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)

Placemaking through community and adaptable design (The Case of Coffee Park) (First Design Iteration).

Using participatory planning and community design methodologies (i.e. open planning, pattern language design, placemaking, community planning charrettes, planning-in-situ and wikiplanning) this project explores solutions to revitalize Coffee Park -- a small park along the CN railway in West Montreal. This is a complex site that shows issues of unsafety, lack of mobility and sense of place. The objective of this project is to integrate the park to its larger urban context to improve the mobility, safety and overall quality of life in this public space. After a series of visioning workshops, brainstorming sessions, two community planning charrettes and an open planning exercise, this project incorporates inputs from stakeholders, students and ordinary citizens into a collaborative urban design project. The project proposes strategies of urban re-stitching and regeneration through adaptable design and open community planning. With the objective of encouraging future adaptations and transformations, this project is published under a Creative Commons license. Adopt and adapt these ideas (but cite and acknowledge accordingly)

Placemaking from Interstitial Spaces: Participatory planning and collaborative community design as strategies to revitalize a service alleyway in Montreal (Bishop/Mackay)

This project explores participatory planning and community design methodologies (i.e. pattern language design, placemaking, community planning charrettes, planning-in-situ, open planning and peer to peer urbanism) to revitalize a service alleyway in downtown Montreal. The objective of this project is to democratize planning and urban design practices and to engage ordinary citizens in the planning of their own spaces. After a series of visioning workshops, brainstorming sessions and a community planning charrette, this project incorporates inputs from stakeholders, students and ordinary citizens into a collaborative urban design project. The project proposes interventions such as a woonerf, a planning committee, a cubic/fractal scaffolding structure, art murals and wall projections (among others). With the objective of encouraging future adaptations and transformations, this project is published under a Creative Commons license. Adopt and adapt these ideas (but cite and acknowledge accordingly)

Spaces Of Becoming: Public Space In Transformation In The Context Of The Social Movements Of 2011 (Lessons And Questions For Planners And Urban Designers)

Proposing that space shapes publics and publics (re)shape their own spaces, this dissertation explores how the sociopolitical construction of public space informs planning, design and space-making processes. Ethnographic fieldwork including participant observation, direct observation, interviews with key actors and videophotographic analysis documented two social movements, the 15M mobilizations in Barcelona (the Indignados Movement) and Occupy Wall Street in New York City, whose protest encampments and occupation of public spaces became means of expression, organization and resistance. Fieldwork suggests that these movements rejected representative democracy and representative economy and refused representational processes in their assemblies and forms of organization. They enacted a politics of direct presentation in public space rather than re-presentation. Part One explores how the social movements constituted themselves as new publics in space. Part Two demonstrates how these newly constituted publics constructed their own spaces. Part Three draws lessons about how to plan and design public spaces through space-making processes used in these encampments. The protest encampments operated as open spaces permeable to diverse physical, organizational and informational inputs from outside. Welcoming newcomers at all times, they developed an aggregative identity in perpetual transformation as true spaces of becoming in which the public and the space continually transformed and reinvented themselves. Like open-source or wiki systems, the social movements and their encampments operated through approaches of open planning. Implications and applications of such approaches for planning and urban design involve thinking of planning as a truly open-to-the-public process incorporating citizen participation in situ and in real time, with potentially enormous effects on city-making. ii