Today, Artscape launched a new campaign called Vision 2011: Thinking Big About Culture-led Regeneration aka A Roadmap for Toronto’s Future.
Now, we may all have our own personal roadmaps for Toronto’s future, but as recent problems with the OMB, and ongoing ones with the TTC, demonstrate the key is to combine all those personal roadmaps into something we can all agree on. Not an easy task, by any means.
The main thrust of what Artscape is proposing — you can see if it matches up with your own wee grid — is aggressive expansion of creative spaces and places in Toronto. From talking to Tim Jones, CEO of Artscape, that seems to mean laying down 650,000 square feet of studio and live-work space for artists in the next five years. This includes the 60,000 sq ft Green Arts Barns project, an expanded 200,000 sq ft project at their Liberty Village HQ, 70,000 sq ft at Givins Shaw School, and some property development in Weston/Mount Dennis. Jones also says Artscape is “in talks” to get a handle on some kind of property in the contested Queen West Triangle, as well as on the waterfront. Finally, it looks like they will be locked in in some way with the redevelopment of the Guild Inn site in Scarborough.
What do you think? Astigmatism? Myopia? Just needs some Visine? I think it’s pretty brave.
Image from Artscape Vision 2011.
3 comments
Hi. Thanks for posting this info on artscape.
But I hate to bring that excruciating post/debate up again (it’s bothered me since…), but I’d say your use as comic foil of people with eye disabilities is more overt and direct an “affront” than the anti-women, or more far fetched, anti-queer, issues you interpreted in those Toronto cultural ads a few weeks ago.
I think i can understand you’re writing myopia and astigmatism and crosseyed in jest, and that’s just fine, just as those ads were in jest and lighthearted.
It’s ok to be lighthearted about things, just as those ads were. It works both and all ways, and here you employ what they were employing, and may be we don’t have to read so deep into things. So there’s no need for outrage.
Anyway, the weston development is exciting!
Hey Julia,
Thanks for your thoughts.
I think that I’m going to leave my views on offensiveness, potential or actual, in the “agree to disagree” frame of being for now. I can’t rescind my feelings, though I can examine them, and I can ask others to do the same. But for now… yeah, I’m glad Artscape is branching out too!
L
Sorta glad I missed something. In the enthusiasm for what the artocrats are doing, I wonder about how we can go through multi-millions in the carbarns project where artists really aren’t but we didn’t manage to buy the 48Abell building and it’s 100,000 sq ft of existing arts community and solid building.