Chapter 1
In November 2020, when we were questioning everything, Westbank approached us with a bold desire. Their upcoming project, Mirvish Village, was standing on the shoulders of Ed Mirvish, a huge community figure. They were moved by their own initial community building efforts in the Village, and, in the lead up to the Mirvish project launch, they wanted to work with us to explore more community engagement ideas that would use video storytelling to showcase their support for the historic neighborhood.
We could have just made a beautiful campaign spot. But we felt the unrealized potential of this future development—Mirvish wouldn’t be open till 2023— and the year’s mounting social tensions presented an opportunity to experiment and potentially make a bigger impact. This existential questioning was also fueled by the very real fact that our team was, and still is, burnt out on traditional marketing work and corporate social responsibility initiatives. (Aren’t you?) We saw a chance with this project to move beyond the old model and build something new.
Before we even created the strategy we shared links amongst our team of work that broke the mold. We looked to Redbull Music Academy and Patagonia Action Works as meaningful entities created by corporations that create a sustainable community engagement model. Something that would rely heavily on the brand at first but had legs to grow on it’s own. We knew we wanted to build an entity like this.
Experimental projects of this nature require a deep trust and alignment between teams and a holistic reimagination from the brand on how they see their impact. Our pre-existing relationship with Ian Gillespie, CEO of Westbank, and his stated trust in us to try something new emboldened our thinking and gave us the confidence to set us on our way.
Chapter 2
Once we began to sit with this opportunity we realized that our experience building community centred works would similarly inform how we began with this project.
We knew we needed to figure out a viable problem space for this project. A focus that would authentically triangulate the objectives from Westbank (show support for the neighborhood through video storytelling), with the needs of the city and the desires of our team to break the mould of corporate sponsorship.
Chapter 3
Since these other two areas, the needs of Westbank and our ambitions as a team, were determined, we set out to understand the challenges and opportunities for Toronto, and cities in general.
Immediately observable was the sense of divide on a micro level in the relationships between people and on a macro level within our systems and social infrastructure. While news headlines (and likely your own personal experience) will confirm this tension, here are some additional statistics.
Relationships - We don't understand each other
Only 9% of people “strongly agree” that “[they] have the same outlook on life, opinions on important issues, etc. than other (country citizens).” 15% globally (Ipsos)
Systems - We don't trust in systems
Only 3% in the U.S. strongly believe that their society/system is corruption-free. 9% globally. (Ipsos)
The disintegrating social cohesion between people in cities was only furthered by systemic distrust and social stigma. A grim outlook to say the least. But we knew there was more to the story.
Within all this mess we noticed local grassroots movements presenting another narrative of the future. Networks of community fridges were tackling food insecurity, local organizations were using new forms of communication to share resources, and the fabricators were exploring methods of sustainable low impact/cost building for unhoused peoples. While unique to their respective community’s needs, what these initiatives shared was that they were led by people who felt an ownership of their city and the agency to act.
Still from A Hundred Joys
Stills from Rhapsody on Pavement
How do we share that feeling? We intuitively felt that if we were to overcome this disintegrating social cohesion we needed to catalyze the sense of ownership and autonomy these community leaders had in the broader population.
Chapter 4
At this point in the project we diverged to explore a diversity of perspectives about people’s relationship to place. We wanted to learn where this feeling comes from. We found deep value in place-based academics like Yi-Fu Tuan and Jane Jacobs who have studied the way places shape people and their connection to others.
“People think that geography is about capitals, land forms, and so on. But it is also about place — its emotional tone, social meaning, and generative potential.”
Philosopher, author, and Emeritus Professor of Geography at UW-Madison
Jane Jacobs on our experience sharing sidewalk space in a city,
“Most of it is ostensibly trivial but the sum is not trivial at all,” she wrote in Death and Life of American Cities.
“The sum of such casual, public contact at a local level… is a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust, and a resource in time of personal or neighborhood need.”
Bernard Hunt, of HTA Architects
"We have theories, specialisms, regulations, exhortations, demonstration projects. We have planners. We have highway engineers. We have mixed use, mixed tenure, architecture, community architecture, urban design, neighbourhood strategy. But what seems to have happened is that we have simply lost the art of placemaking; or, put another way, we have lost the simple art of placemaking. We are good at putting up buildings but we are bad at making places."
"First life, then spaces, then buildings – the other way around never works."
Jan Gehl
We also looked into Place Attachment, a school of thought in which some scholars have suggested there is a positive relationship between emotional attachment to a place and feelings of environmental stewardship. This means the more emotionally bonded you feel to a place—be it your family home, or your favorite local restaurant—the more likely you are to advocate and act in its best interest.
This rang true for our team. We have donated money to our favorite book store, and bought pantry items at the beloved neighborhood restaurant to support them during closures. We’ve participated in dance parties, protests, and social runs in the streets of our hometowns. We’ve attended concerts and yoga in our local parks. Our emotional connections to our favorite places—which were only heightened over quarantine—increased the feeling of ownership we have, and therefore increased our sense of accountability. For us it felt obvious, when we loved a place we would step up and support it.
We felt moved by all this research and had realized with a bit more clarity the problem space we were inching towards. But something in our proposition had still not crystallized.
We also explored place-making, a collaborative urban design philosophy and approach that centers a local community in the creation of a space.
Chapter 5
Full of research and big ideas we returned back to Ian Gillespie and the Westbank team to softball some ideas their way. After a conversation where we waxed poetically about fine-grained retail and Jane Jacobs’ sidewalk ballets, Ian shared a single piece of poignant feedback that changed the direction of the project as a whole. “People don’t care about place-making.”
“People don’t care about place-making.”
That was a reality check. The academic research, scholars and new terminology was helpful fuel for our team, but inaccessible to the communities we wanted to reach. The average person living in a city in North America, or anywhere for that matter, shouldn’t need to have a master’s in urban planning to feel like they have the power to create change. We needed to find their voice in all this.
But, there is another side to this. Urban planning and city building is a highly exclusive and homogenous sector that doesn’t always reflect the demographic and beliefs of its constituents. So, while you shouldn’t need a master’s degree to shape the city you live in, in some ways, you kind of also do.
Ian, a prolific force in the field, knew this self-referential spiral well and has continually tried to break out of it with unexpected collaborations and uniquely-positioned projects. (Most recently, Westbank is receiving public praise for their role in Sen̓áḵw the largest development partnership with any First Nation in Canadian history.) His feedback came from experience.
We returned back to our research with the reminder that innovative ideas come as a result of diverse perspectives. Our exploration into theory had been super beneficial but we came back around to understand our strength as outsiders to this game.
Chapter 6
We returned back to our research with people, not professionals, in mind. In our second time around we found new inspirations in our research that grounded us deeper in our mission to make something meaningful for our Toronto community.
We latched onto Cornel West’s famous statement
"Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public."
And to this excerpt in the poem A Hopi Elder Speaks:
"... Where are you living? What are you doing? What are your relationships? Are you in right relation?"
We also fell in love with designer MJ Balvanera’s powerful call to action:
"Your role as designers is to platform thoughts, works and ideas by and for underrepresented communities always. No questions."
While our research is too numerous to recount here, you can view [x] to see more.
All of this thinking centered our team on the power of the people, each with their own unique emotional bond to places in their city. Our value would be in platforming those stories in a way that recontextualizes them. Through this project, we would showcase films that would not just be stories about Toronto, but of the highly specific emotional bonds we have to a place and how those connections catalyze us to act. And, ultimately, how these actions positively impact our city as a whole.
Our belief was that through platforming these deeply human, emotional connections to place, we could decenter the discipline of urban planning and placemaking and bring more people into conversations about cities and the power we all have to shape them for the better.
Chapter 7
With our strategy—our “why”—worked out, we then had to figure out our “how”. Namely, how will we find these stories and get them made?
We started by looking at existing grant programs in Toronto, and Canada as a whole. Based on our team's extensive work in producing, directing, and even starring in Canadian video work, we were well-versed in the current granting landscape. From our experience, we felt the existing programs were limited to overly complicated bureaucracy, a sense of gatekeeping, and a lack of actual funding in recent years. And, consistent with our desire to break out of the traditional mold, we wanted to reimagine what it could look like to engage with the local creative community in a way that gave them more freedom while providing a strong foundation of support and guidance.
Ultimately, we chose to build a commissioning structure from scratch, instead of basing our program on existing models. In each commission, we would create a brief description of a topic, solicit pitches from a long list of directors, and greenlight one of their films for production. We wanted to free our directors from traditional budget reporting, allow them to retain ownership of their creativity, and create a distance between funding and creative opportunity all while still ensuring we create a body of work that reflects our mission.
In parallel with that we began working with our designer, Joanie Brisebois, and our web team, 56, to bring our vision to life. Joanie focused on finding a balance between authority and play in our visual language. She landed on a whimsical character that was balanced by bold typography and an expected but organic color palette. Meanwhile, 56 was inspired to create a unique video platform that felt like the user was entering a new world. The result was a textured and immersive platform with a scrolling video menu and surprising interactive elements.
Chapter 8
In the summer of 2021 we commissioned three amazing docu-poem short films from emerging directors in Toronto. The stories showcased unique, deeply human relationships to place as the catalyst for improving the city.
Rhapsody on Pavement
Directed by Sara Hade Alfaro
Rhapsody on Pavement is an ode to a burgeoning movement. We careen on skateboards with Yumi Lee who stumbled into the into the world of skating. Her experience speaks to the realities of exploring a city through your skateboard, expressing identity in a changing world, and making space for yourself by redefining your city, all while trying to land a sick kickflip.
Sara Jade Alfaro
Sara Jade Alfaro
Sara Jade Alfaro is a director, writer and producer based in Toronto, ON. She grew up in Oshawa, Ontario where most of her childhood friends were over seventy years old and GM pensioners, and where her family was the first family of colour on the block. She uses sharp wit and whimsey to tell stories with honest and real truths, for audiences of all ages. Sara enjoys integrating cultural narratives and comedy into her work, finding ways to explore both her cultural backgrounds – Middle eastern and Latina- within a contemporary Canadian landscape.
Sara is on the board of directors at the Weengushk Film Institute on Manitoulin Island and is also currently the Head of Production at Merchant Toronto working alongside Tim Godsall and Executive Producer Ian Webb where they make award- winning commercials, PSAs, music videos and the occasional weird experimental film
A Hundred Joys
Directed by Amanda Min Wong
"A Hundred Joys" is a film about the main intersection of Toronto’s East Chinatown, a community whose stores spread out onto the streets.
Within its seemingly small area, it shares an important history of entrepreneurship in the face of migration and dispossession. When the expropriation of the original downtown Chinatown began in the 1950s, Chinese businesses were forced to relocate. The city of Toronto was adamant to push them out from the area, and more than two thirds of the area was subsequently razed from existence. Many Chinese and Vietnamese Canadians migrated to Toronto’s east end, initially forming around a Chinese butcher shop on Broadview Avenue.
This documentary pairs cinematic impressions of the East Chinatown neighbourhood alongside interviews with neighbourhood residents and business owners, giving voice to their experiences of community, identity, anxieties, and hopes for the future.
Amanda Min Wong
Amanda Min Wong
Amanda Ann-Min Wong (she/they) is a Toronto-based film director, writer, sound artist, and musician. Her work explores themes of loss, nostalgia, and memory, as well as finding purpose and community through the arts. Her short films have screened internationally and have been nominated for awards such as the Golden Sheaf Award at Yorkton, Best Canadian Short Award at VAFF, and the Iris Prize in Cardiff, Wales. She has also previously worked in television research and production. In 2021, she was a member of Inside Out Film Festival's Canadian Jury.
In her free time, Amanda loves rocking out with her band, cutsleeve. Their debut EP "the parts we could not abandon released" in 2020 to critical acclaim.
444 Dupont
Directed by Good Luck Studio
“414 Dupont” tells the story of Dupont and Howland, an enduring corner of community in Toronto’s Annex neighborhood. Through the passionate words of restaurateurs Aman Patel and Anthony Rose we learn about the building’s evolution - once the revered Indian Rice Factory, it has since transformed into local favourite, Fat Pasha. By weaving together family portraits and scenes from a changing neighbourhood, the film explores freedom of culinary expression, sense of service, and love of family as common threads which prevail within the space today.
“414 Dupont” tells the story of Dupont and Howland, an enduring corner of community in Toronto’s Annex neighborhood. Through the passionate words of restaurateurs Aman Patel and Anthony Rose we learn about the building’s evolution - once the revered Indian Rice Factory, it has since transformed into local favourite, Fat Pasha. By weaving together family portraits and scenes from a changing neighbourhood, the film explores freedom of culinary expression, sense of service, and love of family as common threads which prevail within the space today.
Good Luck Studio
Good Luck Studio
Mica Daniels (she/her) and Sise Drummond (she/her) are the creative team behind Good Luck, a Canadian short form content studio that works to uplift brands, communities and emerging artists. Together, they write, direct and produce mixed media projects that aim to explore humanity, nostalgia and nature. Their dream is to one day transform a vintage ice cream truck into a mobile production office and drive it across the country. https://www.instagram.com/goodluckstudio.co/
We felt these films represented the cross section of stories we wanted to dive into in Toronto. They center the connection between people and place, bring the viewer into the emotional connection while explaining how the subject(s) of the film can offer insight into the ways that Toronto, and cities in general, can evolve for the better.
Chapter 9
Looking to the future, we are building on the strong foundational partnership with Westbank that allowed us to create the building blocks of LibraryLab. This partnership supported our experimental approach to brand partnerships that was not quite philanthropy or marketing but sat somewhere in between, with a strong focus on community. Now we see an opportunity to partner with organizations that will allow us to reach a bigger audience and invest in the experimental nature of this project while also shaping it themselves.
LibraryLab is a template, a format for a new type of community engagement and social initiative. And we are excited to share that we are looking for partners who also want to find new ways to impact their local, or global, communities. Are you an innovative and ambitious organization who wants to break the mold of community, consumer and audience engagement and empower creatives to make great work that shapes the world? Give us a call.