Revitalizing neighbourhood from scratch
Toronto is popular for knowing as the “city of neighbourhoods”. A multitude of communities have marked their place within the diverse spectrum of this city, promoting communal relationships and encouraging local residents to take up leadership and enact change. However, occasionally or often, these mutual connections within communities can be hindered, as was vastly witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Especially targeting the neighbourhoods of low income, racially segregated populations.
Kensington Galloway Orton park (KGO) is a prime example of a neighbourhood in Toronto that faces disparities like unemployments, poor public transit, racism etc that leads to keeping 40% of its households in poverty. Yet, KGO comprises of several community organizations, grass root groups and social service entities to improve the local residents’ lives.
In 2008, the East Scarborough Storefront decided to collect KGO’s efforts and advance solutions beneficial for the locals. It began with a community impact driven initiative and has been able to gather interests in public investments within the neighbourhood and create a new civic organization to improve the residential situations of East Scarborough and beyond.
Community Design Initiative (CDI) I is a collaboration between The East Scarborough Storefront, Architectural Think Tank ArchiTEXT and architectural firm Sustainable. Together with the local KGO and design professionals they revitalized a formal police station into a community facility. But beyond creating a community space, they aimed to focus on and leverage design to inspire participatory, cross-sectoral investment in social, economic, cultural, environmental, and civic neighborhood well-being for years to come.
Some pointers that we get to learn from this initiative about community design and creating community led-neighbourhoods are:
- Focusing on place-based organization with trust that would deepen their relationships in the community that would facilitate the multidisciplinary effort.
- Enabled the residents to make the final decisions by shifting community power imbalances.
- Ensured that the true aspirations of the community were reflected through the strategies and not have a pre-determined outcome.
- Designed a multi year strategy to ensure deep investment with partners and funders to sustain the project.
To know more about this amazing project, refer to the article — How a community-led design initiative in Toronto is redefining neighborhood revitalization from the bottom-up, written by Ajeev Bhatia.
