“This infrastructure—the Gardiner—is pretty imposing,” said Alan Webb, an architect working with one of the teams proposing a design for the Waterfront ReConnect competition. “It’s a clear example of how prioritizing automobiles kind of shaped urban form.”
“In general, we have inherited this major piece of infrastructure,” said urban designer Ken Greenberg of the expressway. He says that when it was first built, “it was all about just moving cars,” but that we’ve since seen a shift in Toronto towards gradually prioritizing other modes of movement through the city, including walking and cycling.
Webb hopes that his team’s design will help make the underpass safer and less intimidating for pedestrians.
His team is guiding their work with questions such as, “How can these spaces be memorable, inviting? How can this be a more welcoming experience that’s not something you’re dreading?”
His and other teams’ designs submitted for the competition will be available to the public from early next year, and the winning design for the York and Simcoe Street intersections will be implemented shortly after.
For artist and curator Luis Jacob however, breaking down the barriers between physical spaces isn’t the only role that public art can play. He is particularly interested in seeing how our ideas of whom public art is directed towards—and in which spaces they are held—can change through these new initiatives.
He says that we tend to assume that “if we put art in public space, it’s therefore public art.”
“I don’t think it’s that way. I don’t think we can take for granted what a ‘public’ is, and I don’t think we can take for granted that there’s such a thing as public space.”
“Sometimes we think that, well, public space is whatever’s not private space,” Jacob continued. “Businesses and homes are private space, so by default everything that’s not that must be public space.
“I don’t think that’s a very good definition of public space; it defines it in terms of what it isn’t rather than in terms of what it is. And I think it naively assumes that anything that’s not private is a realm in which people can enact their publicness together.”
“When the public realm, or the outdoor realm, is designed precisely to prevent people from congregating, I think it acts as an anti-public space.”
Jacob used Life of a Craphead, the collaboration of artists Amy Lam and Jon McCurley, and their work as an example of how we can reimagine where public art can be presented and to whom.
In 2017, Lam and McCurley created a replica of the sculpture of King Edward VII on a horse that currently rests in the centre of Queen’s Park and
floated it down the Don River over four weeks from October to November in 2017.