.

A huge thanks to Jimson Bowler for taking the time to share his stories with me.

The post Reclaiming Spaces/Places: Revealing a forgotten Indigenous visual narrative in Peterborough appeared first on Spacing National.

A peculiar day-trip took citizens of Ontario’s capital on an exploration of the history and revitalisation of Southern Ontario’s other major urban centre. It’s Hamiltime and Emily Glazer has filed this report on what they saw. She is a writer, health researcher, and advocate in Toronto and co-hosts Alleycats on the Toronto Radio Project exploring urban tales and trails. She is also a community leader for the Samba Elégua percussion group.

Fifty Torontonians pile onto a schoolbus and head to Hamilton for a daytrip organized by Toronto-based Civic Salon and the Young Urbanists’ League (YUL) on April 25th. The idea was to foster better ties between the two biggest Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) cities. The result was an on-the-ground lesson in urban revitalization thanks to what’s going on in Hamilton, and some instructive clues for strengthening the region’s cohesion.

Sponsored by Evergreen Cityworks, the sold-out tour affectionately called “Hamiltime” bustled between Hamilton’s rich naturescapes and urban clusters like the downtown and sprawling industrial zones. But Civic Salon organizer Jo Flatt was drawn most to the human engine behind Hamilton’s revitalization. “After spending time there I realized that there are a lot of amazing people who are doing great things to transform the city,” reflects Flatt. “I was amazed at the level of community-led initiatives that are making the city better.” Rachel Lissner, founder of the YUL, wanted to Torontonians to expand their horizons.  “It is really important to remember that geographically, socially, economically, and politically, we are part of a greater region and we should be aware of what is going on beyond our mostly-porous borders.” Flatt and Lissner linked with local guides Peter Topalovic (Transportation/City of Hamilton), Chelsea Cox (Social Bicycles or SoBi, Hamilton’s bikeshare) and Jay Carter (Evergreen Cityworks).

As the day-trippers could attest, more interesting than ideas for integration are the things that have recently kept these municipalities apart. “It is surprising to me how close Toronto is to Hamilton and just how few of my friends and colleagues have ever been there,” muses Flatt. Is it something about Hamilton’s faded rust-belt past, the Torontonian’s penchant for never leaving home, or something more akin to a lack of regional imagination which prevents the Golden Horseshoe from blossoming into an Ontario equivalent of the Bay Area in California? Of late, however, a number of forces have collided to knit the GTHA closer together such as punishing housing costs in Toronto, the scramble for infrastructure to host the Pan Am Games, and a grassroots-led revival of Hamilton.

On the ground, the tour made sure to showcase Hamilton’s proximity to nature, beginning the tour at Webster Falls inside of Spencer Gorge, and later visiting Albion Falls. Head of Watershed Planning and Engineering Scott Peck spoke of Hamilton’s 147 waterfalls, a blessing of the Niagara Escarpment that snakes through the city and creates its famous mountain and plain divide.

In the East End, Hamiltime ventured past the smokestacks often scorned by inhabitants across Lake Ontario. The cloudy blooms are reminders of the heydey of the “Ambitious City” where Dofasco and Stelco fed the city with steel and prosperity then declined with the surge in trends like outsourcing, globalization and automation.

Today the biggest employers are the academic and hospital sectors centred around MacMaster University, explained Jason Thorne, himself a recent returnee to the Hammer. Thorpe is the head of Hamilton’s Department of Planning and Economic Development. He spoke to Hamiltime amid the antique and textile shops on Ottawa Street North in the heart of the east end which used to be a low-density, post-war community of steelworkers. Now it is an increasingly mixed neighbourhood with newcomers to Canada, and is the site of what Thorpe refers to as a “third wave of revitalization.” But in contrast to Locke and then James streets that had previously revitalized, Ottawa is being renewed with existing infrastructure. “It’s revitalization without completely re-doing the streetscape,” says Thorne. The lots are narrow, not conducive to new developments. Vacant storefronts were plentiful, but the vacancy rate went from forty to just two percent within seven years. The areas’ affordable houses are also drawing Torontonians who can no longer pursue a middle-class lifestyle complete with home ownership in Toronto. “A lot of exciting stuff, even though I’m a city bureaucrat, is really not to do with the city,” adds Thorne. “It’s is a very grassroots citizen-led revitalization.”

One important component of Hamilton’s resurgence is the updating of its industrial narrative. Environmental stewardship is integral. Linda Lukasik, Executive Director of Environment Hamilton, is a model of citizen change-making. In 2001, Lukasik sued the municipality using the Ontario Environmental Bill of Rights and won. One Environment Hamilton project is Stack Watch, which arms citizens with the knowledge to document problematic emissions and report them to the regulators, holding companies accountable.

Another success is the Windemere Basin. “This is an amazing area, I love it,” beams Lukasik, speaking to Hamiltime on the Basin’s created wetlands. “To me this story is all about Hamilton and transformative change, and taking a rust-belt city and doing exciting things.” Formerly a deposit for dredged shipping channel waste, the reclaimed east bay is now a flourishing wetlands supporting native fish, birds and plant growth. And it happened with a mosaic of actors: “People in this community are really engaged. You have a lot of interesting multi-stakeholder collaborations like the remedial action planning process where organizations like mine will sit at the table with industry, the universities and all levels of government, community members, and people all come around the table.”

Downtown Hamilton is also being revived with a suite of pedestrianised spaces, preservation of old buildings and small business incentives. Hamiltime strolled down Gore Park – the pedestrianised south side of King Street East – and listened to Glen Norton, Manager of Urban Renewal in Hamilton’s Planning and Economic Development Department. He described the loss of big companies like GE in the 1990s from the downtown. Shops were shuttered and buildings emptied. Even the iconic Royal Connaught Hotel, once inaugurated by a member of the British Royalty, sat idle. Worse, buildings like the old city hall – a French Romanesque jewel in the style of Toronto’s old city hall – had been knocked down earlier for a rendition of urban renewal that erected massive shopping centres across several city blocks. These sprawling and squat chunks of concrete have their backs to the street, like Jackson Square at James Street and King William.

Norton lauds the efforts of local developers acquiring idle buildings downtown and creating new condos and restaurants, encouraged to preserve old architecture with a $20k city grant program for facades. The land housing the Tivoli Theatre, once Canada’s oldest-running cabaret, was approved for a 22-story condo on the condition of restoring the theatre. The Listor Bloc, built in 1924, was given a $26 million restoration and contains the city’s arts and culture department.

But the manner of development gives many locals caution, weary of going down the Toronto route of towering glass condos which pierce the skyline and the eye and where keeping a building facade is seen as preservation enough. A Manhattan feel at a Tower of Babylon pace. It seems a low-bar for city-building. Other downtowners, however, are starved for densification after years of hollow living and are thirsty for tall towers.

There is justified anxiety about the Toronto-Hamilton romance in the Hammer, which is an unequal power relationship after all. Some of the tourists noted how it can take an hour to cross Toronto to get to work downtown; when inter-city transit improves, why not be living in a bigger and cheaper space within a smaller, still-urban city? But Hamilton doesn’t want to be a bedroom community for TO. It clearly isn’t any kind of room in another edifice at all, and during Hamiltime its stand-alone muscles were showing.

One of the most popular civic engagement websites in Canada is Raise the Hammer. Founder and editor Ryan McGreal spoke to Hamiltime while overlooking the downtown from another escarpment viewpoint on Mountain Brow Boulevard. He noted another key to Hamilton’s downtown revival: changing the flow of traffic on streets that were flipped into one-way thoroughfares one gloomy night in the fifties. Opening streets to bidirectional flow encourages stops, walking, shopping and perusing, but takes away fast passage through downtown. And thus emerges the urban/suburban divide Torontonians know intimately, although in Hamilton it didn’t produce a Rob Ford.

James Street North was the first street to be converted back in the early 2000s, fitted with bump-outs and two-way traffic. From the ’90s until then, city council was tenacious. “The council of 15 years ago was so desperate that they laid the groundwork for prosperity and revitalization”, said McGreal. “When we make bold moves, we can actually make changes pretty fast.” Now the changes are painstakingly slow; council has started to coast, moving away from an activist agenda now that the downtown is doing better. McGreal notes the rust-belt mentality still haunts Hamilton in its attempts to lure external companies to consolidate their operations, rather than laying the groundwork for the next big companies to start from Hamilton seeds. McGreal echoes Thorne’s excitement about reusing existing fabric: “A lot of what energizes me is meeting people who moved here recently, who don’t see the legacy of 20 years of frustration and all the politics; they just see the opportunity … they see this fantastic old building that’s just sitting there waiting for someone to buy it and pour some love into it. This city is filled with that kind of opportunity and we need people with a fresh set of eyes to come and remind us of what we have and how beautiful this place is.”

From one vantage point the downtown renewal is visible. But can urban renewal be confined to new condos, their residents, and new places to eat? Hamiltime proceeded down James Street North, the epicentre of downtown gentrification. Sure, Hamilton’s renewal has been fiercely grassroots-driven: the famous Art Crawl and Supercrawl draw over 150, 000 people (in a city of 550 000) and were conceived and organized by artists. Hamilton boasts one of the greatest volunteer rates in the country.  On the other hand, as intrepid community activist Peter Hopperton described to Hamiltime, gentrification often means displacement of local interests in the name of profit. There is a reason old buildings are left to decay by speculators until they’re lucrative, Hopperton noted. And once a cultural milieu is generated by artists drawn by cheap living and derelict buildings, it becomes commodified by developers who use the culture as a brand. Artists become sacrificed on the frontlines of gentrification, eventually priced out. It’s the usual story.

Attendees of Hamiltime were mostly 30-something downtowners of TO who hadn’t ventured to Hamilton before; some were curious about cheaper rents, many were already engaged in social enterprise and city exploration. One had found love in Hamilton and came to learn more about the city. For Elizabeth Littlejohn, a professor of sustainable design and social innovation at Sheridan College, Hamilton represented a viable place for living later in life, and a refuge from some of the poor decisions made in Toronto of late.  “Since the reign of the Fords, they did a lot of damage to Transit City. They’ve done a lot of damage that’s long-term to transit infrastructure in Toronto, and a lot of very poor decisions have been made.”  She also cites the Union-Pearson Express which, at $27.50 a ride, most Torontonians cannot afford. Not to mention the rail will be diesel-powered.

And one obstacle to the Toronto-Hamilton relationship has been the sad state of connecting transit. Express GO buses exist. But the dearth of train linkage is pitiful. Weekday travellers from Toronto can take all-stops trains to Aldershot in Burlington  during rush hour, and then bus to Hamilton. Four express trains run in the morning in the direction of Toronto only, and then send workers back to Hamilton on a few evening trains. On the weekends, it’s back to the bus. Most Hamiltime attendees were unaware of how to get to Hamilton and anticipated it being expensive.

As Hamiltime came to a close, people reassembled at our schoolbus at Bayfront Park. Several people dismounted bikes they borrowed from SoBi. Lissner remarked it was the best bike-share she ever used. Hamilton offers plenty of wisdom for TO: caution about neglecting old buildings; the beauty of interspersed nature and urbanism; the power of activated city councils with an agenda, and of citizens to act as change-makers, culture-brewers and watchdogs. The GT and H can co-miserate about amalgamation, reluctant or fearful city councils, urban-suburban divides, and other divides carved by natural edges like the Escarpment, Don Valley, or Davenport-St. Clair hill. Both cities have made harried decisions on long-term issues to suit a 17-day sports festival called Pan Am. A romantic rekindling is in the works for the GTHA. The challenge will be to support each unique entity in the union so it won’t be leachy for one.

For that, the Golden Horseshoe needs to support new imagination replete with new stories.

The post Lessons on rekindling a regional romance: a visit to Hamilton reveals a percolating urban revival Canada needs to watch appeared first on Spacing National.

At Slow Streets we embrace a philosophy of quicker, lighter and cost effective infrastructure. We believe that this approach can yield the same results and quality. Practically speaking, this can be in the form of using plastic bollards to separate cycling lanes from traffic, setting up lawn chairs bought at the local retailer, installing parklets to instantly add a bit of public space to a retail street, or allowing food carts to anchor a space. 

What if you take this same philosophy and take it to the next level — infusing it into the bones and structure of your city streets? What if you could build your city as a sort of real life Legoland, where it is easier to dismantle, reassemble and change everything? What happens when we infuse modularity into city-building? How would this impact our cities?
 

A tram stop made of modular pieces.

It appears the Dutch have done this very thing. Nearly all of the street materials in Amsterdam are modular:  the bricks and paving stones in the sidewalks, street surfaces,  curbs, speed bumps, barrier posts, planters, tram stop platforms and parking barriers.The Dutch modularity is a results-driven approach to building cities. It uses aesthetically pleasing, high-quality materials that affords the ability to tinker with the street design. This flexible approach permits trial and error — it allows a street to incrementally test what works and what doesn’t work. In the end, the result is a more adaptive and flexible cityscape that aspires to perfection.

Modular material provides flexibility in construction.

Too often, designing our cities is treated as an absolute. We tend to assume people will use things a certain way in perpetuity and almost expect it to be this way (Vancouver’s overbuilt and under-performing bridges come to mind).

Since infrastructure often doesn’t perform as expected, experimental flexibility is an asset and a strategic way to build better. In North America, our roadway materials opt for using single form slabs of concrete and asphalt which permits very little flexibility. Once something has been built and it is discovered that it is not performing as expected (as it often doesn’t), any changes require waiting for the long lifecycle of these materials or its total destruction.

What happens when you don’t build with modular in mind.

The modular elements in Dutch design allow modifications to be made without the destruction of the materials, dramatically reducing capital costs associated with street design changes. The majority of changes can be done with hand tools and smaller machinery, which is significantly less capital intensive.

If you live in a big city you have probably often seen the scars left from public utility companies that have had to access water, gas, electric and sewer lines buried underneath the street surface. In North America, when repairs to the street are required, the street needs to be ripped open and an ineffective patchwork design is applied to close it up. The module design allows only the affected materials to be replaced, restoring the intact aesthetics. This unsightly and wasteful scenario can be avoided and money can be saved when the surface can easily be dismantled with the right tools.

A modular diverter.

Due to this, in North America, there is often a struggle to reverse the impacts of street designs that only accommodate automobiles. Active transportation and transit are on the rise in North America, and many of our streets fail to provide a comfortable experience for these alternative forms of travel. With  modular design, even the curbs and speed bumps can be dismantled and rebuilt easily.

This means that if you need to change the road design to physically make the street feel “unsafe driving at unsafe speeds,” this can be done. The curbs can be easily extended to reduce the street width, pedestrian islands can be constructed and speed bumps can be moved or enlarged. The street allocation is even more ready to be altered to add bike lanes. Everything can be relocated or changed in some way to achieve the optimal results to welcome all people whether they want to walk, cycle, use transit and drive.

Modular materials are permeable for rain.

Water management is also increasingly a problem in cities, where the impermeable surfaces redirect local rainfall elsewhere, leading to flooding issues. The modular design introduces permeable surfaces and allows local rainfall to stay locally.

With all of this in mind, one final thing to note is the Dutch frame of mind towards solving problems which provides true flexibility. While they have laws and regulations like everyone else, the Dutch view some of them more as guidelines and overall common sense prevails. The Dutch do not blindly follow governmental rules, treating recommendations as an absolute, applicable to any context. They recognize that spaces change and our design approach should embrace this. Infusing flexibility into our cityscapes requires less long-term planning since changes can be made incrementally. This philosophy embraces the notion that our cities are not static places. It does not try to predict the future, but rather acknowledges that long-term resilience is achieved only through the ability to adapt easily and quickly. The future isn’t a given and the way we design our streetscapes should reflect this.

***

Slow Streets is a Vancouver-based research group providing evidence for slower & better streets.

The post Use Modular Design To Foster Flexible and Incremental City Building appeared first on Spacing National.

HALIFAX – You may not have noticed them even if you live in the area. Three tiny residential units are being built in a backyard on Hunter Street, and unless someone points them out, they are hard to spot from the street. Making more from less space is a growing trend in architecture/planning as one […]

The post Hunter Street’s microlofts an answer to building sustainable density in Halifax’s urban core appeared first on Spacing Atlantic.

DARTMOUTH – The topic of daylighting Dartmouth’s Sawmill River will be back before Harbour East Community Council this Thursday in the form of a staff report. Unfortunately, the report is overly negative, treats daylighting in a very superficial way, ignores the original vision for the Canal Greenway Park and doesn’t provide council with the information requested […]

The post Daylighting Sawmill River: Rebutting the Staff Report appeared first on Spacing Atlantic.

Editor’s Note: Guest post by Grace Szucs, a 100in1 Day volunteer in Halifax (We’re so excited for this!) HALIFAX – There’s a certain feeling that comes with cleaning up garbage from a beach or helping out at a community supper. Besides meeting neighbours and beautifying your environment, you notice just how easy it is to make a […]

The post 100in1 Day: A call out to commmunity appeared first on Spacing Atlantic.

     “To observe the city’s architecture is to enter into the optimistic vision of its planners and designers and so to engage in the work-in-progress that is Vancouver. The city’s sense of becoming can at times be palpable – an unusual experience in the face of architecture’s qualities of stability and endurance.”

– From the guidebook’s introduction

Edited by Christopher Macdonald & Veronica Gillies (Douglas & McIntyre Publishers, 2010)

With the recent publication of two similar architecture guidebooks of Toronto and Montreal, A Guidebook to Contemporary Architecture in Vancouver (D&M Publishers, 2010) completes the triptych. Guided by Helen Malkin (who along with Nancy Dunton also assisted with the other two guidebooks), and with the support of the RAIC and Canada Council for the Arts,  UBC professor of architecture Christopher Macdonald and architect Veronica Gillies have assembled a current collection of contemporary architecture from Vancouver and its region.  As bookends to the projects presented, two essays by architecture critic Adele Weder and UBC assistant professor Matthew Soules round out the guidebook.

In all, the 58 projects presented, as categorized by the 21 environs that give the book its structure, unequivocally represent Vancouver’s more recently celebrated architectural achievements, with each project having already received numerous accolades in the form of architectural awards and publications.

While the book aspires to be more than just a guidebook of local architecture’s ‘usual suspects’, this as it turns out is quite a difficult thing to do when given the small time period in which the book’s editors have chosen to frame its content – between Expo ’86 and the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games.  Of the book’s 58 projects, 35 are by nine of the region’s most well recognized offices: Arthur Erickson (5), Peter Cardew (2), Peter Busby (7), Norm Hotson & Joost Bakker (2), James Cheng (2), Paul Merrick (2), Bing Thom (6), John and Pat Patkau (2), and Richard Henriquez (6). Just as important, the editors have included Vancouver’s younger generation of architects and designers, including Battersby Howat, HCMA, Martin Lewis, LWPAC, Acton Ostry, AA Robins, and Pechet & Robb.

There is an inherent aspiration by the book’s authors to debunk the ‘starchitect’ myth by offering up several projects that demonstrate larger collaborations between firms, such as those that were orchestrated to realize the former Expo lands, the stations along the Millennium and Canada Lines, the buildings and urban spaces realized for the sites for the Olympics, as well as the realization of the new Woodwards development, which the late Jim Green attested to there being in addition to Henriquez Partners over one thousand consultants to bring to fruition..

Perhaps the book’s biggest revelation is the collection of modest but important buildings that have recently been realized for the University of British Columbia at Point Grey. A new building each by both Henriquez Partners and the Patkaus can now count themselves among many of the other architectural gems that have appeared at Vancouver’s university over the years, including the late Arthur Erickson’s Museum of Anthropology.

As a ‘contemporary’ guidebook, the editor’s admit that the time period of the book regrettably omits the aforementioned museum, along with Robson Square and the Law Courts. Instead, we get more recent projects realized in collaboration with Stantec and Nick Milkovich, perhaps as an exploration of what it means to be contemporary. The book’s editors say as much as they dedicate the book to Mr. Erickson, adding that “in his distinguished designs for Vancouver he has taught us all much about architecture, and much about what it might mean to be contemporary.”

Also significant is the inclusion of Vancouver’s heritage architecture, as its been upgraded for modern building code standards, such that the book features the Electra, Mole Hill, and of course Woodwards – it may have also included the Marine Building and Sinclair Centre. Also regrettably absent from the book are the buildings from Expo ’86 themselves, as Canada Place and the new Trade and Convention Centre could’ve been featured in tandem, as well as the old Space & Science Centre alongside the new Olympic Village.

But without doubt the guidebook’s greatest merit is its honesty, as it unflinchingly portrays the downtown east side and the way architecture can perhaps have a role in the healing of ‘Canada’s poorest postal code’. The book also devotes 45 pages to Vancouver’s satellite communities, featuring such projects as the Richmond Olympic Oval, Brentwood Skytrain Station, and Surrey Central City.

Accompanying the 160 colour photographs in the book are 40 plans and sections provided by the architects themselves, offering a visually rich graphic counterpart to the photography of Vancouver’s urban scenography. As such, the book succeeds in appealing to the Vancouver local, while an excellent guide for tourists in much the same spirit as Harold Kalman’s Exploring Vancouver (1974, 1978, & 1993). As interesting as the projects themselves, the geographical regions the projects occur in are well summarized, and introducing some never before categorized areas of Vancouver. I was happy to see Point Grey and Commercial Drive, places often omitted from more conventional architecture guidebooks.

The editor’s candour is likewise refreshing, not pulling back from the controversies some of the buildings have created since their opening. As an example, for Library Square they point out how “the exterior elevations bereft of the two primary galleria entries remain dismal.” And the inclusion of infill projects in the downtown east side shows the inherent possibility of architecture to create positive change in what could be otherwise forgotten and abandoned city areas. And lastly, as would be expected of any book on Vancouver architecture, there are numerous examples of sustainable and environmental design, as many projects featured are LEED certified, with the book itself even providing transit stops for those visiting each building or group of buildings.

Overall, the guidebook does not disappoint either as a tourist’s guide to contemporary Vancouver architecture, or as a folio for the local Vancouverite, featuring some of its newest and brightest urban projects (even including the new Informs interior and hip ‘Salt’ in Gastown, both by Busby Perkins + Will). Along with some older post-Expo favourites, it makes for an indispensable reference for local architects and designers, historians and educators alike. Most importantly, with A Guidebook to Contemporary Architecture in Vancouver completing the set on the nation’s three largest cities, these books contest to a continuing thriving industry of national architecture despite our current economic slowdown, and are a testament to the talent, new and old, that collectively defines our architectural culture.

***

Editor’s note: This review was previously published March 25, 2010.

Sean Ruthen is an architect working, living, and writing in Vancouver.

The post Book Review From The Stacks: A Guidebook to Contemporary Architecture in Vancouver appeared first on Spacing National.

Last VT image: Trout Lake Community Centre, Vancouver.

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Erick Villagomez is one of the founding editors at Spacing Vancouver. He is also an educator, independent researcher and designer with personal and professional interests in the urban landscapes. His private practice – Metis Design|Build – is an innovative practice dedicated to a collaborative and ecologically responsible approach to the design and construction of places. You can see more of his artwork on his Visual Thoughts Tumblr.

The post Visual Thoughts #54 appeared first on Spacing National.

This post by Jeffrey Trieu is part of Spacing‘s partnership with the Toronto Cycling Think and Do Tank at the University of Toronto. Find out more about the think tank, and the series, here.

With countless community events being hosted from May 25^th to June 25^th, the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area is anticipating Bike Month 2015. Municipalities and community groups alike are hosting the A to Z in bike events, from food incentivized group rides to bike repair crash courses. Although cycling mode shares are still relatively low in Toronto, they are trending upwards; hence, the cause for celebration! In fact, in a two decade long review of trends in cycling rates, infrastructure, and policies, John Pucher and his colleagues suggest that many large North American cities, including Toronto, are undergoing a bicycle renaissance. According to Transportation Tomorrow Survey data[1], all adult age demographics (including seniors!) have seen an increase in cycling rates in the past decade and half. In 2001, 1.18% of all trips were taken by a bicycle for folks 18 years of age and older. Ten years later in 2011, this rate has risen to 1.96%.

However, cycling in Toronto has not been booming for all its residents, particularly those who would benefit most from a transportation mode unrestricted by age-enforced licensing. Cycling rates for Toronto youth have remained stagnant over the recent past and in some cases, have seen decline. In 2001, 1.02% of all trips were taken by a bicycle for Torontonians aged 11 to 17. This rate inched to 1.04% in 2011. Moreover, in Ron Buliung and colleagues’ examination of school travel patterns among Toronto youth, bicycle trips comprised 1.7% of school trips in 1986, then dropped to 0.8% in 2006.

This Toronto youth cycling trend is quite contradictory to the contemporary public health emphasis on youth physical (in)activity. Sixty minutes of physical activity is the daily recommended dose for young folks, yet only 4% of Canadian adolescents are achieving this benchmark. The bicycle combines physical activity with utility; biking simply to get to everyday destinations is a feasible means to sneak in exercise. Moreover, the backseat generation lacks opportunities to be independently mobile – free to travel in their urban space as they wish. Here, the bicycle may be framed not only as a tool for physical health, but for exploration and autonomy as well.

It is quite exciting then, that this year’s Bike Month will be accompanied by the region’s inaugural Bike to School Week from May 25^th to the 29^th. Over 100 schools (and counting!) across the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area have registered to participate in this week-long event. Registration essentially means that participating schools will be delivering cycling-related events leading up to or during the Week, with the potential opportunity to snag prizes.

Perhaps, it is too early to dub Bike to School Week a celebration of youth cycling in the region as Toronto youth cycling rates have not been climbing upwards as they have been with adults. Numerous factors are at play here: parental fears, lack of infrastructure, inaccessibility, or perhaps concern over helmet head. Still, Bike to School Week has the potential to be something more interesting than a celebration of biking in my eyes. It can be a catalyst for change. The idea of Toronto undergoing a bicycle renaissance is quite uplifting; however, it does not occur over one week or one month. It requires long term investment and engagement from numerous stakeholders, ranging from the chief city planner to the average city cyclist. So as our bicycle renaissance rolls on, let’s not leave behind our youngest companions. Bike Month and Bike to School Week is a time for folks across the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area, young and old, experienced and uncertain, to hop on a bicycle. Of course, it is healthy and environmentally sustainable. But, let`s not forget, it is also fun.

[1] The Transportation Tomorrow Survey (DMG, 2014) measures travel modes across the city. If these rates still seem unimpressively low, bike mode shares are substantially higher in particular downtown neighbourhoods. However, suburban-urban cycling is a whole other discussion in itself.

The post Rolling Youth into Toronto’s Bicycle Renaissance appeared first on Spacing National.

“SANAA’s work does not introduce order as do those mid-century architectures to which it is routinely compared; rather it imposes a fine disorder and instability, at times even an agitation, into the surround. The work of SANAA seeks to operate with the invisible potency of weather.”

– From Sanford Kwinter’s essay ‘Koan’

Edited by Florian Idenburg (Lars Müller Publishers, 2010)

With the recent announcement of SANAA as the recipients of the 2010 Pritzker Prize, Lars Müller Publishers, having previously released two other publications on this pair of Japanese architects and their work has hit the nail on the head by delivering this timely snapshot of three Princeton design studios taught by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, otherwise known as SANAA, between 2006 and 2008. Wrapped in a no-nonsense utilitarian cover befitting an architecture treatise of this nature, this brief though dense publication is an amalgam of student’s projects from these design studios, interspersed with essays written about SANAA, including one by Stan Allen, current Dean of the Princeton school of architecture, and the always poignant architectural commentator Sanford Kwinter. Rounding out the text, Dutch photographer Iwan Baan provides the visual narrative for the book, punctuating the descriptions of the student projects and theoretical discourse with stark and realistic images of Japan and its urban scenography.

Though the office is comprised of a pair of architects, it is undoubtedly Kazuyo who takes the role of mentor, having formed her own practice in 1987 after working with Toyo Ito, and going on to receive Japan’s ‘Young Architect of the Year’ Award in 1992. In 1994 she formed SANAA with her former employee Ryue, and began the collaboration as a multi-disciplinary office practicing on the world stage, receiving residential, institutional, and commercial commissions in New York, Lausanne, Valencia, and Tokyo. While without a doubt the Pritzker is the crowning achievement for the office’s work, they are no strangers to accolades, having received the ‘Golden Lion’ at the 2004 Venice Biennale. Kazuyo is also currently the Director of the Architecture Sector for the Venice Biennale, and is set to curate the 12th International Architecture Exhibition later this year.

With the opening of the firm’s 2006 New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, SANAA found themselves catapulted overnight to the status of starchitects, much to the bewilderment of some, and later reconfirmed by the commission to do the much coveted Serpentine Galley pavillion in London’s Hyde Park in 2009. As the Princeton-run, Tokyo-based studios featured in the book slightly pre-date Sejima and Nishizawa’s most current accolades, they thereby offer a glimpse into the office’s earlier genesis. As explored and debated in the essays throughout the book, theirs is an architecture most often misunderstood, as more traditional, Western architects, perhaps having naively believed they had encountered everything Japanese minimalism had to offer, from Ando to Taniguchi, are now baffled anew by SANAA’s style, or absence thereof. SANAA presents a whole new generation of architecture coming out of the land of the rising sun, along with the novelty and innovation that accompanies anything that runs contrary to modern architecture’s ‘business-as-usual’ model.

As Kwinter describes them, theirs is a work of actualization realized through absence, comparing them in his essay ‘Koan‘ – a tenet of Zen Buddhism – as purveyors of ‘the quiet in the land’, later betraying his Canadian origins by quoting Glenn Gould and his famous investigations of the Canadian North. More than a physical notion of space, both Gould and SANAA share a kinship for having sought out that emotional and mysterious place in which the human psyche resides. Similar to the silence of John Cage’s 4’33”, this notion is architecture as invisible artform, or as Viktor Shklovsky wrote nearly a century ago, it is the role of art to rouse the human experience from its ontological slumber – so too does the work of SANAA set out to rouse the world of architecture.

Among the book’s essays, it is one written by one of the studio’s students that I believe provides the book’s most timely polemic. Michael Wang, whose studio project focused on a community of hikikomori, reveals an alarming phenomenon of shut-ins occurring in Japan’s urban centres, comprised of hundreds of thousands of Japanese youth. Besides the sociololgical ramifications, Wang imagines a housing project for a population of hikikomori much as we presently have housing for senior citizens. His essay, simply entitled ‘Shut In’ presents a critical addition to the interviews and essays in the book, and illuminates a societal dysfunction which will shortly impact itself upon Japan’s urban fabric as the population’s aging baby-boomers retire. That this will undoubtedly manifest itself architecturally is truly visionary on the part of Wang, and therein provides one demonstration of the value of having the studios in Japan.

But it is the title of the book which presents the greatest value of the studios and the lesson the West can learn from Japanese post-war urbanism – the notion that densification, and consequently a smaller carbon footprint, is achievable just as much by densely situating single-storey dwellings as it is by building residential tower after residential tower. The criticism of the suburbs in the West is arguably not so much a criticism of the single-family dwelling as it is of the yard around the same house, often mandated for zoning purposes such as right-of-ways and fire protection. But local zoning changes in history have not always been consistent with effective land-use, and great sprawling yards are often the norm in North American inner-city suburbs. While an architecture student at UBC, one studio I took looked at the ratio of lot sizes to house footprints around Brentwood Mall in Burnaby, and found 1:10 and 1:12 to be the norm.

Looking at the stunning photography of Tokyo taken by Iwan Baan, one is immediately struck by the overall absence of lawns and park space. Laneways and spaces between houses in effect become the parks and spaces of social interaction, while those parks that do occur are carefully designed urban artifacts. One photo by Baan of a Tokyo cemetery is startling in the fact that the gravestones are so close to each other that they look like they’re one atop the other. While to us in the West this may certainly seem like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, it teaches us that living in close proximity to each other without certain amenities like tennis courts and lawn bowling greens need not necessarily mean the end of the world.  All of this would have obviously been very much in mind as Stan Allen asked Sejima and Nishizawa to head up the three full-year studios that form the basis of the book.

As a preface to the book, Stan Allen explains that SANAA were the recipients in 2005 of the school’s Labatut Professorship, a three year appointment that Princeton gives to international architects to come teach at Princeton. As the direct result of this, SANAA initiated the Princeton Tokyo Studio program which the book gives significant insight into, and as fully intended by the nature of the Labatut Professorship, the design studios inevitably become a laboratory in which to exchange both Eastern and Western design methodologies, derived from their own unique contexts.

As set out by Stan Allen, SANAA, and other Princeton faculty, the studio’s program objectives varied from year to year, with three sites in three different Japanese cities – Tokyo, Onishi, and Kanazawa – progressing from problems of urban housing in the first year, to town planning in the second, and finally to realizing a communal art gallery space in the third year studio. The common thread in each case could best be summed up by the title of Allen’s essay in the book – ‘Dirty Realism’. As a phrase first coined in literay circles in 1983, it was later adapted by film critics and poets, until Frederic Jameson brought it to architecture to describe the state of the modern post-war city in his writing in the early 1990s. As Allen writes it, Jameson “describes a new social space, a ‘post-civil society’ that is manifest in the interconnected ex-urban spaces of the United States, the depopulated industrial sectors of Europe, or the rapidly expanding cities of Asia.”

In the end, the book stands as much as a monograph of the SANAA project and its design philosophy as a depiction of these three Tokyo-based design studios. Whether its Allen’s description of their work in the context of ‘dirty realism’, or Kwinter’s notion of the ‘contraction’, these two contributors among others in the book do their best to uncover the work of SANAA which has taken the architectural world by storm, and at once giving their work the praise it deserves, while debunking the critics who have called their work overly simplistic and reductivist. While Japanese nihilism as personified by the hikikomori may not be everyone’s cup of tea, Sejima and Nishizawa arrive at a time when architectural posturing has no choice but to give way to action, where vanity and ego have nothing whatsoever to contribute to the gritty realities of homelessness, slums, and urban isolationism. SANAA then comes as a breath of fresh air in the breathless absence of our architectural ethos.

***

Editor’s note:  This review was originally published in 2010.

Sean Ruthen is an architect living, working, and writing in Vancouver.

The post Book Review From The Stacks – Learning From Japan: Single Story Urbanism appeared first on Spacing National.

Author: Henry Shaftoe (EarthScan, 2008)

Henry Shaftoe’s Convivial Urban Spaces: Creating Affective Public Places is a thorough and informative investigation into what is needed to make public spaces convivial, which he defines as: “Places where people can be sociable and festive…” He addresses dauntingly broad topics by breaking them down into smaller ideas and using real-life examples, including five detailed studies from Barcelona, Berlin, Bristol, Padua and York, to present a set of instructions which may facilitate the creation of healthy and inviting urban spaces.

Shaftoe opens by addressing public spaces in a larger context: why do we need public space and who are they for? He remarks on the importance of usable public space as a gathering place for democratic systems, a learning place where various demographics can meet and interact, a natural space, and a place of “urban security.” Shaftoe also investigates exclusive and inclusive spaces and the unsuccessful tactics used to control the public realm such as the London CCTV system, physical and legal barriers, and over-policing.

The second half of the book is dedicated to looking more closely at what makes a space convivial, how to make it so, and most importantly, how to maintain it as such. Here Shaftoe discusses the psychology of public spaces and what might affect our senses in a public place – such as noise from a water fountain or smells from food venders or plant life. He discusses shapes and types of space, and how different characteristics such as colour, art, and hard or soft landscaping in a public space can evoke emotions such as joy.

Shaftoe implies that the space between the buildings is more important than the buildings themselves, and that patrons of all ages, sizes, genders, ethnicities or social-economic background, should be welcome into any public space. He talks of about a bottom-up versus top-down system of design, and he references urban design theories such as Christopher Alexander’s notion of “growing” spaces rather than “building” spaces. Shaftoe also remarks quite candidly on the need for kids and young adults to “get into trouble,” pointing out the natural tendency for kids to hang around public spaces, get in fights, and experiment: “we can’t stop kids from indulging in drugs, sex and rock’n’roll; indeed the more we try to ban these things the more attractive they appear…” He suggests that rather than trying to prevent it, public spaces should provide safe, welcoming, and secure zones in which kids can be kids.

Shaftoe states that a key ingredient in designing convivial spaces is adaptability, and a change in legislation that allows for more long-term interests on behalf of the designers and planners. He says: “very few architects and planners revisit the developments they helped to form to see how they’ve fared over the years.” Which means there is no incentive to return to a space that may need design changes, and it makes it very hard for designers to learn from past successes or mistakes. Although Shaftoe notes that there is no all-encompassing solution for creating convivial spaces, he does highlight the common elements that most convivial spaces seem to share, categorizing them as: physical, geographical, managerial, physiological and sensual. He includes a comprehensive list of Do’s and Don’ts including points such as: “Do: Think about micro climate and provide protection and shelter as appropriate… Don’t: put too many restrictions on the use of public space.” He also addresses materiality issues: “Do: use the highest quality materials, fittings and plants the budget can afford (this will save them money in the long run… Don’t: use single-leaf brickwork or blockwork for walls as the will eventually get pulled down.”

This impressively concise book packs a wealth of information for architects, urban designers, and community members alike. It is enjoyable and comprehensive, and it offers valuable suggestions on how to understand public space and how to design vibrant and convivial public spaces. Shatfoe’s analysis of the conviviality of the public realm is thoughtful, logical and detailed. He is meticulous in his case studies, his collection of data, and his choice of references. His points are straightforward and easy-to-apply to spaces in cities around the world, and, most importantly, are critical to the creation of positive healthy spaces.

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For more information on the book, visit the Convivial Spaces website.

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Ellen Ziegler has a Masters in Advanced Studies of Architecture. She lives in Toronto and spends most of her time biking, exploring the city, drinking coffee, and writing book reviews.

The post Book Review From The Stacks – Convivial Urban Spaces: Creating Affective Public Places appeared first on Spacing National.

Hot drone action! White water torrents! Underground rivers! An urban region of six million people and more coming!

We need your help to tell an exciting story.

I’ve been walking the GTA’s ravines and the Lake Ontario shoreline a lot this past year filming a documentary called Accidental Parkland. Prior to doing this I thought I knew the ravine system here but the more time I spend in them the more I appreciate not just how vast they are, but how critical they are to sustaining life in this part of Southern Ontario. I’m working with producer Dan Berman and we have a modest commission but our ambitions are bigger and we want to do justice to this story. Climate change, resiliency, mental health and equity issues around who has a right to accessible green space are just some of the angles we cover on top of all the geography. And there’s so much geography. This is also a Canadian story we’re telling, and what happens in the GTA relates to other urban areas across the country where, arguably, 80% of us live. Here’s how you can participate:

1> Please click here and take a look at our 4 minute long teaser video and see some of the great drone footage and interviews we’ve been able to get thus far. I promise you’ve never seen Toronto like this before. While there read Dan’s case for why you should consider supporting us. There are many Spacing-related incentives you might like too. If you can’t help financially, sharing this project as much as you can is appreciated. We’ve found an incredible network of people who are passionate about these urban Canadian places, and need help reaching more.

2> Come visit us this Saturday June 6th at the Evergreen Brickworks as we’re collaborating with =DUDEMAN= to produce a large-scale, graffiti-styled sidewalk chalk map of Toronto’s Ravines for 100In1Day Toronto (and event that takes place in four Canadian cities). Join us in the Holcim Gallery between 9am and 4pm. Walk around on a big map of Toronto that emphasizes the ravine spaces. Interact with the artist and the map and add your own mark to it. Chalk in your favourite spot, your bike commute to work, or the places you want to visit and help us create something beautiful and reflective of the people in this city.

See some stills from the Accidental Parkland documentary below & thanks for considering this project.

Shawn Micallef is a Spacing senior editor.

The post Accidental Parkland: Toronto Ravine & waterfront documentary + 100in1day mapping event appeared first on Spacing National.

The series of maps below are a Canadian version of a project called “Minimal Maps” by Michael Pecirno. The original project took a simple view of land cover in the United States and displayed it so the focus was on one cover type at a time. With full respect to the original artist, this series uses a similar style of displaying different general land cover types.

The Canadian land cover maps above that I created reveal of an interesting mutual exclusiveness in the landscape. When compared with the American versions you see entirely different patterns. The United States exists at a lower latitude which gives it a much more moderate climate. There, the patterns of vegetation and land cover are governed by complex interactions between moisture, geology, soils and topography.

In Canada, the situation is somewhat simpler. Although there is a similar complexity with respect to geology, soil, topography and moisture, the Canadian landscape is influenced heavily by temperature and latitude. As you move north, the influence of the arctic winter becomes more pronounced. In southern Canada, the distribution is similar to the United States with a mix of different forests and grasslands. As you move north, however, the deciduous forests yield to coniferous forests which again yield to shrub lands, which yield to arctic grasslands, until eventually the land is bare save for a few hearty lichens.

In the “Vast” grassland map, there is a pocket of crop and grasslands in southern Alberta and Saskatchewan, which is actually the northern extension of the Great Plains in the United States. Moving still further north grasslands appear again (although they are different species) as the climate becomes more challenging. In between these two pockets of grasslands, on this same map, you see a blank stripe that is occupied by all the country’s different forest types.

In British Columbia, west of the Rocky Mountains you do not see the same banding as you do with the rest of the country. Here, the moderating effect of the Pacific Ocean currents plays an important role. Consequently, a more consistent mix of cover types extends father north. The combination of mountain ranges, moderate temperatures and moisture carried in from the Pacific Ocean allows the area west of the Rockies to escape the extremes that would otherwise be present at different latitudes.

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 For more information on the original project please visit: http://www.michaelpecirno.com/minimal-maps

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Data for Canadian land cover maps from: 2005-2010 North American Land Cover Change at 250 m spatial resolution. Produced by Natural Resources Canada/ The Canada Centre for Mapping and Earth Observation (NRCan/CCMEO), United States Geological Survey (USGS); Insituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (INEGI), Comisión Nacional para el Conocimiento y Uso de la Biodiversidad (CONABIO) and Comisión Nacional Forestal (CONAFOR).

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Canadian maps by Andrew Cuthbert

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Andrew Cuthbert is a planner and geomatics specialist working in environmental consulting. When not working Andrew can most likely be found on his bike taking in the sights and fresh air.

The post Cartographically Speaking: Canada by Land Cover Type appeared first on Spacing National.

Museums in China are booming. Their unique forms and innovative structures stand out among the more mundane buildings of China’s explosive urban growth, announcing that the country’s new money is being redirected from the necessity of industry to the nicety of culture. New Museums in China presents fifty-one of the most notable buildings from the last ten years. Each is brought to life through stunning photographs, detailed drawings, and engaging texts based on personal interviews with the architects.

– Excerpt from the book

Edited by Clare Jacobson – Princeton Architectural Press (2014)

Spacing has featured two past book reviews on Chinese architecture – New Chinese Architecture (2009) and New Urban China (2008) – with the former looking at new buildings for the Beijing Olympics among others, while the latter looked at the impact of the country building 400 new cities in the space of three to five years. We may now add to this New Museums in China, expertly brought to us by Shanghai-based writer, editor, and curator Clare Jacobson. Featuring fifty-one new and under construction museums in China, all of the international stars – including eight Pritzker recipients – are here, along with several Chinese firms, including the 2012 Pritzker winner Wang Shu, and the over twenty museums he has built in his home country. Jacobson rounds out the book’s projects with an afterword by the deputy director of the National Art Museum of China, Xie Xiaofan.

The book is foremost a testament to the fact that the Bilbao effect is alive and well in China, especially as every city vies for its own cultural institution to outdo their neighbour. As Jacobson observes, the new affluent Chinese are turning their new found wealth to philanthropy, especially as this kind of investment seems more and more a safer place to invest than real estate. The museum as cultural artifact is more or less a new typology on China’s architectural landscape, with the National Historic Museum in Beijing being the first to open in 1912.

According to the book, by 2000 there were over 1,100 art museums in China, with that number doubling between 2000 and 2011 to over 2,500. Amazingly, 395 were being built in 2011 alone. And according to the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, there were over 3,400 as of 2012 – quite a number, though still far less than the 17,500 currently in America. Jacobson also suspects that some may seem to be padding the count, with such museums as the Beijing Museum of Tap Water and the China Pickle Museum seeming a bit trite. Regardless, the building type is having its day, and both local and international architects are realizing an astonishing number of commissions.

Given their sheer quantity, there are certainly a number of them that are slightly less banal than their surroundings, but as would be expected from such a large number there are also a large selection of exquisite buildings, such that the fifty-one in this book are most certainly the crème of the crème. The usual European suspects are here – Foster, Koolhaas, Hadid, Coop Himmelb(l)au, EMBT and MVRDV – along with some big American heavyweights such as SOM and Perkins + Will, sharing the spotlight with smaller firms such as Steven Holl, Preston Scott Cohen, and Tod Williams and Billy Tsien.

The book also demonstrates that museums in China are not always stand-alone buildings, as Jacobson has selected several that play against the type – a museum in a shopping mall by Arata Isozaki, one in a skyscraper by SOM, and one at the top of a residential tower by Rem Koolhaas. The editor also points out that in some cases, the museum might not even have a permanent collection to exhibit, meaning that the architects had to look beyond the building’s curatorial function to drive its program – as was the case for MVRDV when they were designing their China Comic and Animation Museum.

As Shi Wenchian, the project manager for the Comic Museum, pointed out, “You ask, ‘What am I going to put there?’ Often you get an answer saying, ‘I don’t know. First let’s have a space, and keep the space flexible, then we’ll see what we can put inside.’” This also has to do with the fact that there are two words for museum in Chinese: meishuguan, which is more exhibition hall for art, and bowuguan, which translates to the more conventional English museum for housing cultural artifacts. After the 1980’s, the meishuguan translation became most representative of the museum in China, such that most people associate them still as places for having temporary art exhibitions, and hence the reason why the buildings are often absent of any permanent program for its contents.

For this reason, many of the buildings in the book are highly sculpted artifacts, and excellent opportunities to cultivate the building type. As Fan Ling, principal of FAN Studio pointed out, “The building became a kind of embryo to cultivate the art, instead of trying to put all the art in place.” Similarly, Loretta Law of Foster + Partners pointed out about their Datong Art Museum that “the scale of the space could actually contribute to how artists respond to the space.” Here then, the museum building type becomes a kind of Möbius strip, where the architecture is influenced by the art, and the art by the architecture.

As Jacobson points out, the surge of museums being built in China is a passing fad – much like it was the same to build stadium architecture prior to the Beijing Olympics – and that within five years this activity will have levelled off. This is coupled with the fact that China’s population are not a culture that travels from museum to museum, which must introduce its own particular set of challenges for the directors and curators. Since 2009, the government has attempted to bolster this by offering free entry to 80 percent of the country’s cultural and antique museums.

The book’s highlights are many, with some noteworthy examples including: the Tianjin Museum by Shin Takamatsu & Associates; the Cafa Art Museum by Arata Isozaki; the Datong Art Museum by Foster + Partners; the Taiyuan Museum of Art by Preston Scott Cohen; the Ordos Museum by MAD Architects; the Sifang Art Museum by Steven Holl – a purist variation on OMA’s massive CCTV building in Beijing; and one of my own favourites, the OCT Design Museum by Studio Pei-Zhu in Shenzhen, whose exterior shape suggests some great spaceship sculpted by Anish Kapoor.

These buildings and many others provide for an excellent monograph of this building type in China’s burgeoning urban environments, making it an indispensable visual companion for designers and architects the world over. And as the deputy director of National Art Museum of China points out in the book’s closing pages, collections of art for public consumption is a relatively new notion in China, with art historically being more intended for private contemplation. For this reason, Jacobson observes that there is much to be learned by how this building type proliferates in China during its building boom, noting that they are more like American churches than museums – as churches back home may have lost their original purpose as houses of worship, they nonetheless retain their prominence within their neighbourhoods as communal halls, place makers, gathering points, and sources of local pride.

As stated at the end of the book’s introduction, “A building type that holds the cultural and architectural aspirations of a nation at a particular moment in time is bound to be wrought with a certain gravitas. New museums in China have that weight. Within the sea of anonymous buildings that make up the contemporary urban fabric, they provide points of excellence. And as buildings dedicated to culture, they offer great potential for China’s future artistic exploration, in whatever form it takes.”

With Xi Jinping, the President of the People’s Republic of China, stating last October that there would be no more ’weird buildings’ in the country, mostly a reaction against OMA’s CCTV building, it is probably his desire for an architecture that celebrates more local building traditions, as best representative of the critical-regionalist architecture of Wang Shu. Suffice to say it will be a few years yet until this has any lasting impact on museums and other cultural buildings. And so Clare Jacobson has rightly pointed out, the West can learn much from how this preeminent building type is improved upon in the East, with valuable lessons to be learned by us all.

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Sean Ruthen is a registered architect and member of the AIBC Council, in addition to being Chair of the RAIC Metro Vancouver Chapter.

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Author: Jared Green (Princeton Architectural Press, 2015)

Sometimes the strongest way to get a message across is through simplicity. When dealing with a topic as broad as a “sustainable world” it could have been easy to slip into the trap of writing a complex book that scared away readers and distanced them from the inspirational stories inside. What Designed for the Future: 80 Practical Ideas for a Sustainable World did instead, was inspire hope and a vision into projects that are changing the world around us piece by piece. Ranging from architectural studies, interiors, products, and even some artistic or theoretical planning pieces, the book keeps the information concise and easily attainable.

Interestingly, instead of the author – Jared Green – picking his favourite ideas and writing about them, he brought together leaders throughout multiple industries and had them choose something that had inspired them. Names like Bjark Ingles and Elizabeth Mossop are dotted within, in no specific order. There is no hierarchy to the way the book is presented, no idea better than the last, but simply an overwhelming sense of hope in a time when we read a lot about the negatives human beings are perpetrating on the world.

The book follows a constant format from beginning to end: The title and author on the top right followed by a brief, one sentence description, and then a longer breakdown, never exceeding the one page. To the right of this is a single or collection of images that portray what the idea is. This simplistic way of guiding people through the book makes it not only easy to pick up and put down as needed, without feeling like you were breaking away from something at a critical point, but also allows for a quick reflection if you are ever in need of an inspirational burst.

To go through all of the 80 ideas shown would ruin the fun of the book, but to highlight a few and show the broadness of the book would do it justice, and hopefully entice you to pick up a copy for yourself. As mentioned before,Elizabeth Mossop chose a topic that she breaks down to, “use creativity to influence established systems.” She goes on to talk about the Changing Course competition, which focuses on a way to rethink the Mississippi River.

One of the key aspects of this article, for me, was the collaboration. As Mossop writes: “Privately funded nonprofit organizations are cooperating with the state, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and academic institutions to generate ideas an develop a new paradigm for the river.” The reason this is happening is because of the rapid loss of wetlands surrounding the Mississippi River and the “huge amount of pollution that enters the Gulf of Mexico.”

As highlighted above, the beautiful part about this collaboration is that it is allowing designers to work with engineers and government planning entities to take a design-focused approach to dealing with these complex problems. As it is a contest, we won’t know yet if any of the design ideas are implemented, but the overarching promise is that people are getting together and stripping away titles to allow design thinking a chance to correct a major challenge.

Some of the ideas are more broad. Thomas Balsley directed his attention to “The City” as a whole entity, or an overarching idea. His write-up is short and to the point, which is rousing in it of itself considering the scope that “The City” as an abstract idea takes on. He sums it up best in his last paragraph: “This invention called the city impresses me. It’s a phenomenal device. Great thinkers since the Greeks and earlier have seen why the city works and what it means for humanity. It’s key to the preservation of the planet. I’m putting all my money on the city.”

Technology also has a place within the book, as evident in the Media TIC building, written by David Garcia. “The building uses new technology not as a gimmick but as a new way to mitigate environmental challenges.” The facade of the building can adapt itself for thermal gains and losses from the sun, and as Garcia states, the technology is not a gimmick, but rather being used in a way that will actually benefit the occupants and the city in which it is located by reducing power consumption for heating and air conditioning.

In an almost perfect juxtaposition, the following page by Eva Franch I Gilabert focuses on the Merian Map of Paris, “a map of paris from 1616 [which] depicts not only the city’s plan but also its different inhabitants and social strata.” To move from something that is a technology only available in the last 5-10 years to a map that is almost 400 years old says something about the state of sustainability; that it is available through almost any facet (be it technological or otherwise).

Gilabert sums it up best when she states that “History and time are both latent in the present moment.” We have never been without the issues of “sustainability” but obviously, in the present, they have taken on a different meaning. The map itself outlines all the different people that make up the city, which refocuses the reader on the human aspect of why we want to fix the problems at hand. A city is made up of a myriad of people with different backgrounds, social structures, incomes etc. and in order to help the city as a whole, one must remember the subsets of people that make up the city first.

In a nutshell, Designed for the Future: 80 Practical Ideas for a Sustainable World is everything about sustainability without reducing it to the “greenwashing” we see so frequently. Not everything focuses on Co2 emissions and climate change. There are many aspects of the book that bring us back to times when people were the central focus, when helping humanity was the basic tenant to create a more stable and sustainable culture.

The book also shows that the wide blurry lines around certain professions, a necessary endeavour if we are to change the thinking processes of individuals and groups to think more critically and from a problem solving, designer, stand-point. It is all these subtle things that make the Designed for the Future: 80 Practical Ideas for a Sustainable World such an inspirational read, that one can quickly refer back to in a time of doubt or uncertainty.

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Jeremy Senko is happily lost in the world of theoretical architecture and design. He is forever a student at heart, consistently reading, experiencing and learning about the world he inhabits. More specifically, he works as an Interior Designer in Vancouver and plays an active part in bettering the environments we live in.

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WHAT: Summer 2015 issue release party & Jane Jacobs Prize ceremony
WHEN: Wed., July 15th, 7-11:30pm (Prize ceremony runs from 8-8:30pm)
WHERE: Royal Canadian Legion (Branch 344) / 1395 Lake Shore Blvd. W., Toronto
COST: $10 (includes copy of issue), cash bar
RSVP: Feel free to let us know if you’re coming by RSVPing to Facebook listing
* please note that the ceremony time has changed to 8-8:30

Is there a better way to spend a summer than sitting on patio on the waterfront? The answer is no. With that in mind, you need to spend the evening of Wed. July 15th at our release party which is taking place in the west end at the Royal Canadian Legion, branch 344 (1395 Lake Shore Blvd. W.).

DIRECTIONS TO EVENT:

On bike: Take the Martion Goodman Trail or cross at Jameson bridge, Roncesvalles bridge, or at Dowling Ave.

On transit: The 504 streetcar (south & east from Dundas West station) exit at Queen St W. stop > cross on Roncesvalles bridge > walk east to location. On the 504 streetcar (westbound) exit at Jameson stop > walk south > cross on Jameson bridge > walk west to location. Another option for the 504 streetcar (westbound) is to exit at Dowling stop > walk south on Dowling > cross Lake Shore at lights > location is right there.

By car: There is a public parking lot just east of Legion Hall on south side of Lake Shore Blvd.

From 8-8:30pm the event will double as the ceremony for our 2015 winners of the Jane Jacobs Prize. This year, we have three winners: their identities will be revealed the day of the event. After the ceremony, you can dance in the main hall or lounge on the expansive patio.

Our newest edition is packed with great features for your summer reading:

• Architects Joe Lobko and Megan Torza outline a detailed history of the West Don Lands development (from 1987-2015), home to the Athlete’s Village during the 2015 Pan Am Games
• We reveal the three winners of the 2015 Jane Jacobs Prize
• A ranking of the best and worst of urban design that surrounds the stadiums and arenas of Canada’s professional sports teams
• John Lorinc, Kimberley Noble, and Alex Steep provide a summary and update to the Spacing investigation into why the City of Toronto has collected over $250-million since 2010 for parks acquisition but only spent $10-million
• How civic hashtags on Twitter are helping people engage with municipal politics

The post SPACING: Celebrate release of summer issue & Jane Jacobs Prize winners appeared first on Spacing National.