Parking lot event welcomes students back to campus
Park(ing) Day is an international event that temporarily repurposes parking spots into tiny parks. Urban Minds received a grant to participate in 2021 in partnership with the School of Urban and Regional Planning.
Life is returning to campus, and earlier this month Ryerson’s School of Urban and Regional Planning (SURP) gave the community a chance to enjoy it.
In partnership with Urban Minds (external link) , a Toronto-based non-profit with a mission to create meaningful ways for youth to shape equitable and sustainable cities, the school transformed parking spaces on Bond Street into a mini park for the community to use for the afternoon.
For the past two years, while students learned remotely, SURP and Urban Minds hosted an online program during the month of June called 105 Bond-ing: Weekly Warm-ups (external link) to help incoming first-year students transition into university life and learn about urban planning.
The parking lot transformation stemmed from the Weekly Warm-ups program and was organized in recognition of Park(ing) Day (external link) , a global initiative to bring attention to how cities are designed and built.
“We introduced the idea of Park(ing) Day to the students and challenged them to work in groups to brainstorm ideas to activate the street parking spaces in front of the South Bond Building,” said Ryan Lo, co-founder of Urban Minds.
Students came up with a wide range of ideas and many of them centred around the need for more seating, art, greenery, and cycling facilities, as well as using food to bring people together.
“Park(ing) Day is a chance for us to demonstrate solutions and show how we can be creative with spaces,” said professor Zhixi Zhuang, who had previously participated in Weekly Warm-Up sessions by teaching design to new students, including discussions on how to transform and re-create urban spaces.
Zhuang adds that the interactive activation is also a chance to show how Bond Street, where the SURP offices are located, can be transformed into a more pedestrian-friendly space that showcases faculty and students’ work within the school.
“Cities are for people not for cars,” she said. “In this prime location, downtown in front of the school, we could have a space for people to socialize, to rest, or even simply just enjoy this environment.”
Park(ing) Day at Ryerson was executed by Urban Minds, SURP students and faculty thanks to a micro-grant they received from Better Block and SPIN.
The interactive activation, which turned parking spots into a mini park, included a welcome tree. “We thought it would be a great opportunity to create a space for students and faculty members to meet in person safely and encourage each other through short, written messages hung on the tree,” said Lo. Angela Ng, co-founder of Urban Minds, is pictured hanging a hand-written message.
The welcome tree will be donated to the university and planted on campus.
Organizers indicated that seating is an important element in city spaces, so they incorporated seating in the mini park.
A bike tune-up station was a way to encourage students to consider biking as an option to commute to school.
SURP and Urban Minds invited Ryerson Urban Farm to do a mini farmer’s market in the “park”. Students identified food as an important way to bring people together.
Fresh, spray-free and affordable produce from Ryerson Urban Farm was for sale.
Professor Zhuang uses Bond Street as a case study in her classes. She encourages students to come up with design ideas for the space outside of the SURP offices. “This could be such a vital space in student learning,” she said.