Weather impacts who Canadians are as a people and greatly influences when and how we choose to go outside and spend time in public space. Quite frankly, most often we abandon our public spaces – aside from skating rinks and hills where we ski, board and sled – for the colder months of the year, re-emerging at the first sign of Spring and sporting short sleeves probably before we should. There is a reason why Canada’s largest city, Toronto, is considering expanding what is already the world’s largest urban tunnel system, connecting much of the downtown business district.

We rarely ask why we don’t design our public spaces differently to find ways to enjoy being outside more of the year. Even more rarely do you find new reasons to go outside in sub-zero temperatures. This is why the Christmas Market found at Toronto’s Distillery District – an old reclaimed industrial site featuring condos, shops and space for artists – came as such a pleasant surprise. The market, meant to mimic those found across Europe for generations, is a joyful blend of old fashioned lights, trees, booths selling gifts and treats, and open fire pits dotting the cobblestone walkways.

These fire pits are pretty unusual for Toronto. We are a very careful city that follows a lot of rules. Fire can be dangerous and almost no one has dared think of creating such a feature in any public space.

The fire pits at the Distillery bring an entirely new dimension to the neighbourhood and make the walkways warm and inviting. There is moveable, community seating around each pit allowing revelers to move out of the way of the smoke and join together with strangers who just might share their warm candied almonds with them – we were just that lucky

While I think we could do a lot more to make our public spaces more enjoyable and full throughout the colder months, adding fire pits to any destination will go a long way to pulling people out of their homes and getting them into their city throughout the winter.

Jordy Gold is the OpenCity Projects Senior Editor and is a sustainability consultant. He has worked and studied in Geneva, Lund, Chiang Mai and Prague. Jordy learned from the Swedes how to cycle in all conditions and can be seen on his bike 365 days a year throughout the core of Toronto. Follow Jordy on Twitter: @JordyGold

photos by Kristin Neudorf

• Reclaimed Bus Yard Begins Life as Urban Wetland
• What can you do with an old bus yard? Well, if you’re in Los Angeles you can now answer: turn it into an urban wetland. After three years, the nine acre park has opened, providing walking paths, native plants, and is also working to clean storm water. (via Los Angeles Times)

• Can a Font Help a City Make a Comeback?
• Quick–what font is used on the street signs in your city? Residents of Chattanooga may soon be able to answer this question, as the City is embarking on an extensive rebranding exercise that includes the creation of a proprietary typeface, Chatype, to be used for all City purposes. Somewhere, Helvetica is crying. (via Good)

• Why Alleys Deserve More Attention
• Alleyways are usually something we are told to avoid, but Seattle architect Daniel Toole doesn’t think so. He’s an avid alleyway explorer, documenter, and writer of the book Tight Urbanism. Here he explains his obsession with alleyways, and why they’re important to the future of our cities. (via Atlantic Cities)

• A Plan to Behead Vancouver’s Urban Serpent: The Georgia Viaduct
• It occupies a prime piece of land in Vancouver’s dense, but growing downtown core, and pressure is mounting to demolish the Georgia Viaduct, built to serve an urban highway that never came. The winning plan of a City sponsored contest to find alternatives to the viaduct reimagines the area as a mixed-use neighbourhood with large waterfront green spaces and connections into Vancouver’s historic Downtown Eastside and Chinatown. (via Globe and Mail)

photo by Payton Chung from Flickr (cc)

Self-selected assemblies on public rights-of-way—streets, sidewalks, on-ramps, off-ramps, etc.—are as varied as that which brings them together. A political rally is a world apart from an outdoor concert. And no one would want to confuse a protest with a parade. But they all have one thing in common and that is an overriding passion. Emotions—ecstasy, frustration, anger, persistence, celebration, or disaffection—are overt and often very raw. A living room or local pub are too small to contain this level of passion. The world—or at least thousands of brethren—must see and hear this intensity of expression in order for it to be processed successfully.

The cause is compelling. The impetus to participate is enough to divert the protestor or sports fan from his or her day-to-day routine to join a major public spectacle.

Like a protest, a parade takes place without exception on public land. And while the governing municipality may try to control the situation through barriers or corrals, these events are free and open to the public. While unquestionably public in terms of physical presence, the feelings on display are ordinarily only visible in private. Passion is not generally conducive to typical public conduct. Extremes are rare. The street is generally reserved for pragmatism—getting from point A to point B with little to no fanfare and an expediency and efficiency learned with practice. Averted eyes, quick pace, poker face—passion-free.

Sharing the streets and sidewalks of Lower Manhattan with very devoted New York Giants fans, it was clear that the motivation to endure the inconvenience of live crowd control was two-fold: to experience unmitigated pride and joy amidst hundreds of thousands of people who felt exactly the same way and to be as close as physically possible to one’s heroes—the sports greats who inspired regional pride by winning Super Bowl XLVI.

The route for the ‘ticker-tape’ parade was advertised as traveling up the ‘Canyon of Heroes.’ So iconic is lower Broadway for honoring the United States’ heroes for the past 93 years that the word Broadway was somehow superfluous to AP wire writers. The parade covered just over a mile of Manhattan’s Financial District. The lengthy route facilitated thinning out the fans and precluded overcrowding.

It also meant that my entire neighborhood was packed with football fans. Whether before, during, or hours after the parade’s end, the Giants fans were unanimous in an unmitigated passion for their team. Men, women and children were dressed in team garb, often replete with under eye black anti-glare marks. They had little to say in terms of chants or good wishes other than the one word which said it all: GIANTS!

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 fake sun over London’s Trafalgar Square, San Francisco’s e-bike sharing experiment, the business case for beautiful libraries, and an underground video tour of Hong Kong’s subway expansion.

• Winter Sun Over Trafalgar Square
• Winter can get a bit depressing, what with the lack of light and all. It’s hard to wake up in the morning and go to work in the dark, then come home from work in the dark. So on the darkest day of the year, an artist collective named Greyworld, with backing from orange juice maker Tropicana, created a glowing fake sun hoisted in the air at Trafalgar Square for one day. Sunscreen, not required. (via The Pop-up City)

• San Francisco Will Pioneer Electric Bike Sharing
• As the proliferation and popularity of car-sharing services shows, we are beginning to leave behind the age of car ownership–at least in dense urban centres. Then came bike-sharing services like Montreal’s Bixi, which has expanded to cities all over North America. Now, San Francisco is trying it’s hand at electric bike sharing, adding e-bikes to stations around town. Leave it to the city of massive, rolling hills to be the first to attempt to leave manual peddling behind. (via Good)

• The Business Case for Beautiful Libraries
• For centuries we have housed our books in some of our most impressive architectural structures, but in these trying times of economic austerity, many libraries are facing dramatic cuts. Now, a new study shows that libraries offer large economic benefits to their cities, while their often stunning architecture breathes life and excitement into the urban environment. (via The Globe and Mail)

• Minding the Gap as the City Expands
• When we ride the subway, it’s hard to imagine how anything so large could ever have possibly been built underneath the streets. In this video, we get a firsthand tour of the massive construction under the streets of Hong Kong as that city expands its subway system beneath one of the densest cities in the world. (via CNN)

photo of the Rem Koolhaus designed Seattle Public Library by Theodore Scott from Flickr (cc)

The architecture is so overwhelmingly beautiful in Paris that public spaces are often overlooked. This flowering wall stands out in Square Paul Langevin by creating a colourful backdrop for a small and simple neighbourhood park.

Wendy Gold, Founder and President of OpenCity Projects, comes from small-town Canada. 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.

photo by Wendy Gold

• Two Wheels and High Heels
• From counters and foot rests to separate traffic lights, there is a lot to learn from the world’s top cycling cities. Check out the Top 10 lessons. (via Sightline Daily)

• Rooftopping: Guerrilla Skyscraper Photography
• Some photographers choose rolling meadows while other prefer the bustle of city streets. But if you want to hang off the edges of skyscrapers to get just the right shot, ‘Roof topping’ might be your thing. Don’t miss the beautiful photos here. (via The Toronto Star)

• Traffic Jam Economics
• Did you know New York City is planning to add 2,000 more taxis to their streets? Will this extra capacity help relieve traffic or cause more congestion? You might not guess the answer. (via The New York Times)

• The Surprisingly Complex Art of Urban Wayfinding
• Contrary to popular belief, wayfinding is not about building “nicely designed signs.” Okay, so then what is it about? (via Atlantic Cities)

photo by Paul Krueger from Flickr (cc)

Maybe I’m lazy, but the first thing I do when I get to a park, plaza or other public space is look for a place to sit down. But it’s amazing how many public spaces get seating so wrong. It’s shoved far off in a corner, or plopped in the middle of open plazas where you feel like you’re on display, or, worst, there isn’t any at all. Many times I have wished I could just uproot a giant concrete bench and drag it to where I wanted to sit.

Indeed, several decades ago this is exactly what William Whyte found when he researched the use of New York’s plazas in order to come up with recommendations for the City’s zoning code to ensure plazas were better designed. Whyte noticed that there wasn’t so much a lack of public space in New York, rather a lack of good public space. There were often expansive wind-swept plazas in front of looming towers that were devoid of any people. One of the main things that came out of his research was something extraordinarily simple, yet something that cities often get wrong: people will sit when there are places to sit.

Of course, it’s not quite as simple as that. Whyte went on to say that it wasn’t enough to just provide seating, the seating had to be of a certain quality. And he found that the best seating in the most well-used plazas were movable chairs.

When I was in New York City this past summer, I was amazed to stumble across parks like Bryant Park and Paley Park, both of which were stuffed with people lounging on small, metal movable chairs. Instead of prescribing where people sit, how they face each other, and how big their groups can be, movable chairs allow people to take matters into their own hands. They can sit as close or as far from each other as they want. They build flexibility into a space.

Whyte also found that people often moved the chair before they sat down in it, even if moving the chair didn’t really seem to accomplish anything. He mused that perhaps it was a sense of control, of ownership over the chair, that drew people to move it. You move it an inch forward and sit down and that chair now becomes yours. I catch myself doing this all the time now.

This kind of movable chair is just one example of how cities are experimenting with flexible seating in public spaces. New York’s High Line Park contains reclining deckchairs on wheels that one can move side to side along the rails. Vancouver’s addition to the sea wall near the Olympic Village site contains chairs that can spin around a table so you can sit near someone, or move the chair to avoid facing the sun. Or, they can be moved to face then sun, which is what people do with the movable white deck chairs at Toronto’s Sugar Beach. Some of these chairs are attached to the ground with a wire, but they still allow flexibility.

Such a simple idea: allow the public who uses public spaces to participate in the design instead of prescribing where and how to sit. It not only makes the space seem friendlier, but gives people the choice to adapt the space to their needs.

Jake Tobin Garrett is the OpenCity blog editor. Originally from Vancouver, he is currently completing 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

all photos by the author

You will find the February installment here. You can subscribe for future newsletters on the right side of our website where you see the ‘sign up’ button or here on our Facebook Fanpage.

Photo by Jill Slater

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 author Chris Turner speaking about the value of public space, Vancouver’s anti-neon crusade, towers of dreams (and nightmares), and why the most environmentally friendly buildings may be the ones we’ve already built.

• Chris Turner on Public Spaces
• As part of The Walrus Magazine’s public lecture series, author Chris Turner, speaks about the art of the city, specifically the importance of public space. (via CBC)

• Vancouver’s Light Pollution Battle from Another Era
• While some citizens may be complaining about the light pollution from several large advertising screens near the newly revamped BC Place stadium, this is not the first time that there has been debate about the neon-ization of the city. Marsha Ledermen takes us back to the 1950s, where Vancouver had 19,000 neon signs and citizens wondered whether they created excitement in their city, or a gaudy distraction. (via The Globe and Mail)

• Towers of Dreams: One Ended in Nightmare
• Say the words “modernist public housing” and you can literally watch planners involuntarily shiver. After all, much of the public housing built in the Corbusier-happy days of the 1950s has proven to be unsavoury. But was this architectural style always doomed to such spectacular failure? Here, Michael Kimmelman, unravels rarely spoken about successes of the tower-in-the-park. (via The New York Times)

• Why the Most Environmentally Friendly Building is the One We’ve Already Built
• Cities like to tout their green building policies and standards. They like to unveil new LEED platinum projects and neighbourhoods, but what we don’t hear about so much are the retrofits, old buildings reworked as new. But can giving an existing building an energy-saving retrofit be more environmentally sustainable in the end than building a new eco-building from scratch? (via Atlantic Cities)

photo by rommy ghaly from Flickr (cc)

At the gateway to downtown Miami Beach’s celebrated pedestrian promenade sits an important new social and civic experiment, Herzog and de Meuron’s 1111 Lincoln Road. Completed in 2010, the mixed-use project features residential, office and retail components; however, the standout element that re-shapes the discussion about urban and architectural design is, uncharacteristically, the parking garage.

From an architectural and urban standpoint, it is a bold and exhilarating design, celebrating form, structure and material properties in a striking, well-conceived piece of urban sculpture. The client and architects have seized an opportunity to redefine a typically unpleasant  and maligned utilitarian typology, driven by efficiency and density, and transformed it into a civic and cultural amenity. They have created not only a thing of beauty, but also provided an important urban gesture by continuing the public/private realm up through the garage.

Even though the garage is a private facility, there is a strong sense that the public is welcome to explore the dynamic levels and unfolding vistas of the neighbourhood. The ground plane of the pedestrian realm transitions easily into the parking garage, forming an almost continuous urban sequence from pedestrian street to parking garage. High ceilings, dramatic forms and open-air sides frame views of the surrounding neighbourhood. A high-end clothing store on the fifth floor offers a destination for the street-level pedestrians. An event space and glass restaurant at the top floor has become ‘the place’  for art, fashion, film and cultural events.

The project is successful, not only for its architectural bravery and sophistication, but also because it turns the typology of what a parking garage is expected to be, on its head. The much maligned parking garage becomes an opportunity to enhance the public realm.

Jonathan Friedman is an intern architect living in Toronto, Canada.  Born and raised in South Africa, and having lived and traveled around the world, he views the city an armature upon which daily life is played out.

photos by the author