Building Better Lives: How Infrastructure Shapes Our Wellbeing

Full Panel
Transcript

Note to readers: This video session was transcribed using auto-transcribing software.  Questions or concerns with the transcription can be directed to citytalk@canurb.org with “transcription” in the subject line.

Alex Bozikovic Thank you for having us. This has been a fascinating day so far. Always a pleasure to be part of one of these events and to be among such a sophisticated and creative group of people thinking hard about our cities, about which we all care so deeply. So I’m going to ask each of you in my panel to just very quickly introduce yourselves, to tell everybody who you are. And then we’re going to get into infrastructure. As quality of life and how what infrastructure has to do with quality of life. So we can we just do a very brief intro. We would tell you to explain to the folks where you’re coming from and perhaps a few words on what that connection means to you. The relationship between infrastructure and quality of life. Toby.

Tobi Nussbaum Okay. Thanks, Alex. I’m Toby, I am the premier of the National Capital Commission here in Ottawa Capital Commission here in Ottawa, which is a federal crown corporation responsible for building and inspiring capital, which we try and do every day. And a lot of that is done through infrastructure, through building great public spaces, through managing parks and parkways and roads. So this topic is very near and dear to our heart, and we’re engaged right now in a very ambitious capital program to address the state of our assets, to improve them and to really think deeply about how to create great spaces, both for residents in the national capital, but equally, many of you visitors to the national capital who maybe only visit occasionally but are our key. We want the capital. We want the country to be reflected in the way the capital looks and the kinds of activities we do. So I’ll stop there. Alex.

Alex Bozikovic Thanks so much. And Pena, over to you, please.

Pino Di Mascio Sure. My name is Pino Di Mascio. I’m a principal at SvN Architects and Planners, so based in Toronto, we’re an architecture and planning company. I do a lot of my work related to large scale master planning. A lot of work our firm does is actually also related to transit oriented development. So looking at, especially in Toronto, how we actually leverage the investments being made in transit to support additional housing choices amd additional housing density in those areas. I worked a lot on the Toronto waterfront, on similar ideas. And I think, you know, what we’ve heard, and it’s kind of been building up through the last couple of sessions is that, you know, infrastructure is really the support for our social lives. And then layered on top of that is the community infrastructure that kind of goes goes along with that. So my real interest in thinking about infrastructure is really think about is – how does it shape our cities and then how does that in turn shape the way we live our lives and what can we do better to address the issues, whether they are of inclusion, equity, fairness or, you know, in some ways just making better investment choices in terms of the things we spend public money on.

Alex Bozikovic Thank you. Dorian …

Dorian Moore Hi, I’m Dorian Moore. I am a partner in Archive Design Studio in Detroit, Michigan, and in Toronto, Ontario. And I am concerned with the ability of us to think about our public space, our major public space, which is the street as part of the social infrastructure that we need to deal with. And part of my interest in being here has really been to look at the public space as infrastructure and to fund it and think about it in a way that it becomes part of every municipality’s budget and it becomes a place where we can all interact, and it also becomes a place that, as someone brought up in a previous session, brings us joy.

Alex Bozikovic The street as public space. Leila.

Leila Ghaffari Hello, everyone, Leila Ghaffari, I’m an urban planning professor at Concordia University in Montreal. And my main expertise is housing and gentrification and neighborhood transformation. What is important in the topic that you mentioned, Infrastructure and Quality of Life for me is mostly to ask for who we are providing quality of life when we are providing infrastructure. So maybe we can talk about it later. So I will stop there for now.

Alex Bozikovic Excellent. So each of you have introduced a theme that we can come back to – great spaces and their social function, transit and its relationship to the larger city, the street as public space and infrastructure equity within providing infrastructure and measuring the effects of it on social equity. All right. So we heard earlier, maybe we should begin with the street, if that’s okay. We heard earlier from Monique Simard from the Quartier de spectacles,   about the importance of getting people into the street and that this is important both for cities and both for encouraging culture, encouraging the flourishing of culture. So if that is important and Dorian, please, you can kick this one off. How do we do that? And as leaders of municipalities and as people in government, how can we measure for that? How do we make it happen? And how do we know when we’ve actually pulled that off?

Dorian Moore Okay, one of the things that I try to do in practice and in my role as an educator is to make sure that we look at any urban district from four different perspectives. One is the perspective of public space overall, that accessibility to parks, green spaces, plazas, open space. The second is to look at it from the standpoint of the built infrastructure, meaning the buildings that are there within an urban district, the history, the character, what happens on the upper floors, you know, the ability of us to provide housing in our urban districts that feeds the street. And then also what happens on the ground floor going even beyond just retail. Thinking about what are the functions that make people want to come to an area and spend time there. Adding on to that, the other two areas that I try to emphasize is mobility. And what I mean by that is the ability to access an urban district and make your way through an urban district. And so that touches a little bit on transit in going to the area. But it also talks about bicycle infrastructure, non-motorized infrastructure and pedestrian infrastructure. And understanding that in our districts, it’s not just the automobile that needs to be emphasized, that needs to be accommodated, but it’s … people need to be the priority and multiple ways of getting there. And the final thing that I think really adds to that is the idea of connectivity. How do we, how do urban districts, connect to their adjacent areas, whether there are neighborhoods or other districts? And all of that feeds into a higher quality of life and wellness.

Alex Bozikovic All right. So Pino, maybe you can pick this up. You’re doing extensive work on particular neighborhoods along the new Ontario line subway in Toronto, quite dense new communities that are being planned because of their connectivity. Can you talk about how the work that you’re doing might begin to answer some of Dorian’s questions?

Pino Di Mascio Sure. So I think, you know, what’s first important to say is, for a lot of us in the room here, I think we know how to build good streets. We know what goes into it. So the question then becomes what prevents us from doing that? Right. And in some cases, what’s driving us trying to reverse back some of the, you know, good choices that we’ve made, which we see happening in Toronto and other places as well. So when you look at something like that, say the Transit Oriented Communities program in in Ontario, and it’s mostly focused in Toronto with a lot of the investments being made there. Well, we’ve done a good job at … I think what my firm has been doing is really figuring out how to move away from building sole purpose engineered transit infrastructure, which is what we did for a very long time. And even the Eglinton Crosstown, which isn’t built yet, is going to be a lot of the same thing where we’re going to have these stations that are singular, they don’t have housing on it and they’re not connected to the community below them. We started to move away from that and actually starting, you know, designers and engineers working together to think about how is hard infrastructure designed with the housing that’s supportive of it and how do we actually build those things together. Some of it is architectural, some of it is actually engineering related, but it’s building that into the cost of the infrastructure and having it funded from the beginning. That’s a step – I think we have a lot of ways still to go. One of the things we still haven’t done is within that – building the community infrastructure into that area. So we’re getting the density that’s required, hopefully, and we’re getting that approved. But the elements around the public spaces, the streetscapes, the green spaces, even elements around the the housing choices within that, that built form, that still needs to be built into the model and the funding model for getting the hard infrastructure in place because we see them separately sometimes.

Alex Bozikovic So rather than build standalone stations, the model here is try and create, use that new infrastructure and capitalize on it immediately to create what hopefully will be successful communities. I guess when you said “we know how to build good streets”, I was smirking a little bit and apologies for that, but I’m not sure that we do actually know how to build good streets. I think the the knowledge of what makes the street work for other than as car infrastructure has perhaps been a little bit lost. But I know, Tobi, that in your work at the commission that you’ve been paying attention to that. Can you talk a little bit about some of the thinking that you and your team have around that specific question?

Tobi Nussbaum Sure, I will. And maybe I can use two specific examples. So one of them is for those who are from out of town, the NCC owns a big parcel of land just west of downtown called the LeBreton Flats. And we have a master plan for that area, which is going to include many things, most recently in the news, that I actually think went outside Ottawa, is we struck a deal with the Ottawa Senators, the hockey team here, and they’ll be building an arena there. But there’s a lot of residential. We’ve already got a number of parcels that have been announced. We’re working with different developers from across Canada, Montreal, Toronto and others. But on the issue of streets, we are being very deliberate about how those streets work. And essentially for us, it’s keep them narrow. You know, we often hear from fire chiefs and others who want as wide streets as absolutely possible. Yes, we have to make sure that the infrastructure underneath the roads fits. But really thinking a lot about scale, what is the human scale? If we’ve been very clear that mobility through this new neighborhood should be largely active transportation. So how do we make sure that streets reflect that? How do we ensure that streets are places for people to stay and sit and hang out and meet one another? So that will be a deliberate strategy. And we are having to fight often specific standards. You know, people talk about TAC and these other road standards that we really have to fight against because otherwise it’s status quo. Maybe I’ll pause there.

Alex Bozikovic Fair enough, perhaps I can pick up on Tracy’s point from the previous panel that if we’re talking about level of service in a different way here, perhaps the level of service that’s required is not how much traffic moves quickly, but how much time people spend in the streetscape or how much social activity is happening there, which would be a very different approach. But Leila, I know in your research, as you’ve already implied, you found that perhaps we need to be careful in making these sort of assumptions about how what are perceived as improvements in infrastructure will generate good for everybody. Can you talk a little bit about that and specifically what the nature of that concern is and how as leaders, the folks in this room might think about it?

Leila Ghaffari Yes, sure. So we talked about how we may know how to create great streets, but for sure, we don’t know how to create great streets for everyone. So through these projects that  we are bringing in, whether it is streets or other types of infrastructure, we are creating exclusion and inequality, inequality in the territory that we are serving. Because with the projects that we are bringing, we are also bringing interest. So with these infrastructure projects, what we are creating is not automatically a quality of life, but it is automatically expanding profit margin for those who want to invest on it. So we have these people who are going to invest and capture this added value that we are creating. And then we have prices that go up and then we are displacing people or we are creating this displacement pressure that they cannot afford to live there. Why is that? Today we talked a lot about considering housing as an infrastructure, and I’m happy to hear that. But I think we are really confused about it. We say it’s infrastructure, but we don’t treat it as one. We treat it as a commodity and not any type of commodity, a commodity that it is taken for granted that we don’t want homeowners to lose money. Any other investment we may lose money on. But for housing, we just we take it for granted that we don’t. So I think that if we want to change things, we have to see housing as infrastructure and we have to invest the money that we have to to keep those people who are living in these neighborhoods in the neighborhood, so that they can benefit from the change that we’re bringing in. Otherwise, they’re going to be displaced. And the best that we do is that we talk about affordable housing and we are considering 20% affordable housing in the project into poverty, for example. But there is a really fundamental problem is that affordability is not a characteristic of housing. It’s the relationship between the housing of the people who are living in them. So we cannot talk about affordable housing. How do we define affordable housing? Affordable for whom? For how long? So it’s a problem there. So we are saying that we are resolving the issue by considering affordable housing, but we are creating this pressure around the area that we’re developing that’s influencing all the people around that development that we have, also that want that affordable housing that we are developing is not affordable for most of the people who would want to live there.

Alex Bozikovic So let’s take this back a little bit though, where you begin was with the implication that improving the quality of a street, of a public space, you know, necessarily results in real estate values going up, which then leads to displacement. Are there ways around that? Does that phenomenon occur because these improvements are only happening in particular places? Could we get around this problem by making things better in more places and for more people to create these desirable conditions, not just in a few isolated places?

Leila Ghaffari Well, that’s one of the problems. Yes, we are improving places that we see that this potential of attracting people because cities, they are counting on the money that are getting from the residents of of any area. So when they see the opportunity, then they invest in the area because this they know that they can capture it. But in disadvantaged neighborhoods, we can see very obviously that we have less investment in streets and in public spaces and in green spaces. So we have this problem that’s evident. So if we invest everywhere, that may change things. But we also have … we need to have strategies to enable people to stay in their neighborhoods when we are improving the situation.

Alex Bozikovic Thank you. Pino, do want to jump in?

Pino Di Mascio Sure. I mean, your question was a good one to start that discussion. And I think it comes down to the fact that we are relying too heavily on housing market economics and the development process to pay for the infrastructure that we need. I think we’ve heard a lot through different sessions today. We don’t have a national infrastructure plan. We don’t have long term, stable, committed funding to infrastructure of any kind, let alone community infrastructure. So what we’re doing is relying on the development process to create the profits that then pay for infrastructure and then municipalities maybe supplement that with a little bit of funding here or there or money from their operating or capital budgets that they put together. And then that results in a lot of the issues, right? If we actually had different models for funding, I’d say community infrastructure into our mixed use developments, we’d find that they, in themselves, would become more equitable because there wouldn’t just be retail, private sector rental or condo housing and maybe a bit of office and then transit, right, which is all we’re getting now. It’s expanding beyond that and getting that more choice of programing, which is only going to come from, I think, just long term committed funding to different kinds of infrastructure.

Alex Bozikovic So what you’re suggesting is tightly regulating housing and then taxing it very heavily, as we do, though not in Quebec, is actually giving us not just immediate results, but also second order results that are kind of working against the goals that we’re actually aspiring to. Is that right?

Pino Di Mascio And very expensive housing.

Alex Bozikovic Dorian, I think you might have a take on this one.

Dorian Moore Yeah. What I’d like to really focus on is, or take off of here, is the idea of equity, right? And thinking about it in a very different way than we typically do, which thinks about it from a standpoint of distribution of some sort of product or something that that, that we’re doing. I’d like to think of equity from the standpoint of the same way we look at it when we talk about housing and its the value that you get out of your community. And I think part of what’s happened is that. A lot of times in lower income communities specifically, they have been conditioned to think that what they have is not as valuable as what’s in other communities, newer communities or more affluent communities, when in fact, a lot of the things that we need to do to make sustainable communities are already inherent in some of these traditional areas. And I think we need to look at that.

Alex Bozikovic And what are those … what are those qualities that we need to look for?

Dorian Moore One of the things is we talk about housing. And just to build off of that is the fact that we want mixed housing. And we’re going through a lot. Dealing with single family zoning right now is a major issue. One of the things that we see in traditional neighborhoods all throughout North America is a mix of housing types. Part of my issue with … a lot of the time, a lot of the things that we’re talking about in terms of housing is we’re talking about houses. We’re talking about more production of building single family homes, where the real secret, I think, which is inherent in our neighborhoods, is multiple family, six units, four units, 12 units. All of these things that if you drive around and over an older neighborhood, you will see everywhere. And I think that is a component of … we’ll call this housing infrastructure that we’ve been talking about that will help us solve this housing housing problem, but also tamp down the fall back from NIMBYism. Right. I think we need to build at a scale that has been traditionally accepted within neighborhoods. And I think it will help us get through this crisis. And so that’s that build … that value that I think I was talking about earlier.

Tobi Nussbaum Well, I think the relationship that we’ve been talking about, streets and social infrastructure and and housing, I mean, there’s obviously a lot of linkages there. And one of the words you mentioned earlier, Alex, that the word joy was used earlier. Another word that I would insert into the conversation is beauty. And the reason I would is I think actually addressing inequality and the notion of successful public spaces can include the idea of build beautiful public spaces and that in its own right will help attract use and help attract use that’s equitable. And if I can just use a concrete example of this, because sometimes it’s helpful. The NCC just rehabilitated an old boathouse. It was 100 years old to be rehabilitated. And while we were at it, we made huge improvements to the landscape in front of it. It literally sits on stilts in the Ottawa River. It’s not too far, just a couple of kilometers from downtown, and we put swimming docks in it. And the team did a fantastic job. It is a beautiful site. And two things happened. One of them is, to our surprise, we were a bit worried that this would only attract local neighborhoods which are more affluent. That didn’t happen. This attracted people from across the region, and I saw more newcomers to Canada at this NCC asset than I had seen on any other NCC asset. And we have a lot. And the second thing that happened is people remarked on the fact that it was a beautiful place and that mattered and there were attracted to it because of that. And I think that’s important, too, because that gets into issues of trust in public institutions and actually governments. We are a government agency. At the end of the day, they can build great things. It didn’t get bogged down in bureaucracy and the result was something that everyone could enjoy. It was free. So that was important from an equity lens. And so I think if we could find a way to quantify beauty and quantify the way in which people enjoy a space that would make it easier for us to do because we’re a public institution. But imagine if we could find through cost benefit analysis or quantifying the social benefits of building great public spaces what that would do to the calculus and the cost of building infrastructure.

Well, it certainly has something to do with social mobility, certainly has something to do with public health. Pino, you look like you wish to jump in here and you want to respond to what Tobi was just saying?

Pino Di Mascio Well, I was just almost agreeing with what you were saying is, you know, beauty is … and beautiful places are definitely something that brings people together. People like to spend time in it. They’ll go to it for various reasons. It’s one of the ways you can actually cross class boundaries and actually have people come together. And the investment that you need to make to make something beautiful versus not beautiful is not is marginally very low. Unfortunately, it always gets value engineered out first if the actual community infrastructure doesn’t get value engineered out entirely. So those are the kind of the kind of obstacles that that that we’re working with. And maybe I’d add on it is another thing, you know, in terms of, you know, beauty is one of them. And I agree that, you know, single purpose buildings are not very useful, especially in an urban context. I loathe them. I think they’re the antithesis to people coming together just because they only have that. And I think a lot of community organizations and community groups and the buildings we build for, you know, what we often call community infrastructure is still trapped in single purpose buildings, even though they co-locate sometimes. You know, the biggest example of that is the, you know, what is a a Canadian icon of community infrastructure. It’s the hockey arena, Right. How many urban hockey arenas do we have in in Canada? How many can you walk to? How many can you get to by transit? How many can different people, people access? What else can we put with our community centers? Does every medical space need to be provided for in a hospital, or can hospitals decentralize so they’re more within communities and these services that people need to get to? So it’s kind of the beauty is really, really important, thinking about form and function also is important so that we can we can connect places where people want to be.

Alex Bozikovic But if I can, Leila, I’m going to go to you next. But if I can just offer a concrete example of that beauty, I think and you have maybe heard somebody mention my complaining about public procurement recently. Beauty is sometimes framed as I think you were implying, as something that has to do with expensive materials or something that necessarily has to cost more money or is about fundamentally about the way things look with good design, I think, and I hope we would agree, is not really just about that. And one good example I have seen recently is a rec center in the city of New Westminster in B.C., where the architects HCMA, designed a new community center, a rec center that truly is a community center. And the thing that makes it a community center genuinely is that the lobby, which is a space where nothing would generally be happening, is big enough that you can spend time there and you can come in without a ticket, without having to cross security and sit at one of the large tables and do your high school homework or kill some time. There are chairs. There are tables. It’s essentially a lounge where you don’t need to buy anything and don’t need to have any reason to be there. And this seems incredibly obvious. But aside from libraries in our societies, there isn’t really anywhere like that. And I just wanted to call out that example because it seems like a really valuable one of how public facilities can and should serve multiple purposes, and perhaps we don’t always ask them to. But Leila, do you want to respond to what Pino was just saying?

Leila Ghaffari Yes. And what you just said … I think beauty is important. And what you said about this urban space that you have created, that’s beautiful. And it attracted other people, other than affluent neighborhoods around. I think we have to think about bringing a layer of complexity to it maybe, if these people who are not living in these affluent neighborhoods come to this space, is it because they don’t have these kind of spaces in their own neighborhoods, that they have to come to this? Or if they had, would they come still? So … and one of the characteristics that you mentioned that I think is very important is that it is free of charge. So I was doing this research on third places, which are socializing spaces outside of work and residence and how people relate to them. And one of the main elements that disadvantaged population would talk about was that if it’s free of charge, we go there because we can spend time there, we can socialize, we can just watch people around without being obliged to consume something. So I think that is an element which plays an important part. If we want to really create this mix of population and create quality of life through this infrastructure that we’re producing, and of course it is important, that’s beautiful. But also I think it is important that they are produced with people for people. So the research shows that when people are included in the process of designing these places, they are more inclined to maintain them. They are more inclined to accept even the negative effects that can come with them. So the gentrification effect that can come with them because they have been included in the process of decision making and designing and conception.

Alex Bozikovic And so it belongs to them.

Leila Ghaffari Exactly.

Tobi Nussbaum Leila, I’m glad you mentioned third places because that’s such an important concept for what we’re talking about and I think as a theme. And just to give another good example, you mentioned the work, the rec center in New Westminster, this building … And so for those who don’t know, the addition that was built on the National Arts Center in 2019, previously this was more like a bunker. And I mean, it was a beautiful bunker, but it wasn’t inviting. And if you’ve come in from from Elgin Street, that’s the new addition. And that Alex, essentially functions like a library. In fact, I have a I have a daughter at home. She’s got a virtual job. She said, I think I’m going to go to the National Arts Center this morning and do my work because it’s a beautiful space. It’s inviting. You can sit. You don’t have to buy anything if you don’t want. So just because we’re talking about it and because it’s right here, that’s another example of a very successful public space that’s not a library that performs some of that function. And to frame that in terms of the importance of third places I think is very useful.

Alex Bozikovic I think that’s really useful as well. And something that’s been occurring to me recently is that social media really does not … fundamentally the social media networks don’t want us to be in public space. Right? I mean, connecting online does not require you to be in public. And in fact, if you are in public, you might not be on your phone if you’re busy speaking to somebody. Right. So it feels to me as if, you know, in the past few years, we have both seen a deeper understanding in some ways of the importance of public space to a larger segment of the population. But also many of us, me included, I’m sorry to admit, spending hours and hours a day like this. And so in some ways these places, third places or other, define them however you like, welcoming public spaces are important to us all. So, Leila, how do we…  And again, remembering that we’re speaking to a lot of municipal leaders in the room, what is the recipe for creating today, good public spaces, given what we’ve learned in the last few years? You’ve already talked about inclusive design as a process. You’ve talked about them being ideally free of charge. What else do we need to think about in creating places that will bring people together and encourage them to actually, you know, show up?

Leila Ghaffari I think housing comes up again here. I think we cannot design great public spaces that will attract everyone without thinking about the surrounding areas of these places. So I think land acquisition, building acquisition is one of the strategies that can be used by municipalities to protect and to remove the buildings around these areas from the speculative market and to protect the affordability of these buildings. So I think that’s one of the higher level strategies that we can have. But again, also at the local level, at the street level, if we want to have people coming into these places, we have to think about different types of populations and different needs that they have. So including them in the process, that’s one. But not everybody wants to be included in the process. So if we think about people who are homeless, for example, to avoid hostile architecture in our urban spaces so that we just remove them or erase them from our public spaces because we want them to be clean and beautiful. Think about how we could answer to their needs in public spaces. Access to restrooms can be a very simple example that these people … that could hold these people. And also the aspect of having these spaces free of charge. Also, the elements … Details are important. I had some people who would tell me this is a cafe and a coffee shop that’s not very expensive, but I don’t put foot in it because the way it is designed tells me not to enter. So it’s also the way we are designing the public spaces. That’s important to show that everyone, whatever kind of population you are, you can be here and you are welcome to be here.

Alex Bozikovic That’s a good challenge. Anyone else have any ideas about how to how to achieve that goal? Dorian.

Dorian Moore You know, one of the things that I want to touch on, we talked about these social spaces. And when you talk about libraries and you talk about this building, even though they’re open for some people, they can still be intimidating. And I think we need to look incisively at our different communities and find the spaces that are there, that the community can tap into. We have to think about the, you know, from the standpoint of traditional neighborhoods, the corner store as a gathering place more than just a place for commerce so that people can feel that there’s something within their community that they can go to. When we look at more urban districts, we also need to look at some of the things that we deride in urban districts such as, you know, the esthetic shops, the yoga places, the beauty parlors. All of these things, while smaller in scale, can still be community gathering places. Because not every mixed use building can have a restaurant at the bottom. And that’s basically what we’re doing. It’s either a restaurant or a Shoppers Drug Mart. And I think we … I need to get beyond that. And we have to think strategically about how we populate the ground floors in order to enhance the street.

Alex Bozikovic And Tobi and I had a long conversation about this yesterday. If I can just add two cents … I think what the consensus we came to is that that’s not purely a matter of architectural expression, as it often seems to be. What happens on the facade of the building or the number of doors it has is not going to give you the activity that you’re looking for. If what’s behind those doors is … those four doors all lead to a Shoppers Drug Mart, and all of those windows are covered up by stickers. So perhaps we need to be more … planners and cities need to be more intentional about, as much as they can, incenting or requiring particular spaces that will create these qualities that we’re looking for. Pino, you have thoughts on this, I’m sure.

Pino Di Mascio Yeah. And maybe even less intentional. So I think, you know, flexible, open spaces that can be programed and curated by the community, people who are going to use them, is probably what’s needed. Right? And if you think of what works well in the entrance way here, it’s that it’s open and flexible and can be used for a variety of purposes, a variety of times. I think, you know, sometimes keeping it simple is a lot better. And that in itself, you know, creates beauty in the space.

Alex Bozikovic So public spaces need to be perhaps slightly less programed than what they usually are.

Pino Di Mascio Or programmed but by the users and more ability to be programed.

Tobi Nussbaum But I think you guys are talking about two different things in the sense that if the developer is trying to monetize the retail space on the main floor, I think Alex, what you’re arguing is maybe municipal authorities need to say, “okay, floor plates have to be a maximum of X, keep them small”. So to allow the different kind of functions, Dorian that you mentioned, to be able to afford to rent that space and that will give us more diverse users, restaurants, yoga shops, whatever it is. And I think, Pino, your mention, I mean, maybe as a separate issue, we have to say a certain amount of that space should also be dedicated for public use. But I don’t know if we’re asking for too much.

Alex Bozikovic I think you’re right, perhaps the public space perhaps needs to be … doesn’t always need to have a specific function in mind, perhaps we need to think about how to create public spaces that are more open ended, which is generally outdoors. Right? I mean, that’s what parks and squares have usually done. But I think perhaps we don’t have a lot of time left. We’ve got about 2.5 minutes left to go. So if we were to think about where we’ve gone in this conversation, which is to talk increasingly about buildings and built for mass infrastructure, we’ve gotten away from sort of more familiar definitions of infrastructure and into shaping the spaces in which people spend time. So how do we make those serve as social infrastructure? Final words of wisdom or particular tips about how to create buildings within our cities that serve social purpose? Leila?

Leila Ghaffari I could go first.

Alex Bozikovic Yeah, please

Leila Ghaffari I would say we we need to identify services that the community needs and include them so – the community that we are suspecting, that these buildings, they may be displaced include the services, community organizations. I can give some place to social economy in these buildings so that we can attract this population and we can keep them keep them there.

Dorian Moore I think we need to take back the street. And I think we saw that during Covid and it worked well. And I think we started to move towards that in many of our cities. We are seeing some regression on that or aggression against, you know, using the street in a very different way.

Alex Bozikovic The cars are taking over again, you mean?

Dorian Moore Yes, the car advocates are taking over. But I think that’s the primary thing that we need to do is take back some of that street for public space, for pedestrian and for non-motorized.

Alex Bozikovic If I can just interrupt before we go to you Pino, I know this number because I know Toronto, in the city of Toronto, there are more than 5000km² devoted to roadways for vehicles, 5000km². Imagine you take back 10% of that. That’s 500km². Right. I mean, the scale of what we have to play with here, and this is true for every city in this country is enormous. Right? Pino?

Pino Di Mascio Yeah, it isn’t something that that any single building or spaces in a building is going to solve. It’s the collection of buildings we put together, the programing we do in them together and making sure that they leave space for a variety of different uses. And I’m going to harp on this again, for also government to be able to come forward and fund infrastructure within mixed use buildings that then can go on to serve a good social purpose in the ongoing community.

Alex Bozikovic The new models of social infrastructure. Tobi, you want to close this off?

Tobi Nussbaum Yeah. Well, maybe just one other item that hasn’t been mentioned so far in terms of the issue of programing or not programing is one of the lessons we’ve learned is we used to think mostly about public space in terms of passive public space. And increasingly we’re thinking actually to offer people active options, to give people choice. So if they want to sit at a bistro and have a glass of wine, great. But what if they want to rent a stand up paddleboard or go swimming or go skating, which is something else we offer. And so kind of thinking about different activities and what the user groups need in terms of active use is something else that we’re thinking more and more in terms of the use of our public spaces,.

Alex Bozikovic Giving people things to do, not just places to be. All right. Well, we are a little bit over time. Everyone, please join me in thanking our panelists.