Join >4.5k subscribers and stay updated by getting the latest posts delivered directly to your inbox.
As many of you know, Toronto has a highly successful public space underneath the Gardiner Expressway called The Bentway. I have ice skated in this space during the winter and I have listened to hard techno in this space during the summer. It has become a public space anchor in the city. Ilana Altman and the team are doing great work. And this week, they just announced that Field Operations (New York) and Brook McIlroy (Toronto) have been hired to design a major expansion. Called The Bentway Islands, this next phase consists of three "islands," totalling 11,500 m2 (~125,000 ft2).
Here's a map:
And here's what the spaces look like today:
https://videopress.com/v/wmBLbLgC?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&preloadContent=metadata&useAverageColor=true
Both of these firms do fantastic work, and so I'm excited to see what they come up with. (Field Operations is the firm behind New York's High Line.) But if I can offer two unsolicited (yet related) suggestions, they would be: 1) Let's incorporate more commercial uses and 2) let's aim for these three parcels to not actually feel like urban islands. Generally speaking, the spaces underneath highways aren't the most desirable. They also tend to be surrounded by inhospitable urban environments. Stitching them in and creating continuity in the fabric of the city (existing example, here) is the best way to make the highway above more or less disappear.
Toronto's elevated Gardiner Expressway is a topic that pops up periodically on this blog. We have talked about taking down a portion, realigning a portion, adding a congestion charge,
Many cities around the world practice some form of participatory budgeting, but even among those that do, Cascais [Portugal] is an outlier. It spends prodigiously through the system: in Paris, five per cent of the city’s annual investment budget has been allocated to participatory projects in recent years, but in Cascais, more than fifteen per cent of the budget flows through the program, and the percentage can float higher if voter turnout rises. Cascais is surprising in another way: its mayor, Carlos Carreiras, is both a champion of participatory budgeting and a member of a center-right political party. Participatory budgeting is often considered a tool of the left, but its role in Cascais suggests that it could have a broader appeal; part of the theory behind it is that citizens can be better than officials at knowing how money should be spent.
Of course, it won't solve all of our problems:
Even in the best of circumstances, participatory budgeting faces some structural limitations. Citizens can’t use it to raise the minimum wage, for instance, or to reconfigure affordable-housing policy, or to ban single-use plastics. As it stands, the approach “will never change the destiny of a poor neighborhood,” Giovanni Allegretti, a senior researcher at the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra, told me. Allegretti noted that participatory budgeting is mainly a competitive process involving limited resources with no long-term strategy; it doesn’t eliminate the need for other policy interventions. But when it functions effectively, participatory budgeting can give direct political power to those who might otherwise have very little of it.
There is something very compelling about empowering people to come up with new ideas, compete with others for the best ones, and then participate in public decisions. It also strikes me as a possibly efficient way to force: "We only have this much money to spend. What should we spend it on? Spending on this means not spending on that. Time to make a decision."
And now it has me wondering: If we asked Toronto whether it wanted to spend over $1 billion to rebuild the Gardiner Expressway east or spend it on other things, what do you think it would say?
For the rest of the above article, click here.
Their most recent project is something called Standing Grounds. It's a collaboration with New York-based Tei Carpenter (Agency--Agency, NYC) and Toronto-based architect Reza Nik (SHEEEP, Toronto), and I think it's really clever.
If you look closely at the underside of the Gardiner Expressway, you'll see that there are existing downspouts in place that take rainwater, snowmelt, and whatever else from the highway above, down to the ground. What Standing Grounds is going to do (by next month) is take this existing infrastructure and add natural filtration chambers that can remediate this excess water.
I learned today that plants like milkweed, agastache, and yarrow are actually able to absorb road salts and heavy metals like lead, cadmium, and hydrocarbons. So instead of this dirty water flowing from the highway and into the ground, it will soon be filtered by a seemingly simple garden system that looks like this:
This is an obviously positive thing for the city and I love that it is leveraging infrastructure that already exists. As I said: really clever.
Renderings: SHEEEP
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
Share Dialog