Imagine

Imagine that it’s your job to design a brand-new neighbourhood. Everything will be demolished, and you get to decide what will take its place. Excited by the challenge, you spread out a gigantic sheet of blank paper and start drawing where the streets will go. Then you arrange your buildings, highrises along main arteries and townhouses on side streets. Yes, you’ll need a park and some recreation facilities. Also, commercial spaces, such as a pharmacy and grocery store – and of course, a coffee shop or two or three. Such fun!

But you’re getting carried away. You’ve built condo buildings before, and you know what condo dwellers usually want. Your current assignment, though, is different. You’re being asked to construct a mixed-income neighbourhood! What’s more, for decades, the area has been entirely social housing – and these low-income residents have a legal right to return. As you ponder their needs, you come to a crucial realization: You cannot design this neighbourhood by yourself. You must find out what they imagine.

Through ongoing conversations, you discover that despite, or more likely, because of their hardships, these residents have a rich history of community – support groups, ethnic groups, and advocacy groups. Although they have long crusaded for revitalization, you also realize that they worry about the middle-class newcomers who will soon swarm their neighbourhood. Having been disrespected so often, how can they trust these newcomers? Will they ever regain their old sense of community? Will they ever feel at home?

Then it dawns on you – your fundamental task is to design for community. This means that you must create spaces that will not only bring mixed-income neighbours together but also honour the area’s original residents and acknowledge their history. So you spread out another gigantic sheet of blank paper – and start over.

To build for community, you create a focal point – a large park in the centre of the neighbourhood, where, on warm summer evenings, all residents can gather. You picture young moms chatting as their children play, neighbours gathering around picnic tables, and seniors relaxing on benches. Amidst lush grass and flourishing trees, you add a dog park, a community garden, even a bake oven. As your imagination soars, you envision an impressive paved space with steps leading up into the park – an ideal place for speeches and music, rallies and festivities.

Designing for community necessitates, you soon realize, a pedestrian-friendly approach. Jeff Speck in Walkable City (Speck, 2013) spells out the requirements: good public transit; cars parked underground; a grid layout with short blocks so that folks take various routes as they run their errands; mixed-uses on major streets, providing destinations such as banks and health clinics, restaurants and hair salons; traffic slowed by stoplights and bike lanes; wide sidewalks on main arteries, allowing for baby carriages and strollers, walkers and mobility scooters; attractive streetscapes with trees, planter boxes, benches, and plenty of enticing shops.

Then, with your streets in place, you locate your buildings. To prevent further ghettoization, your social housing and condo buildings must alternate along each road. And despite differing budgets, you must make their exteriors as similar as possible. You also try for a range of dwellings: condominiums and rental buildings, social housing and supportive housing, seniors’ buildings and apartments for larger families. 

Still pondering how to build for community, you start listing the activities that bring people together – leading to a rush of creative ideas. You draw an arts hub for music, visual art, drama, and dance, along with a sizeable multi-use theatre. You plan for sports facilities such as a state-of-the-art indoor pool, a sports field, an ice rink, and a community centre with a gym, a running track and even a climbing wall, plus lots of meeting rooms of all sizes. After conversations with some of the neighbourhood’s enthusiastic gardeners, you add community plots both in the park and on building podiums and balconies. And you ensure that all buildings, even social housing buildings, have various amenity rooms – party rooms, meeting rooms, wifi rooms, gyms, etc., with some on the ground floor for easy public access.

Finally, your creativity tackles how to honour the original residents and their history. You’ve come to understand that your job is revitalizing, not obliterating, the past. So, no matter how strongly your marketing team urges you to drop the stigmatized neighbourhood name, you refuse – you know you must keep it. You also realize that you must create space for the much-needed social service agencies that have served this neighbourhood for decades. But only as you get to know individual residents does your creativity truly sparkle. You name new streets after local heroes. You preserve old landmarks by redesigning them to fit new settings, such as the old smokestack from the district heating plant or the peace garden remembering sons lost to violence. You even reimagine an old neighbourhood tree as a stunning live-edge table for a condo wifi room. Then you become excited about public art: a mural designed by neighbours; graffiti-art portraits of well-known residents featured at the entrance to the big park, local artists showcased in building lobbies, along with a community sewing group’s beautifully crafted quilts.

Yes, a neighbourhood designed for community is easy to imagine – because this is the Regent Park neighbourhood we now have. Of course, it’s not perfect. But through countless creative features, we can come together as a brand-new mixed-income neighbourhood while still honouring the old Regent Park. Now it’s our turn. It’s up to us to use our designed-for-community spaces to reach out and befriend our neighbours.