[URBAN NOTE] "Public Works: Reconsidering the Town Square"

[rfmcdonald]

Torontoist's Peter Goffin makes the case that Toronto has much to learn from Washington D.C. in the use of parks and public space, specifically in having a lot of public space that isn't necessarily accessible.

In 2012, architecture, planning, and design firm Gensler launched “The Town Square Initiative,” a challenge to its designers to “unearth and re-imagine” public space in major cities around the world. Hypothetical designs were thought up for Shanghai, Tokyo, New York, Chicago, and many more. But perhaps the one most applicable to Toronto was devised for Washington, D.C.

In tourism pamphlets and establishing shots for House of Cards, it’s clear Washington has a lot of great public space. The iconic National Mall alone is over three kilometres of public square. Why, they could probably fit, like, a million people there. The city’s grid, designed in the 1790s, is famous for its wagon-wheel configuration. Roads angle out like spokes from circular centres, creating a bevy of small, round, or triangular plots of land, many of which have been put to use as public space.

But, as D.C. has developed from a modest government town into the heart of a thriving greater metropolitan area that is a home to 5.8 million people, the centralized spaces that have served the city for centuries have become less accessible to a large number of residents. The Washington Post declared the National Mall too big to serve as a proper community space. One assumes it might be overly touristy, too. How much community-building can take place in a spot where half the people are just trying to find the Air and Space Museum? And, as for the vaunted 18th-century city grid, it “disintegrates along the city’s southern borders, where it collides with the Anacostia and Potomac rivers,” Gensler’s Carolyn Sponza writes. That means none of the neat colonial-planned public space for Washingtonians outside the city’s core.

Toronto has had a similarly difficult relationship with major public space. Ninety years ago, University Avenue was slated to be our landmark, our National Mall. That dream died with the start of the Depression.