Community Designing Community:
A public workshop by St Clair by Design
Saturday, January 22nd
1:30 - 4:00 pm.
Wychwood Library
1431 Bathurst (1 block south of St. Clair)
Over the next year and a half, as the new streetcar right-of-way
is built,
the city will be making decisions about how every aspect of the
street will
look and feel, including shelters, platforms, benches, landscaping
and
public art. St. Clair by Design will be getting together regularly
to talk
about our priorities for the design of the street
and
to feed ideas into the official design process.
Urban design is not just about making things look pretty. How
we design our
public spaces affects how we use them!
* Where do we put benches so people actually sit in them?
* How do we design a sidewalk where people will stop to chat?
* How do we create public art people feel reflects our communities?
At this first workshop we'll take a look at a short film called
"The Social
Life of Small Urban Spaces". In New York in the 1970's, the urban
planner
William Whyte and his assistants set out to find out why some
public squares
were full of people and others were empty. (With some surprising
and
not-so-surprising results.) To get a sense of the kind of approach
presented
in the film, check out:
Project for Public Spaces: http://www.pps.org
After the film, Nik Luka, an urban planner living in Hillcrest,
will walk us
through some basic design principles, illustrated with slides
of the good
the bad and the ugly from around Toronto. We'll then begin to
talk about
how we can apply these principles to St. Clair.
..
St. Clair Right-of-way Initiative for Public Transit (SCRIPT)
E-mail: info@script2004.ca
Phone: 416-535-1617 (9AM-9PM)
Web: http://www.script2004.ca
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