Up Front
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The barriers to community engagement are many: from a lack of political will to simple indifference. Yet the patio of Market 707, an outdoor marketplace in Toronto’s west end, is an example of a built project that may signal a new era for community engagement around public space.
PUBLIC SPACE
new frontiers in funding
Marisa Bernstein and Nicolas Koff, two recent graduates of the landscape architecture program at the University of Pennsylvania, sat down with me on the patio of this innovative market, surrounded
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by shipping containers repurposed as food vendors’ stalls. After graduation, their experiences with community-based projects were uninspiring but perhaps typical. Koff and Bernstein found that so many community groups could not connect with a design professional or, if they did, it was never at the right time. Projects got moving with a flurry of excitement, only to be bogged down in bureaucracy and a lack of vision. According to Koff, there were a few reasons for the poor success of these endeavours: “a lack of visibility, a lack of resources, and a lack of design.”
