Sunday afternoon I decided to walk uptown Toronto on Yonge St. to reach the Kinkos shop so I could mass print a few documents. The weather was stable enough and it felt just right a stroll after lunch.
The whole corridor between Finch Ave. and Sheppard Ave. on Yonge has been a constant crescendo of high rise activities since 2000, between the realization of the purple subway line and the many Asian restaurants that replaced the old pubs and burger joints.
The apartment complexes running along the street are coasted by two large low-density residential areas to the west and to the east side, virtually shielding them from sight. Plenty of food from sushi to Korean bbq, from pharmacies to bubble tea shops, it’s a vibrant and young portion of town that will keep you busy if you are a foodie.
Mel Lastman’s Square is great for public events, but its positioning doesn’t attract people.
However, if you slow down and pay attention you will notice the lack of public spaces with the exception of Mel Lastman’s Square; the rest is sidewalks and a series of missed opportunities that would have given a better look and functionality to this part of town.
The square especially has a problem in terms of accessibility since it doesn’t generate pedestrian flow. People have their major entrance and exit point only from the Yonge St. side, leaving the back unattended for lack of opening. The place feels rushed in terms of design development, and the facts it has limited entry and sight doesn’t help.
Squeezed between two towers, an attempt at public space suddenly appears.
I took a picture of a portion of space between two buildings that allegedly should work as public dominion, unfortunately it’s always empty and leads to nowhere but private property access. Indented areas don’t really work if there’s no accessibility from either side when built this way, pedestrian activity doesn’t happen because there’s no source of foot traffic transiting through.
This spot would have worked better if it featured a more welcoming sitting configuration and some flowers too, unfortunately it wasn’t well kept and weeds grew out of the large green container. The overwhelming use of metal elements to create this space make it feel cold and unwelcoming.
The Bauhaus nostalgia is strong with this one.
Close to the sitting area the North York Centre functions as shopping area for thousands of residents and visitors. Inside it hosts a cinema, a large grocery store, restaurants, health clinics, electronic shops, subway stop, and formerly a two-story Staples point which is now no more leaving a huge retail vacancy that removed the only bit of colour from its facade.
From outside the industrial look minimizes its appeal removing any human element form it. The lack of distinctive patterns and vegetation alienates the pedestrian from having a pleasant interaction with the place, also the absence of alternative space arrangement emphasizes the frenetic flow of people along the sidewalk: nowhere to stop, nowhere to sit, it’s not meant to have anyone gazing around or stopping to contemplate.
What punishes this urban setting is the verticality of Yong St. which left no options for an alternative design to happen; intersections are at right angles and leave no room for the public realm to properly exists. This pushes these areas to become sad enclaves of private spaces that oust the public from enjoying their towns.
Diagonal, a missing term in the urban design manual of North America.
Alternatively, the design would have improved if roads took a different angle than crossing at 90 degrees with each other. The Spanish city of Barcelona is characterized by the Avinguda Diagonal, a large and important street which goes through the whole city without running parallel with other roads. Paris is another example of alternatives to the repetitive pattern of road grids that characterizes Canada and the US.
Diagonal street design has the ability to make cities feel more organic and less artificial, they allow for more sidewalk space to exist and therefore to grant access to more pedestrian traffic and business activity which can expand outdoor.
Above the aerial view of the portion of Yong St. and Mel Lastman’s square with an alternative design: purple lines represent additional roads that help relieving traffic directions, red is the focal point that connects all the streets, the dashed yellow line represents a much bigger possible public space pedestrians can enjoy and business to thrive.
The current setting of designing roads doesn’t allow for a natural flow of pedestrians, but rather a parallel dynamic dictated by the car traffic directions. This is one of the reasons these areas don’t collect as much people as they should. At random times through the day you can see the lack of people, the only instant they have activity is during lunch hour when office workers eat their meals in the square.
A cafe in Paris where outdoor seating is a must, even in the winter.
Intersections that meet at different angles have the ability to generate more sidewalk space for people to experience. Cafes in Paris flourished because of this road design which allows commercial activities to extend their seating capacities just outside their doors, becoming a staple reference point for citizens and for cities to become alive.
Bars and outdoor seating areas are greatly cherished and respected in Europe as they represent the quintessential experience of claiming the public space which rightfully belongs to the people. On the contrary, in North America, the systematic absence of the public realm has favored the car-culture to bloom uninterrupted, creating more harm than anything else to cities, pedestrians, and the environment.
The pleasant sight of people filling the streets and enjoying the public realm, a rarity in North America.
Why does this happen less frequently in Canada and the US?- It’s understandable how the weather of certain portions these two country experience has its own impact; however, the good season allows for metropolitan areas to have their share of pedestrians activity to fill the streets.
The current design of cities in these two countries developed around the Industrial Revolution period, where the need for mechanized transportation was already in place, so roads had to be able to host a large flow of private transportation which later transformed society with the advent of the car and the birth of the suburbs, thus more road lanes and less space for pedestrians.
All in all, cities never stop to change especially when we talk about Toronto, now the 4th largest metropolis in North America; so there are big shoes to fill from this perspective. Tourism can greatly benefit from extended pedestrian areas that concentrate people granting more time to be spent around business activity.
In the end we should rethink the way we perceive the public realm. Public as for pedestrian to use, not for cars to generate more traffic that already exists, so it’s essential for citizens to demand from their local and national political representatives to broaden their views in terms of environmental issues. It’s not just a matter of how many trees you plant, but how much space families and tourists can benefit from a better developed city.
This is Saratoga Springs in the state of New York in early 1900. The coloured picture shows a specific period in time where pedestrian outnumbered in presence the carriages and cars. The space division between building to building it heavily emphasized by a generous sidewalk outlined by a series of tall and lush trees that carry along the road.
In recent times we have forgotten how important is a well designed road network. Systematically we removed many pedestrian features to favor cars and its culture. The realm of public life has been ruined by the pervasive ideology that cars are the solution to public life, and also to the transportation issue.
The phenomena of removing space from sidewalks and its features has transformed North American cities into speedways. If once we had more square surface for feet, now we have more than that for rubber. All this has developed by leaving the public transportation out of the equation and pushing the notion that commuting is the way to be.
The essence of the public space extending from the edge of buildings towards the road, is the pedestrian domain of social activities which makes the urban landscape vibrant and acceptable. Without it we would give up our very own ability to claim public spaces a human experience.
The sidewalk becomes an opportunity for business to thrive and for the public to experience a better urban life by walking their neighbors.
Today we have seen the drastic changes of our cities in favor of a chaotic systems that pushes for cars to be the main feature of urbanism. As the invention of the car made its way worldwide, we slowly reduced the public spaces to a mere sequence of tarmac junctions for traffic to collect in it.
The functionality of a wide sidewalk to host plenty of people, along with a solid sequence of trees, has been proven to work pretty well in terms of urban design. As the road traffic flows along streets, the parallel parking creates a virtual barer to define the obstacles along the road in order to protect the pedestrians.
Wide sidewalks aren’t just for people to stroll by, but they provide opportunities for local business to become part of the community establishing their brand and practices. Bars, restaurants, cafes, are all in need of public pedestrian space to engage people into enjoying the city.
At the same time a solid line of tall trees enforces the safety boundary between the street and the sidewalk, while simultaneously the branches with their leaves provide the necessary shade to cool the ground and preventing excessive heat from creating heat bubbles across the city.
The trees coasting the streets will absorb the CO2 produced by vehicles and release at night the fresh oxygen, which replenish the air quality of the city. This will help the overall urban temperature from producing excessive heats during summer periods.
Trees along roads will work beyond their natural purpose. We forgot how the presence of green throughout cities has the ability to remove the grey effect of buildings, and to create a welcoming atmosphere through communities, enhancing the psychological aspect of citizens.
Municipalities ought to reconsider the way green spaces are used. Trees, bushes, and others natural elements can increase the life quality of many urban dwelling. Reshaping public spaces for pedestrians can only have positive impacts, engaging people into becoming more active among city streets while reconsidering their approach with the car.
Parks and vegetation spread out across cities works towards creating a wide and positive sense of urban beautification, which aims at defeating the grey and obsolete polluted stereotypes city dwells into. Municipalities can only benefit from implementing such natural spaces that focus on pedestrians to reclaim space from cars; also by reshaping the old concept of suburban solumes that are virtually isolated from any walking experience or commercial engagement.
Jesus Christ, when was the last time a swede did anything useful?
What the fuck those streets were before cars, fucking playgrounds and parks with waterslides?
Or did people commute on them, on the level of whatever technology they were on, the vere purpose they were built for since the first city?
I’m trying my best not to automatically dislike artists, I really do, but sometimes I just wish I could send them milking cows or shoveling gravel.
@santaclausdeadindian “What the fuck were those streets before cars, fucking playgrounds?”
Yes, actually.
[description: a black-and-white photo from the 1900s of a group of girls in pinafores standing in the middle of the street; according to the website I found it on, this is a ‘street dance’. The girls are talking to each other in small groups. end description.]
Children used to play in the street all the time. And for most of recorded history, that was relatively safe. Running into someone on foot is not going to kill a child, and horses - let alone carriages- were relatively rare.
Streets used to be public spaces. People would hang out and talk in the middle of the road, or set up shop with a little cart at the side of the road. “Right of way” used to mean “your right to take up space on the street, because you are a free citizen and free citizens get to use the road.”
[description: a black-and-white historical photo of two children in the middle of a mostly empty street. One child is sitting in a wagon, and the other child is standing, ready to pull it. End description.]
It wasn’t until the 19th century that it became common enough for your average joe to own horses that it was unsafe for kids to play in the street (and they still did anyway!). And it wasn’t until the early 20th century that people got cleared off of the street in favour of cars- before then, people and horses and carriages had to share the road, and carriages had to go at the same pace as whatever was around them.
We laugh at the insanely low speed limits of the 1910s and 1920s - really, cars can only go at 3 mph?- but they were there for a reason, and that reason was “to keep the roads safe for horses and pedestrians”. If cars could go at top speeds on city roads, they’d only be safe for cars, and people couldn’t use their public spaces anymore. But thanks to lobbying by the auto industry and a whoooole lot of PR spin, that’s exactly what happened.
I’m going to leave you with two pictures. The first is Mulberry Street in NYC, according to wikipedia, in 1900. The second is Mulberry Street today.
[Description: two photos of city streets. The first photo is sepia-toned, from the 1900s. It shows a city street full of people and carriages. The foreground of the photo is taken up by a group of vegetable sellers, and a group of men and young children standing beside them looking at the camera. The second photo is a modern photo of the same street. It is a heavily decorated tourist district, but most of the street is taken up by cars. The sidewalks are crowded with pedestrians, but they’re shoved off to the side. End description.]
Little Italy is a touristdistrict. It is meantto be walkable so that tourists can browse and look at all the little restaurants and window-shop. And yet 75% of this picture is taken up by a fucking car canal, and people- the people this street was built for - are shoved off to the side, so as not to get in the way.
People got forced off the road in favour of cars. People got forced out of public space in favour of cars.
When someone posts on their blog or social media, they sometimes see themselves as being in a public space. So, they expect people to voice disagreement, ask them to quiet down under certain circumstances, or tell them when they’re being very rude.
Some people see their posts as a private space. If you join that conversation, you’re opening the door and letting yourself in, and anything you say upon entering will be viewed in that context.
If you’re not sure if you’re welcome in a space, you can always ask permission before joining or starting a conversation. Often, you’ll be treated more warmly because you treated the space as personal to someone else.
Now, people tend to see a space as more public if more people spend time there. This can be disorienting for users whose web pages become popular on the internet, and they find that what used to be a place to tell their friends and family about their thoughts is suddenly… a little less intimate.
When you’re on the internet, there’s no solid way to measure the privacy of a space you are in. So you can’t be totally sure how anything you say will be received. Be careful when you can.
Great insight on the way Long Beach residents (like myself) are able to achieve healthy sustainable lifestyles at low cost thanks to wonderful community-driven alternatives such as time banking, free stores, and more.
“What does the world look like when you take away the things that limit you?”
Shepard Fairey’s work, called “Create Your Future”, is a contribution to the Arts Matter campaign, which promotes art programs in public schools. This work has been revealed by LAUSD as the last of three Metro buses designed by famous artists, in addition to designs by Barbara KrugerandJohn Baldessari, which will be featured all over Los Angeles. About $4 million in space have been donated by billboard companies. Wonderful attempt to place some art in an otherwise advertisement-filled environment. Way to go, Metro!
Using the streets as a digital canvas. Oregon’s 130-ft elevator will become a platform for a site-specific projection encompassing the idea of media art as a contemporary form of street art, reflecting the culture of the city not only through it’s media content, but through the choice of site, by using an iconic landmark.
This is a compelling story about video artist Nam June Paik’s only permanent outdoor video art installation, originally installed in 1990. The poor condition in which this piece was found raises the question: Who is responsible for maintaining our city’s public art?
Public art, specially public media art, must face a series of obstacles in order to keep running, being exposed to constant environment threats. In order to make this work, it requires extensive maintenance and operation tasks. Public media art installations are sometimes not the most aesthetically pleasing when turned off. However, when fully functional, the impact can be profound.
Whose job is it to keep up with maintenance and what can we do as a community? Cities are a reflection of the people. Art is a reflection of the people. We have the ability to shape our environment. Keep public art public. Raise awareness of poorly maintained public art.
