Gorilla Park: A Sustainable Space for All (Mobility pilot project)

This project explores urban design and urban systems solutions to address issues of shared mobility, accessibility and urban fragmentation. It is a pilot project to create a park and a shared mobility hub in the borough of Rosemont-La-Petite-Patrie in Montreal. This is to be a node of many in a metropolitan-wide shared mobility system. A shared mobility approach to city planning incorporates notions of Transportation Oriented Development (TOD) and Pedestrian Oriented Development (POD) and links it to notions of smart cities and autonomous transportation. The challenge at hand was to create a public space that incorporates these questions as well as notions of placemaking, community planning and open urbanisms. The project is part of an urban design studio taught in the Department of Geography Planning and Environment at Concordia University in Montreal, and it takes place in the context of the first edition of the CitéStudio Montreal program, which fosters collaborations between academics, students and the city government. The solutions explored in this project were conceived by the students of URBS333 - Urban Laboratory (class of 2019-2020) under the supervision of the instructor (S. De la Llata) and in collaboration with stakeholders and neighbours of Gorilla Park. The solutions are divided into five thematic axes (Sustainability, Mobility and Accessibility, Community Engagement, Hard Design and Soft Design)