My good friends over at Distl here in Toronto have recently published their first Insight Report. It’s called, Make This City: The State of Urban Manufacturing, and it’s available via free download here. I like the title ;)
The report is 39 pages and is really well put together. There’s research, case studies spanning San Francisco to Toronto, and some great takeaways for city builders.
Since the internet likes listicles, here’s a preview of some of those takeaways – 10 ways that cities can take advantage of the urban manufacturing revival:
Preserve urban industrial areas
Focus on the niche
Public investment is a good investment
Think mixed-use
Diversify learning
Redefine industrial assets
Connect supplier & retailer
Leverage your city’s brand
Form supportive organizations
Leverage partnerships with both the private and public sectors
But it’s definitely worth a complete read and I plan to do exactly that this weekend. Click here to download Make This City.
Back in April I wrote about a competition for young people to reimagine public space in Toronto. It was called NXT City. Well that prize has been awarded and the winner was Richard Valenzona for his vision–called Yonge-Redux–of a new and reimagined Yonge Street. To download the PDF of his entry (the image shown above), click here.
The proposal encompasses a stretch of Yonge Street that runs from Queen Street in the south, to College Street in the north. It would capture the Toronto Eaton Centre (mall), Yonge-Dundas Square, Ryerson University’s expanded Yonge Street footprint, and the massive mixed-use developments happening in the College Park area (see Aura Tower). To quickly simplify, the proposal is essentially about enhancing the urban experience, prioritizing pedestrians, and reducing the flow of cars to two lanes.
Overall, I think it’s a wonderful proposal and I’m not surprised it won NXT City. This type of intervention is on so many of our minds. In fact, it’s somewhat surprising that we’ve been as slow as we have to improve our main street. There are so many anchor institutions, such as the Eaton Centre and Ryerson University, that plug into this section of Yonge Street. It makes a lot of sense.
But as I said in my original post, one of the most exciting things about the NXT City Prize is that it has always been about execution. This is not just an academic exercise–or at least that’s the hope. This exercise is about spurring real change in the city and I genuinely hope that they’re successful in doing so. Because then I can turn around and say: Take that Melbourne :)
Kudos to Richard Valenzona, Mackenzie Keast, as well as everyone else involved in NXT City, for making this initiative a reality and for doing your part to make Toronto even more awesome.
If you are under 30, you love Toronto and you care about public spaces in this city, I would encourage you to check out the NXT City Prize. It’s a public space competition being organized by a number of local organizations including Distl. (and my friend Mackenzie Keast), Loop, Gen Y, and the City of Toronto.
Toronto needs great ideas for its public spaces. Ideas that are big, bold and unconventional. Ideas from champions, outsiders and geniuses. Ideas that recognize Toronto’s greatness–and its potential for the future.
The competition opens today and anybody (under 30) can enter. The winner will receive $5,000 in cash, and then $10,000 to work on actually implementing the idea(s). What’s cool and unique about this competition is that it’s not just an ideas competition. It’s a competition based on doing and executing.
Click here to download the competition brief.