Living Streets

Living Streets

— making room for life in the city

w/ SvN, 2024

Location | Toronto, ON

Typology | Public Space Activation

Size | 54 sm (580 sf)

Involvement

“Living Streets” is a series of installations, lectures, and events focused on building awareness around the importance of streets in shaping our collective urban experience.

Streets Toolkit

Streets are places for people!

Streets have the power to define the way we live together. As our largest public space by area, they can be dynamic places where community life unfolds, relationships are built, and local culture is expressed. But to achieve these goals, we need to move beyond the one-dimensional “movement only” thinking that currently dominates the design of our streets, towards a multi-dimensional and place-based set of strategies. To illustrate this potential, SvN has invited Toronto citizens and place-makers to explore five thematic installations to help them imagine the many opportunities for our city’s streets:

• Our streets are social

• Our streets bring us together

• Our streets build vibrant communities

• Our streets are playful

• Our streets are filled with life

Our streets are social!

Streets are where we meet our neighbours. When paired together with outdoor seating, they create opportunities for connection and social exchange among diverse age ranges and cultural groups. This inclusiveness can promote community cohesion and good mental health. Streets in dense urban areas can also serve as extensions of our living spaces, especially where private outdoor space is limited. They can improve our quality of life by providing opportunities for rest, conversation, and people-watching.

Our streets build vibrant communities!

As a shared space, streets can enhance our connection to the people that live around us. By incorporating diverse elements such as activities, events, and economic activity, they can create dynamic public spaces that encourage regular use by all community members. This can lead to chance encounters or shared experiences that form stronger bonds between people, boost local economy, and celebrate local culture.

Did you know:

• Toronto has approximately 5600 km of streets. If you lined these up end-to-end, they would stretch from City Hall all the way to Whitehorse in the Yukon Territory.

• If we took all of the street space in Toronto and divided it equally between all citizens, each person would have 54m2.

What would you do with your 54m2 to improve your community?

Our streets bring us together!

Streets connect us as a society, allowing us to work with each other toward a civic “common good”. For instance, well-designed streets can provide adaptability and resilience, addressing challenges such as social isolation, public health, economic development, and climate change by encouraging collective support and action in times of crisis. Streets are also one of the few truly public spaces in cities, accessible to all regardless of socioeconomic status. If designed as interconnected places, they become social “infrastructure”, able to provide equal opportunities for participation in public life.

Engagement Booklet

Our streets are playful!

Streets are places to enjoy. Before parks and playgrounds, most urban outdoor activities occurred in streets. When designed with “play” in mind, streets have the flexibility to encourage walking, cycling, games, exercise and many other physical activities. This in turn provides opportunities for intergenerational engagement, allowing streets to significantly contribute to physical and mental health while fostering community cohesion. By making walking and cycling more attractive options, streets can also support sustainable urban living, reducing the impacts of car dependency and promoting health for both people and the Earth.

Our streets are filled with life!

Nature is incredibly important for our cities. Biodiverse street networks make city life healthier and more sustainable for people, plants, insects, and birds alike. Adding native pollinators and trees along our streets can meaningfully expand the habitat of our city’ gardens, parks and ravines, creating a biodiverse urban ecosystem throughout the city. Ecological street networks can also enhance our mental health, encourage outdoor activity, and provide “ecosystem services” that make our urban environment more resilient and sustainable, improving life for all our city’s residents.

Park(ing) Day 2024

Park(ing) Day is a global event that takes place annually on the third weekend of September. Around the world, people temporarily repurpose parking spaces to create pop-up parks and other public spaces for art, play, and activism. The event draws attention to the need for improving access and quantity of public open spaces in densely populated urban areas as well as the need for these spaces to provide social and environmental engagement. The goal of Park(ing) Day is to celebrate the use of urban public space for people and challenge the dominance of the automobile in cities.

In September 2024, SvN partnered with Dubbeldam Architecture + Design, Arup Canada, DTAH, and MASSIVart on a grant program, funding activations across Toronto.

The Evergreen Conference 2024: Placemaking

The 2024 Evergreen Conference was a two-day respite to experience placemaking in action - an opportunity to learn and connect with people across sectors committed to building better public spaces for people and planet. At the conference, we re-installed our Park(ing) Day activation in the Evergreen Parking Lot, and paired it with an interactive lecture.

For the Love of Toronto, 2025