Designing new practices of transformative urbanism: an experiment in Toronto

Abstract

The increasing complexity, rapid change, and often unpredictable outcomes of city-design-and-building processes demand new modes of practice that are responsive and adaptive to the specifics of such changing contexts in the twenty-first century. These include open-ended outcomes, rather than rigid and predictable products, that emerge out of interactions with a specific context, specific communities and specific interactive processes. This article describes how we can design such new practices of transformative urbanism, derived largely—but not exclusively—from the innovation, resourcefulness and collective creativeness of informal urbanisms. To illustrate such new practices of transformative urbanism, the author describes an experiment in the city of Toronto undertaken as a partnership between the residents of the Thorncliffe Park neighborhood and urbanists from the University of Toronto. The article concludes by describing several promising results of the experiment.