St. James Town Coolspot — OACC’s exciting new venture
On Friday July 23th, we had a really spirited & rich brainstorming session with St. James Town Community Co-operative (SJT CO-op) around their new collaborative initiative: St. James Town Cool Spot. #STJCoolspot is going to be a place that shapes with and for St. James Town residents as a safe, vibrant open hub for refuge from heat, learning and knowledge and resource sharing for local food resilience.
SJT Co-op and the Open Architecture Collaborative Canada (OACC) came to collaborate through a shared interest in fostering connection and building community capacity around local resiliency and space justice. OACC team,
Marveh Farhoodi, Sandra Iskandar, Christina Baldanza, Alexandra Sermol, and Ronak Gandhi spent awe-inspiring amount of time and effort voluntarily on this project to turn the process into a community-driven practice and a mutual learning and sharing, and creativity process. #STJCoolSPot now has passed the initial participatory planning stage, and we are eagerly looking forward to the next step of the project; bringing some of co-created ideas into life and engaging youth and different residents in this process.
The community of St. James Town is a culturally diverse urban neighbourhood with an estimated 140 languages spoken,home to majority newcomers, this densely populated high-rise neighbourhood has, unfortunately, remained overlooked and underserved for several decades.
The St. James Town Community Co-operative was created to address the growing resident need for food security, capacity building, and emergency preparation.
The resident-owned and operated Co-operative is committed to engaging Toronto’s underrepresented voices including those of new Canadians, minority groups, and women within the neighbourhood.
St. James Town has the lowest square ft. of public park space per capita in Toronto. This, combined with decades of under-funding thus poor maintenance of these spaces, has left residents with few options to safely gather, breathe, and find relief from stuffy apartments. Given the mental health implications of COVID-19 isolation, anticipated climate-change-induced heat waves, and lack of space for neighbourhood emergency management, safe, accessible, enriched outdoor spaces are vital.
St. James Town is among the hardest hit neighbourhoods in the city in this pandemic. Restrictions related to COVID-19 have had serious impacts on community mental health, especially for those who are isolated, seniors, youth, and single-parent families, and the need for safe social gathering is essential as restrictions begin to lift.
Through community surveying, the SJT Co-op identified immense support for free outdoor, pandemic-safe programming and enriched public space for residents. The SJT Co-op and the OACC came to collaborate through a shared interest in fostering connection and building community capacity around food. Ideation commenced in May 2021 with the initial aim to capitalize on the Co-op’s strong connections at the community level with OACC’s experience in supporting community-engaged design and placemaking and implementing equity and impact lenses. The SJT Co-op leads this project. They have framed the scope of programming and events, and have provided OACC with neighbourhood insight. OACC supports this project through applying an asset-based and equity-centred lens in participatory planning of the site’s design and in workshops and charrettes.
Combining placemaking and community programming, the St. JamesTown Cool Spot’ is a community-led project that converts an under-used and under-maintained public space in the St. James Town neighbourhood into a vibrant community gathering place for community building, learning and knowledge sharing, and shade and refuge from heat waves.
