To reach Evergreen Brick Works, visitors typically walk to a subway station, hop on a train, and transfer to a shuttle bus. This multi-modal transit trip is a fitting prelude to a tour of MOVE: The Transportation Expo, an exhibit exploring the past, present, and future of transportation in cities, currently on display at the Brick Works Kilns Building.
The exhibit, presented by Evergreen and the Institute without Boundaries, investigates key transportation issues in Canada and abroad and offers ideas, both innovative and imaginative, on how to connect people and places in more sustainable ways.
Incorporating a variety of mediums — including animated film, photos, video interviews, graphic displays, and models — MOVE is able to condense an incredible breadth of information into an exhibit that is both lucid and engaging.
The narrow brick hallways of the Kilns Building are transformed into interactive presentations. To highlight the current challenges related to urban transportation, both locally and globally, a corridor is transformed into a “subway” with windows opening onto photos and data highlighting pressing issues, passengers on video screens discussing impacts, and advertisements above to display promising remedies, currently available.
Winding the corner leads you to the children’s area, delineated by a beautiful structure that mimics an overturned canoe, complete with mini street sign stools and transportation themed wooden toys and blocks made by local toy designers.
After revisiting our transportation past and understanding our present situation, the exhibit turns towards the future. Focusing on five overlapping themes — Energy, Land Use, Infrastructure, Health, and Environment — MOVE explores sustainable transportation solutions for our shared urban future. Exhibit pieces present the outcomes of a series of charrettes held last fall to engage a diversity of students and professionals in addressing ten key transportation challenges facing the world today.
“How can we use nature’s corridors to move through the city?” “How can we encourage active transportation in the suburbs?” “How can we revolutionize the auto industry?” The answers to these questions are explored in a series of panels, projections, maps, and models, focused on the GTA context.
The results are fascinating, combining innovative thought and local experience with lessons learned from international best practices.
“The Parkway of Least Resistance” explores the question, “How can we use nature’s corridors to move through the city?” Using the Don Valley as a case study, the charrette group proposes a radical new movement pattern for both people and goods through the area that aims to reconcile “conflicts between the highway and the natural systems that encompass it.” By removing auto traffic completely and adding a new rapid busway, the plan facilitates both improved pedestrian connection and access to recreation space while remediating the river bed and preserving a natural corridor in the Don Valley.
Shifting the focus towards infrastructure, both social and physical, “Reconnect the Disconnect” begins with the question of how to connect isolated communities through accessible transportation networks, using the Kingston-Galloway community in Scarborough as a case study. The project explores the roots of Kingston-Galloway’s social, economic, and geographic isolation and proposes measures to improve connections and quality of life. Inspired by the East Scarborough Storefront, recommendations combine urban planning with community engagement and include transit extensions and shuttles, mixed use transit node development, and improvements to the public realm through streetscape design.
The responses to the challenges are incredibly diverse and inspiring, bringing solutions to global issues into a recognizable local context. And the physical set-up of the exhibit, utilizing existing features of the Kilns Building to present information in visually interesting ways, adds to the appeal. The Brick Works is the perfect venue for this exhibit, as its industrial heritage and innovative revitalization and programming exemplify the same ideals of progress through sustainability as highlighted in the MOVE Expo.
MOVE: The Transportation Expo is on display at Evergreen Brick Works through October 28. It is, without a doubt, worth a visit.
Editor’s note: Spacing is a media sponsor of MOVE: The Transportation Expo
One comment
Definitely worth a visit. Superb location and a fantastic exhibition.