AN ORPHAN SPACE PRIMER The City of Toronto’s Clean and Beautiful City initiative was adopted by City Council in 2004 with the goal of raising the bar on urban design and architecture in the City of Toronto. The initiative identified “orphan spaces” across the city as sore spots in need of attention. An orphan space can be characterised as an urban space – typically a street – that is underperforming significantly in its potential. What started off as a specific response to one site became a set of protocols for interventions in orphan spaces across Toronto. 1. Eye Level Designing in orphan spaces demands detective work, or a way of looking at the city from eye level in search of sites. 2. Design ≠ Brand An orphan space is not a tabula rasa. Orphan spaces seek to amplify an identity that is latent, rather than the imposition of a transplanted or branded identity. 3. Design = Strategy Design for orphan spaces is more a matter of clarifying design strategy, rather than imposing an image or totalizing system. Community and identity do not necessarily beg the image of traditional main-street. 4. Incremental Orphan spaces could benefit from an anti-masterplan, where ideas for demarking public space allow for the incremental accretion of urban life. In orphan spaces, a toolkit of devices is more likely to produce a coherent site-specific urban space over time. 5. Design = Phasing Phasing is an essential design tool to initiate the transitional development of an orphan space. The pause between phases is a design act that requires considered choreography.
6. Typology In Orphan Spaces, traditional urban typologies don’t compute. Orphan spaces are an opportunity for developing new typologies of public space and the street. 7. Ambiguity Public space typically lacks an overlap of informal and formal use, programmed and unprogrammed events. Ambiguity is an asset. Public space should adapt to temporal shifts rather than impose a rigid figure. 8. Infrastructural Landscape Orphan spaces suggest a vision of urban design in which infrastructure is the hero, and landscape its accomplice. 9. Soft Catalyst Landscape can be more than urban parsley. It can be the catalyst for program. 10. Saturation Programming an orphan space should reject the tendency to arrange filler urban elements, such as a bench, a tree, a lightpost, like a buffet. Instead, orphan spaces could saturate a space with a single element – grass mounds, or picnic surfaces, or game graphics – in order to script new uses for these spaces. 11. Hybrid Successful public space frequently requires a hybrid or symbiotic relationship between public and private entities, in which ownership and use remain somewhat ambiguous to the visitor. 12. Negotiation Adopting an orphan space necessitates parenting through negotiation.
53
street, street smarts, street life: onsite 19
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator