vic.gedris.org Never mind the blogs, here's the website.

As many readers are no doubt aware, a taxi driver and cyclist were involved in an altercation a few days ago which escalated into a fight that ended with the cyclist’s leg being amputated. The driver was charged today with six offenses: criminal negligence causing bodily harm, dangerous operation causing bodily harm, fail to stop at scene of accident causing bodily harm, attempt to obstruct justice, aggravated assault, and assault with a weapon. He appears in court tomorrow.

This is a sad story, but one we should all try to keep in perspective. Nearly 25,000 people mount bikes each day in Toronto and most are able to get to their destinations without incident. But it seems once or twice a year there is an altercation of this nature that escalates to more than just yelling between a driver and cyclist. Most cyclists will never be in a situation where their life is being threatened by an irate driver.

While I’m sure many of Toronto’s most dedicated cyclists will see this incident as a symptom of our car-oriented culture, I feel it has less to do with that and more to do with someone who has much greater issues than a hate-on for cyclists. After reading numerous blog posts and comments on this incident over the last few days, I’m concerned that too much energy is being spent raging against this driver instead of using the incident to push for much better cycling infrastructure and awareness. I would assume most cyclists are more concerned with getting doored by cars on roads without bike lanes, since the chances of that happening are much greater than being attacked by a taxi driver. I’m not trying to minimize this awful scene — rather, I’m hoping to put this into a wider perspective on how to approach these isolated incidents.

I’m curious to hear how people think we should view this incident.

photo by Trevor Hunter

An upcoming Spacing Magazine theme will be “The Suburbs” — we’ve tried hard to include writing about Toronto’s  inner boroughs in our print magazine and on this blog, but think we need to dedicate an entire issue to these interesting places that will be where much of Toronto’s future unfolds. We’ll be putting that issue together in 2009, but until then we’re pleased to be partnering with the Scarborough Arts Council and Centennial College on a series of public discussions on our suburbs. These are “Live-to-Podcast” events, and we invite you to join us in our studio audience to participate in the taping of this lecture series that will later be available via online video and, yes, podcast.

Once seen as quiet bedroom communities far from the noise of the urban core, Toronto’s inner suburbs have become centres of activity - culturally vibrant, diverse and ever changing. The New Art of Suburbia, a two-evening panel discussion and forum, will address these changes and implications for arts and culture. Dealing with changes in the development and urban fabric of Toronto, speakers from a variety of backgrounds will tackle pressing questions:

–What is the nature and role of creative communities in the suburbs?
–How can we better understand and support arts and cultural activities in the suburbs?
–How can we create and support a vibrant arts scene in suburban communities?

Session 1: Not So Quiet: Welcome to the New Suburbs

WHEN: Monday, December 1, 2008, 7 p.m.
WHERE: Centennial College Residence and Conference Centre / Markham Room
School of Hospitality, Tourism & Culture, Centennial College
940 Progress Avenue, Scarborough
PANEL: Ian Chodikoff, Editor, Canadian Architect Magazine; Janet Fitzsimmons, West Hill Community Services;
 Nate Horowitz, Dean, School of Communications, Media & Design, Centennial College

Moderator: Tim Whalley, Scarborough Arts Council

Session 2: The Suburban Art Scene

WHEN: Tuesday, December 9, 2008, 7 p.m.
WHERE: Centennial College Residence and Conference Centre /Scarborough Room 
School of Hospitality, Tourism & Culture, Centennial College
940 Progress Avenue, Scarborough
PANEL: Catherine Hernandez, Dora Award-nominated author of Scarborough Stories 
Rafael; Gomez, Director, ThinkTankToronto; 
Erika DeFreitas, Visual Artist and Curator

Moderator: Shawn Micallef, Spacing Magazine

The New Art of Suburbia will respond to a burgeoning interest in the development of Toronto’s suburbs and provide a forum for discussing the challenges and opportunities in supporting and sustaining cultural and artistic activity in these communities. The New Art of Suburbia is a joint venture of Scarborough Arts Council, The Centre for Creative Communications, Centennial College and the School of Hospitality, Tourism & Culture, Centennial College. Spacing Magazine is the media partner for the series.

Photo by Danielle Scott.

• GO Transit offers to buy part of Union Station [ Toronto Star ]
• TTC marks ridership record as it improves bus-subway links [ National Post ]
• Councillor applauded for opening barn door [ National Post ]
• Councillor uses own budget to get trash hauled [ Toronto Sun ]
• Hill of bins ‘an eyesore’ [ Toronto Sun ]
• New building might sit atop old building [ National Post ]
• Squaring away controversy [ Toronto Star ]
• Doublin’ for Dublin [ Toronto Sun ]

The next issue of Spacing that you’ll have in your hands will likely be our fifth anniversary issue (see larger version of the cover).

Spacing launched December 3rd, 2003 at the now-defunct 360 Legion Hall near Queen West and Spadina. We weren’t even sure if there would be a second issue, so we feel quite fortunate to have reached 13 issues over five long years.

Next week we’ll reveal more details about the content of the issue set to hit newsstands in the first week of December. But we wanted to make you aware of our release/anniversary party before anyone else books you that night for a holiday party.

WHEN: Wed. December 10th, 7pm-1am
WHERE: The Great Hall, 1087 Queen Street West at Dovercourt
HOW MUCH: $5 for subscribers or $10 (includes mag)
RSVP: check out the Facebook event listing (send to your friends!)

We’ll have large panels displaying the finalists from our thinkTORONTO urban design ideas competition. Rannie Turingan will be manning the photo portrait station again. Rose Bianchini will be filming people’s answer to the question: name five things you like about Toronto. And,  saxaphonist and former Shuffle Demon Richard Underhill will perform solo (he performed at our launch party in 2003, bringing this party full circle). And lastly, the DJ trio Track Meet will provide us with danceable music throughout the night.

UPDATE: The TTC has just issued a press release heralding the surface route service improvements coming this Sunday. The TTC website now has the details here. The press release also says that the TTC has also just hit a new record for ridership from mid-November 2007 through mid-November 2008, of 465 million rides. This breaks the 1988 record of 463.5 million, yet we are not yet at the same service levels on many routes (particularly the streetcar network) that we had 20 years ago.

Previously posted October 26: 

The oft-delayed TTC Ridership Growth Strategy reaches a milestone on November 23, when all routes currently operating are subject to a new maximum headway (the time between scheduled buses on a route) of every 30 minutes. Effectively, this guarantees nearly every city resident bus service until after 1AM, 7 days a week, even on the least-patronized routes, like the 120 Calvington, where buses only run hourly during peak periods. In addition, there are some other minor service improvements to some of the busiest routes intended to help with overcrowding. Finally,the new Mount Dennis garage will open to handle the increased number of buses. Both these service improvements and the garage opening come a year late due to David Miller’s controversal mandated TTC funding cutbacks. (more…)

What: Bloor-Yorkville lights up with holiday magic
When: Saturday November 22, 4:30 - 5:30 pm
Where: Village of Yorkville Park (On Cumberland between Avenue and Bellair)

Though we have enjoyed some pleasantly warm weather through most of November, that familiar crunch under our feet means its winter again. That means pushing through sidewalk crowds who are both boxed-in by snowbanks and stopping to window shop at every story, getting the bottom of your pants soaked from trudging through snow, navigating the curbside slush-swamps when crossing streets, and… well pretty lights!

On Saturday, November 22, the lights are switched on in the Bloor-Yorkville neighbourhood with lighting displays “lit” simultaneously to join popular animated storefront windows and charming decorations – a part of the citywide Cavalcade of Lights celebration

The event is going to be hosted by Steven Sabados and Chris Hyndman (CBC TV’s Steven and Chris Show) and will feature Zero Gravity Circus performers.

For more information visit www.bloor-yorkville.com.

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What: Mobile City Book launch
When: Thursday, November 27, 6 pm
Where: George Brown School of Design (230 Richmond Street E)

The Mobile City is a project aimed at enhancing youth participation in community building in the twin cities of Milan and Toronto. It is meant to provide urban youth in those cities with a platform to share their dreams and insights about urban life. Through the use of digital photography posted to the photo galleries on this web site, as well as commentary on the discussion board, the project will act as a bridge between the two cities, the two nations and the two different cultures.

The winners from the Mobile City contest have been compiled into a book which will be released next week. Daniela Benelli, the Minister of Culture for the Province of Milan will be the event’s special guest.

For more infortmation visit www.mobilecityphotography.org.

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What: York Region Transportation Master Plan public consultations

Where: See description

When: Tonight, Nov 25, Nov 27 6 pm

 To allow residents to learn more about the Transportation Master Plan Update and provide input, The Regional Municipality of York will host a third and final round of Public Consultation Centres this month across York Region.

Draft transit and road network improvements as well as policies and programs for the next 30 years will be presented.

They take place tonight at Markham Council Chambers (101 Town Centre Blvd), Tuesday, November 25 at Newmarket Council Chambers (395 Mulock Drive), and Thursday November 27 at York Region South Service Centre (501 High Tech Road, 1st floor, room ABC).

For more information visit www.york.ca (pdf).

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The Events Guide is a regular feature on Spacing Toronto. To submit a listing, email eventsguide@spacing.ca. Please note that, due to demand, we cannot guarantee publication of your listing.

photo by blkmage

POLITICS
• Green bin helps, but not enough to hit city’s goal of 70% [ Toronto Star ]
• Green bin reaches for the sky [ Toronto Star ]
• Toronto’s green bin program moves into highrises [ CBC.ca ]
• Green bin recycling’s movin’ on up [ Toronto Sun]
• City betting tenants, landords willing to ‘do the right thing’ [ Toronto Star ]
• City curbs parking at Islington strip malls [ Toronto Star ]
• Showdown looms in Halton [ Toronto Star ]

ART
• Streetcar barn makes long journey to become artists’ colony [ CBC.ca ]
• Wych Will [ Eye Weekly ]
• Urban revival balances past and present [ Toronto Star ]
• Raising the barns [ NOW Magazine ]
• Dazzling Dundas [ NOW Magazine ]

TRANSIT
• City to clear snow from Martin Goodman Trail this winter…mostly [ National Post ]
• City gives cyclists a hand this winter [ Toronto Sun ]
• Cyclist who lost his leg unable to aid police [ Globe and Mail ]
• CUPE tries to extend its reach at the TTC [ Toronto Star ]
• Safe way across 401 just needs a sign [ Toronto Star ]

MISCELLANEOUS
• Naughty on St. Nick’s [ NOW Magazine ]

Councillor Joe Mihevc’s unfortunate and undeserved ousting as chair of the Community Development and Recreation Committee and Councillor Michael Thompson’s minor temper tantrum over the loss of his post on the TTC board were the only stories told in the media earlier this week after the mid-term committee reassignments were unveiled [PDF] at last Friday’s Striking Committee meeting. But when the dust settles, neither of those decisions will have more impact than what is set to happen to the Parks and Environment and Public Works and Infrastructure committees.

With the exception of Executive Committee, standing committees of City Council are mostly politically balanced. Usually there are three votes the Mayor can count on to support his direction and three that range from sometimes supportive to almost always opposed to anything the Mayor proposes. Given the voting habits of the current crop of councillors (and the requirement that every councillor be appointed to at least one standing committee) the Mayor doesn’t have the numbers to get a majority on every committee. To ensure the remaining part of his agenda proceeds as planned, the Mayor has to forecast which committees will be most important to him over the next two years, and which will have less important work to do on his agenda.

Committees like Economic Development and Government Management are traditionally ones where the Mayor has few problems getting consensus from across the political spectrum so there’s generally less concern about the political affiliation of those councillors. In contrast, it seems over the first two years of his mandate the Mayor felt he needed to focus his political capital on his environmental agenda, demonstrated by stacking the Parks and Environment Committee to ensure a clear 4-2 majority on key votes. That committee delivered the Mayor’s climate change plan to City Council and it passed Council unanimously. A job well done.But following its work on the climate change plan, the Parks and Environment Committee has been very quiet, with at least one regularly scheduled meeting cancelled because there was nothing on the agenda. Now, key environmental initiatives like packaging reform laws and bicycle lane approvals are coming through the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee since that committee is responsible for waste diversion and roads. However, the Mayor has had problems progressing on both the cycling and packaging fronts because of 3-3 splits on key Public Works and Infrastructure Committee votes (a vote loses on a tie).

With that surely in mind, the Mayor shuffled committee assignments (approved by Striking Committee last Friday and going to City Council for approval at the end of November beginning of December) to make Public Works and Infrastructure weighted 4-2 in his favour by dumping Councillor John Parker and Councillor Mark Grimes (responsible for holding up bike lanes and striking the deal with Tim Horton’s that will, at the least, delay part of the new packaging laws), and replacing them with his ally Councillor Gord Perks and opposition rep Councillor Cesar Palacio. The corresponding trade-off was replacing Councillor Perks at Parks and Environment with potential mayoral candidate Councillor Karen Stintz, making that committee an even three-on-three.

What this means for the remaining 24 months left in this term of council is that Public Works and Infrastructure will be doing more heavy lifting that the other non-executive standing committees and Parks and Environment will likely be inconsequential, leaving the politically ambitious Councillor Stintz and vociferous Councillor Michael Walker to sit in boredom.

Photograph by Kevin Steele

Spacing contributor Laura Boudreau is blogging the Creative Places + Spaces Regional Forum at the Artscape Wychwood Barns. Follow her posts on Tuesday and Wednesday to learn more about innovative city-building at the Barns and beyond. 

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The Forum is over, but the celebration continues: the Barns officially open to the public tomorrow, November 20th.

Happy exploring!

Photo: Wychwood Streetcar Barns #1, Hugh Martin

Spacing contributor Laura Boudreau is blogging the Creative Places + Spaces Regional Forum at the Artscape Wychwood Barns. Follow her posts on Tuesday and Wednesday to learn more about innovative city-building at the Barns and beyond. 

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It’s the Community Hubs breakout session, and we’re exploring the kinds of new and innovative partnerships that are being developed to advance the “neighbourhood hub” concept from an idea to reality.

Ruth Crammond, the United Way’s Community Hub Coordinator, gave us some insight into a hub project that’s in the works for east Scarborough:

As part of its strategy to strengthen social services across Toronto, United Way has announced a major initiative of a 15,000 square-foot community hub that will provide programs and services to residents in the neighbourhood of Eglinton East/Kennedy Park in east Scarborough. The facility will house a number of social programs and services, including a satellite Community Health Centre…

 The hub, which will be operated by West Hill Community Services (a United Way member agency), is an exciting initiative, but still in the very early stages of development:

“Too often the cultural sector is not at the table during the earliest stages of culture-led regeneration,” said our facilitator Patrick Tobin, Director of Policy Programs, Ontario Region, Canadian Heritage. That’s something the United Way approach is definitely taking into account, trying to leverage the local relationships and partnerships that are already at work in its targeted 13 priority neighbourhoods, all in the hopes of helping rich cultural infrastructure explode at the community level.

The take-home message of the session is more question than answer: What would a community hub look like in your neighbourhood?

Spacing contributor Laura Boudreau is blogging the Creative Places + Spaces Regional Forum at the Artscape Wychwood Barns. Follow her posts on Tuesday and Wednesday to learn more about innovative city-building at the Barns and beyond. 

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Name: Jack Zhou

Occupation: Painter

Moved to the Barns: 1 week ago

Favourite feature of his new live/work space: great light, big windows, and high ceilings

——
Learn more about Artscape’s tenants.

Spacing contributor Laura Boudreau is blogging the Creative Places + Spaces Regional Forum at the Artscape Wychwood Barns. Follow her posts on Tuesday and Wednesday to learn more about innovative city-building at the Barns and beyond.

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I just heard Carol Coletta, president and CEO of CEOs for Cities, speak about collaboration and creativity, and I’m keen to give her radio show a listen:

Smart City Radio
A weekly, hour-long public radio talk show that takes an in-depth look at urban life and the people, places, ideas and trends shaping cities.

Spacing contributor Laura Boudreau is blogging the Creative Places + Spaces Regional Forum at the Artscape Wychwood Barns. Follow her posts on Tuesday and Wednesday to learn more about innovative city-building at the Barns and beyond.  

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Creative convergence — what is it, why is it important, and what can creative space developers from different sectors learn from one another? Big questions for an 8am morning and a negative-8-degree commute, which might explain the rather desperate clutch of delegates at the coffee stations this morning on day two of CP+S at the Artscape Wychwood Barns.

Aggregation, collaboration, cooperation, innovation — these watchwords serve as a good unofficial motto for the Barns. Tim Jones, President and CEO of Artscape, says, “Here we have a marriage of art and environment and urban agriculture, and it came out of the aspirations and collaborations of this local community, and that’s why it’s authentic and successful.” Without the creative convergence of imagination and willpower from many different stakeholders, the transformation of the Barns simply wouldn’t have happened.

From a policy and administrative standpoint, however, convergence can be hard to handle. “Because we don’t fit into the box, we’re so much easier to ignore,” says Tonya Surman, the Executive Director of the Centre for Social Innovation  (Spacing Media’s HQ). “Everybody wants convergence, or says they want it, but the funding mechanisms we have in place don’t know how to recognize it when they see it.”

How can out-of-the-box thinking be realized when it’s boxed in by government policy, “silo-thinking,” and inadequate or overly complicated funding structures? That’s the focus of our break-out sessions today, and it’ll be exciting to see what kind of answers we generate.

Spacing’s Shawn Micallef is the Blogger-in-Residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Art Matters blog in anticipation of the grand re-opening of the new AGO. He will be cross-posting some of the entries here on Spacing Toronto. To comment on this post, click here and head over to Art Matters.

The AGO is not just for looking at. One of the things I like best about the new gallery is the way it makes Toronto — the city — as much a part of the gallery experience as the art inside. The Gehry addition (or “intervention” as I’ve been hearing it called) has opened new views to the north and south, and we’re getting to see the city in a way never seen before. To the north, the timber beams of the Galleria Italia frame the quintessential old Toronto homes along Dundas as if they are works of art themselves (perhaps they are). Apart from the occasional view stolen from somebody’s lucky second or third floor apartment, we usually don’t get to see a Toronto street from this angle.

Try this the next time you go to the AGO — walk along the south side of Dundas like you normally might do, looking at those houses along the north side. Then go into the gallery and up to the second floor and do the same thing. It’s remarkable to walk (nearly) an entire dense city block along the second floor of another building. (more…)

• City scores a win in tax war [ Toronto Star ]
• Apartments, condos to get green bins [ Globe and Mail ]
• City plans to clear snow off major cycling routes [ Globe and Mail ]
• Scramble relay sparks canine confusion [ Toronto Star ]
• Truce declared for a day in city’s club zone [ Toronto Star ]
• Irate retailers protest loss of parking spaces [ Toronto Star ]
• Don Jail to lose bars on windows in makeover [ National Post ]
• $16.60 minimum wage to live in T.O.: Report [ Toronto Sun ]

Spacing contributor Laura Boudreau is blogging the Creative Places + Spaces Regional Forum at the Artscape Wychwood Barns. Follow her posts on Tuesday and Wednesday to learn more about innovative city-building at the Barns and beyond. 

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One of the most exciting community-building initiatives at the Barns is the Green Barn Campaign, a satellite project of The Stop Community Food Centre, a not-for-profit organization that “strives to increase access to healthy food in a manner that maintains dignity, builds community and challenges inequality” (editor’s note: you can read about The Stop is Spacing’s summer-fall 2008 issue still on newsstands). The Green Barn will feature a 3,000 square foot year-round greenhouse, a pizza-making oven, a teaching-grade cooking facility, a compost demonstration area, and a community dining area. There are only a few green shoots sprouting from the garden trays at this point, but I can already imagine families learning about environmental food production, then making their own pizza dinners with toppings they harvest from the community garden.

The Stop’s Executive Director Nick Saul says that education, particularly of children, will be a focus of the Green Barn. “The more cooking shows we have on TV, the less we seem to know about how food gets from field to table,” Saul says. “We have a societal confusion about food — 1 in 3 kids are obese now. At The Stop, we use food to build community, skills, pleasure, hope, and knowledge.”

To hear more from Nick Saul and see the bones of the Green Barn, check out the video link below. Better yet, come yourself on November 22 from 9am-12pm for the very first Green Barn Farmers’ Market. (Don’t worry — you don’t need to bring your hard hat. It’ll be a while before the Green Barn’s own tomatoes are ripe, but the bulldozers are gone and the walls are up!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE9PE_u4698

Spacing contributor Laura Boudreau is blogging the Creative Places + Spaces Regional Forum at the Artscape Wychwood Barns. Follow her posts on Tuesday and Wednesday to learn more about innovative city-building at the Barns and beyond.

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When we think of “Green” architecture, we usually think of new technologies, new materials — in short, new buildings. But with the Barns, architect Joe Lobko has shown that old can be green. “There is a natural complement between heritage and sustainability,” he said during his panel discussion, From Concept to Development. “A lot of our building stock already exists, and that’s what we should be thinking about when we think about sustainability issues.”

The Artscape Wychwood Barns is the first heritage building to achieve LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Canada certification at the Gold level. The Barns showcase many green design features, including:

• a cistern beneath Barn 2 to collect water for irrigation and toilets
• low-flow toilet fixtures, and waterless urinals (“Peeing is believing,” says the manufacturer)
• natural ventilation and daylighting through operable skylights in suites

To hear more from Joe Lobko about the Barns, check out the following video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOUDqrPWcpE

photo by Steven Hoang

Spacing contributor Laura Boudreau is blogging the Creative Places + Spaces Regional Forum at the Artscape Wychwood Barns. Follow her posts on Tuesday and Wednesday to learn more about innovative city-building at the Barns and beyond.  

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Maryann Kerr, Executive Director, Artscape Foundation, on the up close and personal fundraising ask: “You can’t milk a cow by mail.”

It took $21.2 million to build the Artscape Wychwood Barns, and to give you an idea of what that financial commitment looked like at “dirt level,” check out the conceptual views of the four Barns and then compare them (by clicking on the links below each picture) to Edward Burtynsky’s 360-degree images of the Barns as they were in 2006.

The Studio Barn

The Covered Street Barn

The Community Barn

The Green Barn

Spacing contributor Laura Boudreau is blogging the Creative Places + Spaces Regional Forum at the Artscape Wychwood Barns. Follow her posts on Tuesday and Wednesday to learn more about innovative city-building at the Barns and beyond.  

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From Richard Florida’s Who’s Your City?:

Jane Jacobs once told me that communities everywhere are filled with creative vigor, but that some of them are run by squelchers. Squelchers are control freaks who think they know what’s best for the city or region, even as their leadership (or lack thereof) causes a hemorrhage of bright, talented, and creative people. Squelchers, she said, are the kind of leaders that use the word “no” a lot. They constantly put roadblocks in the way of community energy and initiatives. I’ve seen firsthand how these squelchers drain the life and energy from their communities. They respond to new ideas with phrases like “That’s not how we do things here”; “That will never fly”; or “Why don’t you move someplace you’ll be happy?”

The first panel at the Creative Places + Spaces Regional Forum took on the topic of Community and Civic Engagement in relation to the creation of the Artscape Wychwood Barns — who makes a community, and how does a community make a big decision? Local resident and Artscape Board Member Roscoe Handford told of knocking on doors, bringing flyers to barber shops, organizing a community bake oven, and, of course, slugging it out (very nearly literally!) in public consultation meetings in order to make the Barns an inclusive, community-based reality. But as one conference participant suggested in the Q&A period of this panel, the squelchers are often the most visible people during the consultation period of any project, and other constituents may not have the time, ability, or know-how to make their voices heard in a policy-making shouting match.

The Artscape Wychwood Barns has proven that grass roots initiatives do work — you can win hearts and minds at the Laundromat — but the conversion process is slow, time-consuming, and at times divisive: “100% Park People” campaigned vigorously to raze the Barns and turn the site into a Carolinian forest, for example, and there are still committed Park-ers out there.

So, what’s the best way to convince nay-sayers, address squelchers, or hear from marginalized members of a particular community when making creative places and spaces? What kind of outreach makes its way from your mailbox, inbox, or barber shop and into your consciousness?

photo by Steven Hoang

Spacing contributor Laura Boudreau is blogging the Creative Places + Spaces Regional Forum at the Artscape Wychwood Barns. Follow her posts on Tuesday and Wednesday to learn more about innovative city-building at the Barns and beyond. 

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It’s not everyday that downtown Toronto sees a good old-fashioned barn raising, but it’s happening today in the Christie and St. Clair neighbourhood at the Artscape Wychwood Barns.
For years, the historic barns sat ignored and disused at 76 Wychwood Avenue. To many people in Toronto, the 4.3 acre lot was a symbol of what was wrong with Toronto city-building — the site was a city asset without a city-designated use, the industrial heritage building was in a state of abject disrepair, and the local community was alienated from its own neighbourhood space. Community members didn’t want to see the lot morph into yet another raft of sky-high condo buildings, but it wasn’t clear what the options were for redevelopment, or what kind of say the community could hope to have in the process. But very dedicated community members (hundreds of whom came out to public meetings in church basements — for years) found a champion in City Councillor Joe Mihevc, and through a partnership with Artscape, the culture-led regeneration of the Wychwood Barns began.

Today, the Artscape Wychwood Barns is a 60,000 square foot community centre that includes a host of artists’ studios, affordable housing units, and a temperate green house for urban agriculture production. It is a symbol of heritage preservation and best practices in green tech. And it’s gorgeous — as I walked around the beautiful sunlit Covered Street Barn this morning, peering into office and studio spaces, admiring the exposed brick and steel-girded skylight rooftop, I couldn’t believe that the Barns have gone from being raccoon-infested buildings on polluted land to a centre for learning, growth, change, and conflict (and more on those conflicts later today…). “It was a tangled mess of concrete and streetcar tracks, snowdrifts inside building and plants growing through the walls,” says Tim Jones, President and CEO of Artscape. “We turned intractable challenges into unstoppable ideas.”

The ideas continue to flow today, as the Barns play host to the two-day Creative Places + Spaces Regional Forum. People from across the city — and the country — are coming together to hear more about the Barns as a case study for creative spacemaking and to share the trials and tribulations creative spacemakers face. “[The Barns are] a lesson in what is possible,” says Roscoe Handford, a local resident and Artscape Board Member. “And you can apply those lessons to so many other projects out there.”