10 No Brainers to Make Toronto More Awesome! is a project of the Centre for City Ecology that highlights small, achievable actions at the City-level that would improve life in Toronto’s neighbourhoods, right now. A series of 10 short videos will be released on Spacing Toronto from Sept. 15-19, highlighting 10 No Brainers contributed by a diverse cast of Torontonians. The project will wrap up with a free Pop-Up Event where City Council candidates can pitch which No Brainer they’d champion at City Hall and the public can join in the conversation: October 9 in the East End.

For the second instalment of our 10 No Brainers series, we have Dave Meslin, a community choreographer, public space advocate, and Spacing co-founder, speaking about how we can reclaim our public spaces.

On commercial billboards in public space, Dave asks, “Why is someone else marking their territory the way a dog urinates on a lawn and says, ‘This is mine’? It’s an invasive species, commercial billboards.” His simple No Brainer pitches a three-step strategy to address the proliferation of advertising in public space and reassert our collective ownership of these spaces.