Op-ed: Building Place Through Creativity and Play

Toronto is one of the fastest-growing cities with the most active construction market in North America. However, amid this remarkable growth, buildings and vast expanses of land sit empty, awaiting transformation.

Developers’ sights are invariably on the long-term. They are constantly thinking: What will the future of urban living look like? How can they meaningfully support the needs of the community?

Yet with so many inactive parcels scattered throughout the GTA, are there ways to activate these sites in the meantime for the betterment of all?

Around the world, there are fantastic examples of developers and stakeholders who found creative uses for land prior to vertical development. This concept — known as meanwhile use — can help test the public’s appetite for different activities in the long-term while embedding community and culture into a site’s DNA.

London’s renowned BOXPARK, for example, is a dining and shopping destination that was born out of humble shipping containers. The project is a striking example of a meanwhile use approach that is celebrated worldwide for its range of arts and cultural programming. In Berlin, the Tempelhofer Feld (Tempelhof Field) is a decommissioned airport that is now a de facto public park featuring a multi-purpose trail, dog walking field, and picnic areas. In the United States, The Wharf in Washington D.C. and Cambridge Crossing in Boston have held interim activations as part of their pre-development plans.

Here in Toronto, meanwhile uses are still quite nascent, with spaces like RendezViews and STACKT Market and organizations like Plaza POPs emerging over recent years. Yet properties all over the city can become blank canvases to inspire cultural, playful and recreational programming year-round.

We’ve started doing this at the Downsview Airport, where Northcrest is leading the transformation of 370 acres, which offers a 2.1-km runway, airfields, and empty airport hangars, all rife for community activations and creative placemaking.

Over the next 30 years, these largely undeveloped lands will be transformed into a series of vibrant neighbourhoods, welcoming tens of thousands of residents. The project will introduce housing — market rate and affordable — as well as thousands of jobs, and much needed social infrastructure and programming to the community. But today, it can become a beloved gathering place for the local community and city-at-large, using imagination, creativity and play to define its future persona and reconnect it to the social fabric of Toronto.

It’s unique for a development company to hire someone with an arts and culture background as a core part of its initial strategy, but this early integration of placemaking as a core tenet allows us to holistically and genuinely focus on enriching the community and overall quality of life — today. Over the past 18 months, we’ve launched unique programming at the site. People’s eyes light up when they see colour and creativity here, some of which they helped make.

We have opened the runway to thousands of people for a day of play, where bikes, roller skates, scooters, pickleball and food trucks dominated a mammoth, unobstructed car-free zone. We’ve worked with local artists who reflect the wonderful diversity of our city to create murals and installations, often with elements that are sourced from the public-at-large. We’ve commissioned an art installation that took place in the sky using drones, and recently debuted a mini-golf course where each hole was designed by a different local artist.

There’s clearly an appetite for these initiatives. More than 15,000 people from all ages and backgrounds have attended our free events. It’s the most authentic form of community consultation. And it’s all happening in real time, as we test and trial the types of activations that are reflective of what our future can become and invite the public to be a part of transforming an airport into a community.

When Bombardier departs the site in 2024, we will be able to offer an even wider range of activities, ensuring a spectrum of opportunities for organizations big and small, a healthy balance of commercial and community initiatives, and many ways the public-at-large can inform both the short and long-term plans.

Simply put, we are embarking on an experiment to create the soul of the place before the place itself, ensuring generations of future Torontonians will get to live, work and play in a place that inherently celebrates creativity and togetherness.

My most sincere hope is that all this early work will result in something truly authentic when the development is complete. It will already be a place that is beloved by Torontonians and, from day one, it will be filled with public art, gathering traditions, placekeeping methodologies, and signature events that we built with the surrounding communities and city-at-large over many years. Practically speaking, a 10-year-old who comes today to play mini-golf at “Tee Up Downsview” may be living or working at Downsview, 10, 20 or 30 years later. Today’s memory-making will expedite tomorrow’s sense of belonging.

The work of creative placemaking and meanwhile use is not new. But this is perhaps the first time that it is being executed at such a large scale and for such a lengthy period. And it’s happening in the very heart of our own city, here in Toronto. Imagine the positive changes that could occur if even more developers begin taking this approach.

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