Top of the POPS: Toronto mapping privately owned public spaces

Hundreds of privately owned plazas, courtyards and parkettes around town are open for public use - now, the city’s trying to let the rest of us in on the secret.

thestar.com
Sept. 8, 2014
By Todd Coyne

They are the grey areas between public and private space, and they exist to make cities like Toronto a bit less, well, grey.

Now the city is taking great pains to catalogue and map its inventory of hundreds of privately owned but publicly accessible spaces (POPS); the urban plazas, parkettes and courtyards owned by developers but paid for, in part, by the public.

It’s all part of an effort to clarify the use of these spaces - an effort that now includes posting welcome signs at all new POPS in the city, after a recent council vote.

“We now have council direction, every time we secure a new one of these spaces, to make sure there is signage included on that space that states that it is publicly accessible,” said Toronto urban designer James Parakh.

Those small signs are so far only posted at two POPS in the city - Concord CityPlace and the yet-to-open 300 Front St.

“For the retroactive ones, we’re making the public aware of them by putting them on our website,” he added. “And when we can, we might be putting signs in those spaces, but the priority going forward is making sure every new space is signed.”

Approximately 100 POPS are now on the city’s online map, with an estimated 300 spaces still to be found and plotted.

In many cases, Parakh said, the POPS management team relies on the public to bring existing spaces to their attention.

Around the world, cities secure public-use spaces from developers to build new green spaces or gathering spots, usually in exchange for increased density or height in a condo or office project.

Some of Toronto’s most iconic public-private spaces actually pre-date the city’s use of POPS agreements and are, therefore, technically no-trespassing zones.

The lawn in front of TD Centre on Wellington St. W. is a popular fair-weather hangout, made all the more so for kids thanks to its resident herd of climbable cow sculptures.

And yet, “The Pasture” is technically off-limits to the public from the city’s perspective, as there exists no formal agreement for the public to use the space, according to Parakh. Likewise with the nearby Commerce Court.

“Those are private spaces,” Parakh said. “But if you go there now, or at lunchtime, you will see those spaces quite packed.”

The public-private property debate recently came to a head in Toronto when a bicycle that was locked legally to a TTC pole on a city sidewalk was mistakenly confiscated by a security guard for the nearby property owner, Brookfield Property Group.

That kind of misunderstanding is precisely what the city now hopes to avoid with its POPS awareness initiative.

“We did hear sometimes that land owners were putting up ‘No Trespassing’ signs in spaces that were previously secured,” Parakh said. “We wanted to make sure people are aware they’re allowed to use these spaces.”

David Lieberman, a University of Toronto associate professor in architecture, landscape and design, applauded the city’s attempts to catalogue its public-private spaces but lamented that larger city-owned public spaces are rarely available to the public.

“Dundas Square, a city-owned public space, is constantly being rented out for private events, can’t be used by the public and the process for permits for anything there is very complex,” Lieberman said.

Lieberman’s colleague in the human geography department, Andre Sorensen, has studied the development of POPS agreements in Japan and the U.S.

He said conflict over the use of POPS often bubbles up around activities related to protests, picketing or petitions.

“That’s where things get dicey, is in cases where people say, ‘Well, this is public space,’ and it’s actually not.”

Zuccotti Park in New York City, where the global “Occupy” movement began, is actually a privately owned, publicly accessible space, coincidentally owned by Brookfield.

The lack of fully public spaces - more common in suburban areas - can have real effects on citizens exercising their democratic rights, Sorensen said.

“If there’s no public space and mall owners exclude that kind of activity,” Sorensen said, “you can have some impact on democratic activities like leafletting, picketing or demonstrations.”