Call for Participants - Scenario planning with Upper Toronto

Call for Participants 
Scenario planning with Upper Toronto

DEADLINE: May 21

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June 4-22, 2012

We are assembling teams to create scenarios 
for a city in the sky (75 years from now.)

We are looking for people willing to meet with us for three weekly three-hour sessions of scenario planning. (We’re planning a variety of options to suit a variety of timetables. See below.)

After running a series of one-off community consultations, we have decided to enhance our investigations by inviting small teams of experts and enthusiasts to think about the future of Upper Toronto in a more dedicated way. We want to start going deeper into the future possibilities of a new city in the sky.

Scenario design is used by planners, designers, organizations and governments. Groups are given sets of “given circumstances” – technological, environmental, social etc. – and sets of values and contexts. With these, they are asked to brainstorm flexible but specific scenarios. Over the course of the process, new circumstances, often unexpected but entirely possible, are added. Teams must work out how best to respond to them.

We will be using scenario design to focus our thinking. The goal is to develop scenarios which lay out possible conditions and constructions of Upper Toronto. These scenarios will serve to push the boundaries of what seems possible and to ensure that we imagine a tomorrow that is more likely than “basically the same as yesterday”.

Over the three sessions, your team will generate an overall look and feel for a district in the imagined city of Upper Toronto, along with policies and proposals for how the area should be constructed and run. 

Once that’s all done, we’ll take your work and hand it off to artists who will bring that vision to life.

The type of person you might be for this to appeal to you:
Structural engineer, front line city staff, science fiction writer, civic activist, illustrator, former Mayor, teachers, game designer, students, architects, City Councillors, futurists, curious person, historians…

If you are interested but you don’t see yourself on this list, please get in touch. You are probably the best judge—we just want to be clear that we’re looking for people with different backgrounds and interests. 

Participants will receive a token honorarium to cover expenses of attending.

Questions:
Please email info@uppertoronto.ca if you have any queries.

How to Apply: 
Please send an email info@uppertoronto.ca before May 21 with the following information:

Your Name:
Your Email Address: 
A phone # where we can reach you:
The best times to call:
A 100 word biography that includes some background and current interests.
300 words on what most interests you about scenario planning for Upper Toronto.
You first and second choice for a meeting time.
2 references.

Meeting Times:
Please select a first and a second choice for the following times for the regular meetings. Note that you must be able to attend ALL THREE meetings.

• Tuesday evenings 6:30-9:30 : June 5, 12, 19 
• Wednesday afternoons 1:30-4:30 : June 6, 13, 20
• Thursday evenings 6:30-9:30 : June 7, 14, 21
• Sunday afternoons 1:30-4:30 : June 10, 17, 24

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Images by Brett Lamb & Rachel Kahn, respectively.

Death and Life: infrastructural obstacles

Every week until the end of April, we will be blogging along with the City-Builders Book Club through Jane Jacobs’ 1961 The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Feel free to read along and join the conversation as we consider how Jacobs’ observations might hold up 75 years from now.

A forbidden crossing along Montreal’s train tracks.

Perhaps one of the more universally-applicable topics covered in Death and Life is the inevitability of borders and other geographic obstacles in cities. Interestingly, she speaks specifically of features of native physical geography or cumbersome infrastructure rather than arbitrary and invisible political boundaries. She is also quick to rule out a common assumption that her prescriptions are based on a value judgment:

A big city needs universities, large medical centers, large parks containing metropolitan attractions. A city needs railroads; it can use waterfronts for economic advantage and for amenity; it needs some expressways… They are mixed blessings.

Stephen Dale, in turn, is quick to point out that Jacobs doesn’t differentiate between the scale and geometry of such decidedly divisive features as waterfronts:

Trouble is, not all city-bearing water is the same. There are waterfront cities (those on lakes, seas and oceans), there are riverfront cities (those on rivers), and there are hybrids.

Death and Life: “Diversity” vs. Zoning

Every week until the end of April, we will be blogging along with the City-Builders Book Club through Jane Jacobs’ 1961 The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Feel free to read along and join the conversation as we consider how Jacobs’ observations might hold up 75 years from now.

Nova-Heliopolis II by Dionisio Gonzalez, 2006.

Chapters 12 and 13 of The Death and life of Great American Cities conspire to expose the pitfalls of zoning—specifically, to point towards regulations as the primary prohibitors of diversity. This would be a good time to pick apart what Jacobs might mean when she uses “diversity” as a bit of a buzzword throughout her book. By this - interestingly and often problematically - she implies some sort of equilibrium between a diverse demographic of residents within a built environment; a flexibility of use in said environment; and an aesthetic variation in architectural style, size, age, and level of economic investment. Of course, she is able to blend all of these factors because they are inherently intertwined, but this kind of thinking can be very limiting. Jacobs was a great lover of mixing; a well-proportioned distribution of inhabitants and building types leads to an always lively, visually and culturally stimulating neighbourhood that fulfills many land use functions, according to her. Zoning, however, “permits monotony” and ignores “scale of use.” But what drives a need for zoning? How do we beat the convenience of allocating certain districts to certain segments of our daily lives? How might Jacobs’ envisioned mixed-use neighbourhood become the status quo? Most importantly, can there be a zoning model that revolves around the organically-evolving needs of a neighbourhood, taking into equal consideration the family that owns the laundromat on the corner and the wealthy fashion student looking to invest in a comfortable home?

Mary Rowe brings up the contemporary example of the rapidfire construction of nearly identical glass tower condominiums in major North American cities, where market demands drive out the same old building stock and residents that might lay the foundation for the very diverse neighbourhood Jacobs dreamed of. Rowe’s post brings up an interesting point: while Jacobs vilifies land use regulations, economic development is actually what propels land use regulations to favour the kind of development that is antithetical to Jacobsian urbanism. 

Death and Life: Life in Complete Environments

Every week until the end of April, we will be blogging along with the City-Builders Book Club through Jane Jacobs’ 1961 The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Feel free to read along and join the conversation as we consider how Jacobs’ observations might hold up 75 years from now.

Rendering for what Jacobs would term a “complete environment” in New Songdo City, South Korea: a built environment developed in one shot.

Last week’s chapter on the need for aged buildings really hit home for Upper Toronto. Jacobs, forever advocating for demographic diversity through diversity in building stock, argues that instant neighbourhoods -nevermind entire instant cities- that are built up all at once, are cursed to a short life of vacant soullessness. She describes this sudden build-up as a handicap: an entire neighbourhood of buildings of the same age group permits little organic change, and without these varied rates of decay and renewal, there is no diversity in use or aesthetic, argues Jacobs. Her concerns here, as far as economic factors go, are valid and will be valid so long as we remain within a capitalist economy. Generally, as buildings age, their market value declines and they become more financially accessible to lower income brackets than those who can afford to pay the high rents that accompany newly-constructed buildings. However, the cosmetic concerns for a diverse demographic of building stock can prove to promote just the kind of nostalgic preservationism that in turn prevents more affordable, sustainable, and technologically sound building stock to develop where there is demand for it. 

So, we cannot entirely dismiss the possibility for the success of a completely new built environment, but we must consider who will pay the price of development, and, more interestingly, how a real estate market might develop out of thin air. Without an architectural history, how might a city assign values to its buildings?

One way to move things in the right direction would be to work within a participatory framework from the very beginning to the very end of the planning and design process. If citizens take part in shaping their environment from conception, a new level of engagement - beyond the “street life” of which Jacobs speaks- might arise—one founded in the deep-seated responsibility we feel for our own children, and one which so rarely applies to our relationship to our environment, built or natural. 

Death and Life: A temporal take on streetscapes

Every Saturday until the end of April, we will be blogging along with the City-Builders Book Club through Jane Jacobs’ 1961 The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Feel free to read along and join the conversation as we consider how Jacobs’ observations might hold up 75 years from now.

Piet Mondrian’s rendition of life pulsing through the streets of New York in Broadway Boogie-Woogie, 1942-43.

There is one especially pertinent perspective revealed in Jacobs’ eighth chapter, devoted to promoting mixed primary uses. This is the point in the book when the city ceases to hold still as a tableau, or, at best, as a short series of tableaus illustrating the days and nights of a streetscape. Suddenly, the city — articulated as a web of sidewalks, streets, and public spaces — looks toward time as its primary dimension and traffic flows as its constant. People are recognized as variables, opening the idea of “neighbourhood” to far more than a place for residents to dwell.The built environment is a series of avenues and containers to facilitate movement and usage, and it’s arguably this animacy rather than the physicality that makes up the city itself.

Stephen Dale opens his post with a fitting image this week: a digital time-lapse photo-collage of downtown Toronto taken from above Bay and Dundas. In typical Jacobs fashion, her examination of the usage of the built environment takes place at the most human level, fixating on one block at a time. At the block level, flows of traffic occur throughout the day more so than through the city. The point made is that upon examining a block, traffic patterns should emerge before the user, illuminating the true character of the street, allowing it to come alive and play host to a cast of daily characters. For the sake of safety, successful usage, and sustainability, the street should serve different purposes at different points in the day, responding to and feeding the demands of a demographic that fluctuates as each day plays out.

Approaching the planning process through this lens offers a wealth of interesting applications, from the night-time economy and the growing culture of 24-hour cities, to provoking a re-examination of our material fixations when it comes to the architecture of our cities. Rather than striving to envision an architectural model of new environments, we should contemplate how events might take place within them, and how these new surroundings might lend themselves to transience and accommodate a need for adaptability.

Death and Life: The perilous state of the neighbourhood in the 21st century

Every Saturday until the end of April, we will be blogging along with the City-Builders Book Club through Jane Jacobs’ 1961 The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Feel free to read along and join the conversation as we consider how Jacobs’ observations might hold up 75 years from now.

A neighbourhood rises in Dubai’s World Islands. Image courtesy of Google, 2012.

This week, the CBBC read the Jacobs chapters on what she calls “neighbourhood use” and “the generators of diversity.” I’ll only talk about the former here, as it seems to be the more relevant chapter in regards to our project. In it, Jacobs interrogates the notion of a “neighbourhood” in city planning, and blames rural nostalgia for our desire for these tightly-knit archaic units. However, rather than dismissing the value of community at the street level, she critiques the way cities get divided into these planned neighbourhoods. The underlying thought here is that these planned communities essentially dictate the way we live, whereas the built form of a neighbourhood should take shape in response to a community that settles there.

Jacobs cites urban planner Reginald Isaacs, who pointed out that the appeal of cities is their ability to satisfy the idiosyncratic needs of individuals, and their capacity to feed our niche interests. A city is a large and dense expanse of services, environments, and lifestyles. These components cluster together in units we call neighbourhoods, loosely defined by their socioeconomic makeup, their cultural history, and their aesthetic landscape. Typically, the more obscure our needs in these categories, the further we will travel to fulfill our cultural needs and to lead a rewarding professional life. 

Neighbourhood cohesion, according to Jacobs, only comes about through highly localized social networks. In other words, these loose conglomerations of lifestyles, services, and environments achieve a sense of unity when the people who inhabit them begin to comingle and forge strong relationships within the physical bounds of the established community.

 I would argue that these ideas are largely irrelevant from now onwards. More loosely-defined, and more dependent on the success of their small businesses and attractions than residential street life, neighbourhoods have come to mean something different. Now our networks are more expansive and accessible by means other than face-to-face interaction, and one may argue that we each have a deeply personalized and despatialized notion of our neighbourhood in the city. Isaacs points towards the immaculate ability of a city to breed scores of subcultures—similarly, given ample mobility, we can bend the city into catering to our specialized needs and refined tastes. Our personal assemblages of favourite places come together in expansive mental maps that stretch beyond conventional neighbourhood boundaries. The individualized mental neighbourhoods trace the city-wide webs upon which the homes of our friends scatter; where we went to school; where we work; and other places of significance, big or small. 

However, these destinations are still strongly linked to nostalgia. In looking for a pleasant place to frequent in the city, we look at the housing stock: is it aesthetically pleasing (Victorian)? Or “cold” and still developing in character (post-1980)? Are the trees mature, or are the streets still lacking in lush greenery? If these hunches are right and the idea of “neighbourhood” is becoming more destination-oriented, how do we design neighbourhoods from scratch, evading our nostalgic instincts while allowing the built form to adapt organically to its community? 

As I mentioned, this is a problem for Jacobs’ idea that “localized self-government” is the ultimate task of  a successful neighbourhood — eyes on the street require trust and camaraderie, which are often hard to establish at the neighbourhod level amongst busy urban populations, as evidenced by tales from the newly-established community at CityPlace. Worth noting is that these things take time: Jacobs points out that not only does a neighbourhood need to be cohesive, but its initial residents need to make it their long-term home. Only a while after the initial settlement will neighbours begin to feel like neighbours.  

Perhaps the valuable lesson in this chapter is the social cohesion of the city as a whole. In the latter half of the chapter, Jacobs steps back from the neighbourhood and talks about the district—an abstract division used widely in planning, primarily to serve the purpose of an efficient municipal governance. The district is meant to mediate between the neighbourhood and the city, but often has an alienating effect on communities. For neighbours to feel engaged, mobilized, and empowered, there needs to be a decrease in the level of abstraction between decision-making and the built environment. This does not mean we have to return to the small-town-nostalgic neighbourhood Jacobs subtly mocked; rather, we need to fine-tune our conception of municipal political geography to the impalpable and individualized way we remain mobile in our cities.

Death and Life: Learning from Third Spaces

Every Saturday until the end of April, we will be blogging along with the City-Builders Book Club through Jane Jacobs’ 1961 The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Feel free to read along and join the conversation as we consider how Jacobs’ observations might hold up 75 years from now.

A Beijing public square in which the design unfolds around you, by Interval Architects.

In Chapters 3 and 4, we begin to draw links between the design of an urban space and its pedagogical influence on its users and surrounding community. In talking about Upper Toronto, the design of open public spaces has become a major focus—and naturally so, since it’s these spaces where all of our daily lives intersect, and it’s these spaces that perhaps offer the most room for long-term adaptive thinking in the design stage. Most importantly, as Jacobs points out, public space is where we learn lessons from a young age—be they through interactions we have with strangers, through time spent observing in solitude, or through amateur exploration of our immediate environment. As kids, we might get into fights or fall off our tricycles spending time at the playground after school. A watchful neighbour might rush over with a pack of ice, or make a quick call to our parents. As teens, we might see someone passing through who looks lost and offer them directions. From the start, we learn from public spaces that, as Jacobs says,

People must take a modicum of public responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other.

Heather Ann Kaldeway’s post on the CBBC blog questions how much faith we have put into the “stranger danger” mantra, and we at Upper Toronto have been asking the same question. How can we design spaces that allow strangers to be friends? How can space influence decades of social stigma against the unknown? Design that necessitates play and unconventional use just might be the way to release any inhibitions we might have when interacting with others and with the space around us. 

Sure, Jacobs offers the tried and true elements of intricacy and centrality, but these vague aesthetic guidelines lead to little besides a few shrubs and a fountain decorating an otherwise flat hard public square or green field. When we spoke to the folks at the Parkdale Activity and Recreation Centre earlier this month, there was a big push for interactive furniture in public parks. Specifically, participants were excited about interactive features that would bring together music, an element of surprise, exercise, and an appearance that is open to interpretation. Fittingly, Josh Fullan makes a great point in his post, implying that public spaces need to keep up with the pace of consumer electronics and social media in order to captivate kids long enough that they become drawn to their urban environment:

The problem with applying [Jacobs’ advice] to the behaviour of kids these days is, well, kids these days. They are no longer just squeezed out of street life by planners and engineers as Chapter 4 rightly tells us, but their leisure time is also much more heavily programmed, scheduled, and cybernated. The lure of the street now has a troupe of new competitors for kids’ time and attention in the form of lessons, sports, clubs, and social media.

Since our goal here is to look at the way Jacobs’ guidelines might apply to future cities, it’s important to note that urban social life has arguably become less stagnant than it has been in the past. Public spaces are points of transition more so than they are destinations. A thought on the subject in this week’s batch of CBBC posts is Stephen Dale’s proposal that permeability should in fact be the primary strategy for drawing people to public spaces:

While it may seem counter-intuitive at first, I think there is only one clear and logical solution: We should stop trying to attract people to use the park.

We should try, instead, to encourage people to pass through the park. Like frontier towns that once popped up at the crossroads of major trails and roads, a successful park or square is a response to the traffic that flows through it. The genesis of a quality urban park or public square occurs when it’s situated and designed in such a way as to provide a rare and more direct or more attractive routing than the other available options.

Death and Life: sidewalk relations

Every Saturday until the end of April, we will be blogging along with the City-Builders Book Club through Jane Jacobs’ 1961 The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Feel free to read along and join the conversation as we consider how Jacobs’ observations might hold up 75 years from now.

A future streetscape revolves around a moving sidewalk, pictured in a 1980 issue of Scientific American. via paleofuture

In the first two substantial chapters (2 & 3), Jacobs discusses the use and integration of sidewalks into neighbourhoods so as to promote both safety and social livelihood. She outlines the way that most ideas of the level of safety offered by a certain city rests upon a visitor’s initial experience walking the city’s streets . Jacobs’ measure for safety in this case is whether one feels safe among strangers on a sidewalk, for, as she says, “Cities are, by definition, full of strangers.” This brings us to a question that we have laid out at most of our consultations: How does one design a public space that encourages strangers to be friends? How can we blur the boundaries between the familiar and the strange in a way that encourages discovery without sacrificing security and consent?

Reading this passage, it becomes clear that the step we’ve missed is one Jacobs was well-attuned to: “When you see the same stranger on [a successful street] you begin to nod.” Successful sidewalks - according to her measure, those which have each of the following: 1. Clear division of public and private space; 2. Eyes on the street; 3. A heavy and constant flow of traffic - make strangers into acquaintances. Acquaintanceship is as far as good design can take us; it is then up to us to introduce more profound social bonds which serve as the glue that links the community to its built environment. Similarly, Jacobs’ notion of street characters, ranging from buskers to talkative shopkeepers, is one that sheds light on the way that human presence animates and socializes street space. 

One of her main complaints in these chapters is that architects and planners don’t understand that the presence of people attracts others. Arguably, since the time she wrote (and arguably still, because she wrote) designers have tuned their ears to the murmurs and trepidations of the life of public spaces. Design has adopted a level of organicism and interaction that pleads for strangers to bump paths. Undulating wooden decks along Toronto’s waterfront take people out of their ordinary experience of walking along the water and into a situation where they sign a silent contract to let go of inhibitions the minute they enter the space. 

One last, especially resonant thought here is that sidewalks only exist in relation to the blocks and streets that they serve to outline. They are an “abstraction,” says Jacobs, which in our case implies that no matter what it is that fills the gaps between our bedrooms and the rest of the city, be it concrete sidewalks, a system of moving buildings, a large nature reserve, or a multi-modal transit network (all suggested at past Upper Toronto consultations); it should invite an engaged, playful, and watchful eye as well as some feeling of permanency that encourages residents to adopt it as their own. 

A way we can update Jacobs’ thoughts here is to begin to look into how these concepts might play out on a more expansive scale—how, for a city of hyper-mobile residents, each person’s subjective streetscape, traced from her daily journey through the city, might be made more engaging. Additionally, Jacobs speaks of the way high-income residential complexes essentially hire eyes on the street. How might this translate to a future of increased automated surveillance? All reservations aside, could artificial life play the watchful and friendly role of the baker around the corner, or the neighbourhood garbage collector?

Death and Life: no slate is truly clean

Every Saturday until the end of April, we will be blogging along with the City-Builders Book Club through Jane Jacobs’ 1961 The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Feel free to read along and join the conversation as we consider how Jacobs’ observations might hold up 75 years from now.

A row of boarded-up Victorian houses line Glen Road; a liminal space between Rosedale and St. James Town, a site of history in anticipation of future development.

One thing is to be made clear before we embark upon a multi-generational critique of urbanism — reading Jacobs’ introduction to The Death and Life of Great American Cities, it becomes clear that only through a harmonized consideration of the past, present and future can we build cities for the people that inhabit them. In an interview with Jim Kunstler published in Metropolis Magazine in 2000 (linked to on the CBBC blog), Jacobs shed some characteristically bold light on a specific downfall of Modernist urban renewal strategies: their utter neglect of a city’s desire for narrative. Try as we might, we cannot escape that we are creatures of habit—and therefore, tradition and history.

What was a really major bad idea about the Garden City was you take a clean slate and you make a new world. That’s basically artificial. There is no new world that you make without the old world. And Mumford fell for that and the whole “this is the twentieth century” thing. The notion that you could discard the old world and now make a new one. This is what was so bad about Modernism

With Upper Toronto, we talk of building a metropolis from scratch. However, time and time again we return to the fact that we cannot change social habits nor civilization. We consider questions like, “what will happen with the contents of our cemeteries?” and often speak about the future legacy of Lower Toronto— how will we commemorate the city left behind and - more importantly - how do we forge links between the two cities, between past and present (future)? A city physically built from scratch still cannot come out of nowhere.

Jacobs’ introductory chapter sets the book’s premise as an overhaul of the status quo in urban planning. Rather than presenting us with an attack on aesthetics or building methods, Jacobs carefully takes apart the fortified walls of presumptions and traditions that have brought us to the way we practice urbanism. A pronounced shift to considerations of the immediate and the everyday turns our eyes to the individual’s concerns in an urban environment. 

Similarly, she hints towards a balance of practicality and aesthetics that underlies her discussions in Death and Life: 

It is futile to plan a city’s appearance, or speculate on how to endow it with a pleasing appearance of order, without knowing what sort of innate, functioning order it has.

But how could we design from scractch by this principle? We agree that design should be responsive and cities should grow with their inhabitants, but with project like ours, in which a populace relocates to a freshly-built metopolis, how do we accomodate the needs of its citizens? A problem we’ve encountered has been that this is in fact a city for our grandchildren, but, if we have learned anything from previous gifts received from grandparents, generational gaps often overwhelm what is believed to be wise and well-contemplated. Steven Dale’s post on the CBBC blog implies that, in fact, Jacobs’ genius was her foresight; it wasn’t so much her ideas, but the power of inspiration that she insighted in generations ahead to work from within institutions to begin to shift the way we see the motions of urban planning.

All this considered, Jacobs constantly returns us to a reflection on our current surroundings, and her guidance often still holds relevance today. On the CBBC blog, Mary Rowe wrote,

Perhaps that speaks to an important lens with which we can together read this explicative volume. Why are so many of the challenges Jacobs identifies, and the foibles she exposes, still so prevalent in the ways cities are building and developing (old and new)? Who, or “what” is not getting this? What stubborn structures continue to obstruct the organic, the particular, the diverse, the vibrant, the sustainable, the self-organizing, the resilient, the livable city? Or, where do we see these aspects of city life flourishing—and why there, and why now?

This serves as a fitting segue to an invitation to all of you to join us at our community consultation on Tuesday in Parkdale. At our consultations, we try to get to the root of future design solutions by tackling problems of the everyday. In our own ways, we discuss the very questions raised by Mary above, and Tuesday’s questions will revolve around problems that face Parkdale today. 7PM, February 7 at the Parkdale Activity Recreation Centre, 1499 Queen St. W. The event is free and light snacks will be served.

Image credit: Sasha Plotnikova