Planned art installation? Spontaneous intervention? New bike parking? We’re not sure what the inspiration was for these bikes playfully hanging from a tree in Toronto’s Trinity Bellwoods Park but it definitely got our attention. We love these unexpected and creative changes to our public spaces that make them more enjoyable experiences. Let us know if you saw this over the weekend and bonus points if you can tell us why the bikes were in the tree.

photo by Melissa Daniels

Here’s our weekly review rounding up the best stories and ideas in public space from cities around the world. This week we bring you Detroit’s urban farms, lessons from the Netherlands, Toronto’s Park People, and why the design of transit stations matters.

• Urban Farms, Gardens, Reforestation All Part of Detroit Works Vision for Remaking City
• How do you fix a declining city? This is a pressing question for those working to bring back Detroit from the brink. Can urban agriculture help? (via Detroit Free Press)

• Lessons From the Netherlands
• Vancouver architect and property developer Michael Geller travels to the Netherlands and brings back some key observations about housing and design. In the words of Liz Lemon: We want to go to there. (via City Caucus)

• Toronto’s Park People Creating Fertile Ground for Growing Neighbourhoods
• Parks are a key part of any city, but they are often the one that gets the least love when it comes time to draft up the city budget. Luckily, locals have banded together as volunteer stewards for their local parks. A Toronto organization, Park People, acts as an umbrella organization in Toronto for those involved in making their park better. (via Torontoist)

• Hey, TTC: This is How Our Subway Stations Should Look
• Forget that dank stairwell disappearing into the street, this article argues for transit stations that are visually interesting. This makes us wonder: do we pay enough attention to beauty in our transit systems? Having a system that runs well is key, but having a system that runs well and is beautifully designed is better. (via Toronto Standard)

photo of a set of buildings along an Amsterdam canal by Maurobrock from Flickr (cc)

The Lidenhof Quarter in Zurich’s Old Town has a medieval feel with narrow passages, squares and fountains. I love the old-world charm I’ve come to expect from European cities, and envy the few who live in contemporary apartments amid beauty and history. Wandering about the Old Town between its many iconic churches, I stumbled on a hidden hilltop park that was a pseudo-spiritual experience. I will let you in on one of Zurich’s best kept secrets.

At the top of a cobble-stoned incline, you arrive at Lidenhof Park under a canopy of green. The soft gravel floor absorbs noise, and along with the breezes from so many trees overhead, you can relax almost in total silence while activities go on. Even on the warmest summer day, you can sit comfortably in the shade and enjoy stunning views.

The interior space morphs on and off from tranquil and empty to buzzing with activity. Lidenhof has become known to locales as a community gathering space. In 2011, the park was filled with tents as part of Occupy Zurich, but day-to-day people tend to meet for simple fun like bocce tournaments.

The periphery of the park is reserved for more solitary activities. Some people lounge or picnic while chess enthusiasts play.

To add to this enchanted experience, a hidden floor reveals a passage way to Roman ruins. In the 4^th century, the Romans protected their occupying forces from attacks at their hilltop fort where the park is today. The Roman’s really knew how to pick their spots.

Wendy Gold, Founder of OpenCity Projects, comes from small-town Ontario. While living and working abroad, she became fascinated with cities and how people experience them. But it took moving to Toronto to show her the value of a city that embraces cultural diversity and green space.

photos by the author

Our blog has grown quickly since our 2011 launch and we’re looking for new contributors to cover urban experience in Toronto and cities around the world.

We have some great opportunities to get involved:

Contributors
We are open to like-minded urban enthusiasts from a range of backgrounds. You don’t have to be a journalist but strong writing and photography is key. Contributors will be expected to produce one article per month at minimum.

Internships
We take on graduate students in journalism, urban design programs and marketing/social media programs. This is a great learning experience, with a flexible schedule, if you’re interested in blogging, editing, web site management and content promotion.

Contact us to learn more these roles. Tell us a little bit about yourself and why you’re interested in working with OpenCity.

photo by Elvert Barnes from Flickr (cc)

Here’s our weekly review rounding up the best stories and ideas in public space from cities around the world. This week we bring you how to use your bike as a paintbrush, exploring the urban environment from a kid’s point of view, and a Twitter inspired building in Seoul.

• Bike as Paintbrush, City as Canvas
• An avid cyclist uses a GPS location device in his phone to map out the path he rides through the city, making designs from as simple as a few sonic waves to a Centaur shooting a bow and arrow. (via Atlantic Cities)

• Exploring the Urban Playground
• For many adults, Toronto’s financial district is anything but a place to play, but viewed through the eyes of a kid everything changes. This was the subject of a Jane’s Walk event held over the weekend in Toronto called City as Urban Playground. (via Torontoist)

• Press the # Key if you’d like to Live in Big’s # Cross Tower
• This gravity defying, new tower in Seoul mimics the design of Twitter’s hashtag symbol and includes a variety of green spaces in what is sure to be a dazzling finished product. (via Architizer)

photo by cocoinzenl from Flickr (cc)

Here’s our weekly review rounding up the best stories and ideas in public space from cities around the world. This week we bring you a visualization of shipping routes from around the world, a new Vancouverism, the Maputo People’s Wall, and an interview with author Taras Grescoe about his book on public transit, Straphanger.

• Video: All Roads, Air, and Shipping Routes on the Entire Planet
• We know that our world is connected, but this video shows a dramatic visualization of all the shipping routes that knit our globe together. (via Gizmodo)

• A New Vancouverism
• Vancouver is known for its dense glass towers set on podiums that maintain a humanized street wall, but a new conference in the city has asked designers and architects to break out of the box and come up with a new design for the Vancouver of the future.

• Forget Your Facebook Wall: Maputo Citizens Feedback on an Actual Wall
• A few week’s ago we brought you the story of Space98, a Vancouver bus shelter turned into a community message board. Here’s another city that has created a community message board, where citizens in Maputo, Mozambique can make suggests about what they like and don’t like in their community. (via ThisBigCity)

• The Better Way, Around the World
• Montreal writer Taras Grescoe has written about weird foods and the fishing industry, but his new book finds him riding the world’s public transit systems from Paris’ Metro to Bogota’s bus rapid transit system. Here’s an interview with Grescoe about his new book and about the importance of transit in shaping the cities we live in. (via Torontoist)

photo of Vancouver skyline by Michael Scheltgen from Flickr (cc)

As the days begin to get warmer, I am looking forward to spending some time at Sugar Beach, one of the newer waterfront public spaces that is part of Waterfront Toronto’s ambitious revitalization of the Toronto’s shoreline. The beach owes its name to Redpath Sugar, a still working piece of Toronto’s industrial past that remains adjacent to the park.

It’s not unusual to see a huge ship carrying thousands of tonnes of raw Brazilian sugar docked at the refinery, unloading its burnt-yellow cargo with cranes that send metallic clangs over the water. I love watching the workers who in turn gaze over the railing of the ship at the people lounging under Sugar Beach’s bubblegum pink umbrellas. It must be an uncommon sight to these workers to be able to stare at sunbathers and kids playing in water fountains while they do their work; but then again, it’s uncommon for a public space like Sugar Beach to share such close proximity to working industry.

Such is the complexity of Toronto’s waterfront, where new public spaces are slowly but surely being carved into what was a solely industrial district for decades. What makes Sugar Beach so interesting, however, is exactly this complexity, this juxtaposition between Toronto’s new post-industrial waterfront with its industrial past. Of course, Sugar Beach could exist by itself, but it would lose something–not just an obvious historical context, but an activity and vitality that it gets from being located near a working port.

Of course, this juxtaposition between a carefully-designed public space and a piece of industrial past is not found only at Sugar Beach. New York’s High Line Park, which turns an old elevated rail trestle into a linear park, also plays off its industrial history. Rails are visible through the smooth concrete planks that make up the walkway, and, in one portion, reclining seats are set on wheels that can be moved up and down the rails. The High Line winds its way through old brick warehouse buildings, sometimes coming so close that you can reach out and almost touch them. This graffiti-scarred, industrial landscape provides a dynamic background to the hyper-designed High Line. Take away the setting and the High Line definitely loses something.

Back in Toronto, the Evergreen Brick Works is another example of an adaptive reuse that stays true to its industrial past while injecting fresh and modern architectural elements. Formerly the Don Valley Brickworks, this site has been converted into a sustainability hub with an ice rink, restaurant, offices and classrooms. The graffiti layered on the walls over the years has been preserved as well as portions of the brick kilns. The effect is visually arresting; the site speaks of modernity and the need for a sustainable future, while also harkening back to our industrial past and how we got to where we are.

If there is something to be learned from Sugar Beach, the High Line, and the Evergreen Brick Works, it’s that things that don’t seem like they would go well together—like a working port and a beach—often not only go very well together, but when included next to each other add up to more than the sum of their parts. They allow a more textured public space experience, one where the past has not be erased or painted over, but embraced.

Sugar Beach would still be an interesting place if you removed the Redpath Sugar Refinery, but being able to put down your book for a moment and watch a lumbering ship disgorge itself of huge piles of sugar adds something to the experience of being there that other places just don’t have.

Jake Tobin Garrett is the OpenCity blog editor. Originally from Vancouver, he holds a Masters in Urban Planning from the University of Toronto, and is also a contributing writer for Spacing Magazine and Torontoist. He can often be found riding his bike or reading in a park. Follow Jake on Twitter @jaketobin

photos by the author

Here’s our weekly review rounding up the best stories and ideas in public space from cities around the world. This week we bring you a new book on public transit around the world, a William Whyte film on the use of public spaces, and Georgia’s new bold architecture.

• Road Rage
• A new book on public transit, Straphanger, by Montreal-writer Taras Grescoe takes him on a journey around the world to ride public transit and ponder the future of cities. (via The Walrus)

• Video: The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces
• William Whyte’s famous studies on New York’s public spaces culminated in the landmark book, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, but here’s the hour-long film that accompanies Whyte’s work, which shows the importance of grade, ledges, places to sit, access to sun, and flexibility in making successful public spaces. (via Spacing Toronto)

• Can Georgia Shake its Post Soviet Past with Bold New Buildings
• Architecture has always been used as a symbol of a city or country’s vitality, power, and cultural heft, but can a series of bold architecture experiments really pull the country of Georgia out of an economic slump? (via Atlantic Cities)

photo by Chris Robertshaw from Flickr (cc)

By Brandon Yan

This space on Granville Street near Broadway used to be a bus shelter for Translink’s 98 B-Line, a rapid bus system from Vancouver to Richmond that became extinct with the completion of the Canada Line. Since September of 2009, this sad space has sat unloved and unused: the number 10 bus that now runs along Granville Street stops about five or so metres to the north so no one waits here. Sometimes you’ll see the odd person sitting on the bench.

Whenever I see a sad space in the city I always envision its potential. A few months ago, the Vancouver Public Space Network (a group that I volunteer with), organized an ‘Ideas Jam’ and I brought up the possibility of transforming this old bus shelter into something useful again. A group of us came up with some pretty great ideas but I thought it’d be even better if we asked the community what they wanted. So, I bought a bunch of peel and stick chalkboard panels and some chalk and this past weekend I gathered a few friends and volunteers and we set it up. I kind of prefaced the whole experiment with a quote from Jane Jacobs: “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”

The reaction from the public has been terrific. After a few hours of being up, most of the board space was full. People’s suggestions ranged from a pocket coffee shop to a photo booth to more trees. More than a few people suggested a space for buskers to play music or a spot for a community garden. “Public art?”, someone suggested. “Definitely”, “Agreed”, and “Ya!”, were the added responses connected by arrows. “So many great ideas,” wrote someone else, “can we reclaim all of the parking spots (4) and do all of these?”

A day after, I captured the responses and erased some older suggestions to make room for new entries. As I came by to check on everything, this entire family added their thoughts to the wall. I overheard them talk about how cool the space was and how Space98 was exactly they wanted to see in their neighbourhood: a creative outlet for the community. People love something unexpected and awesome and that’s what makes cities so darn fantastic.

I think it’s extremely important that people be involved in their public spaces. We often just sit and talk about all the cool things that could or should be and all the great things that city x and city y has, but we never do anything about it. Yes, there are ‘rules’ and red tape but so what? I’m tired of hearing, the City should do this or that – let’s do it ourselves.

Brandon Yan is a student in the Masters of Urban Studies program at Simon Fraser University and a coordinator at the Vancouver Public Space Network. Follow him on Twitter at @pre_planner or check out his blog, Masters Planning.

all photos used with permission by Landon Hoyt

Here’s our weekly review rounding up the best stories and ideas in public space from cities around the world. This week we bring you Toronto typography, a Vancouver bus shelter turned community message board, Boston crowd-sources their potholes, and how white roofs could help keep us cool.

• Toronto Type
• For typography buffs, a city is a museum of both bad and good examples. One Toronto resident has taken it upon himself to create a website that looks to document the city’s typographic styles, allowing users to upload pictures and categorize them by neighbourhood. (via Toronto Type)

• Space 98
• Brandon Yan and fellow Vancouver urban enthusiasts were tired of staring at an unused bus shelter on the city’s busy corner at Broadway and Granville, so they decided to take the matter into their own hands, putting up a chalkboard where people could write ideas for what could occupy the space instead. To see the suggestions check out the follow-up article here. (via Masters Planning)

• Boston Does Digital
• Boston’s Citizen Connect app helps the city crowd-source graffiti and potholes, providing citizens with a better way to report problems in the city and giving the City more information on potential issues. We’d love to see this kind of app expand even further to work to connect citizens to their city. (via Co.Exist)

• Just a Fraction More White Roofs Could Have a Huge Global Impact
• If you’ve ever made the mistake of wearing a black t-shirt on a hot day, you’ll know that black absorbs heat while white reflects it. So why is it that, in an age where we are attempting to reduce our energy use, we still cover our houses in black roofs, causing them to absorb more heat and need more cooling? More white roofs could help reduce the urban heat island effect and reduce our energy use. Even the iPhone has a white option. (via Atlantic Cities)

photo by go ask alice from Flickr (cc)