This coming May will mark our fifth installment of the Toronto The Good party. Back in 2005, Spacing teamed up with ERA Architects and murmur to produce the event in hopes of fostering a greater appreciation of Toronto’s built heritage while bringing together a mix of people from various professional backgrounds. Since the inaugural event, we’ve added other partners like the Toronto Society of Architects, Wireless Toronto, and Heritage Toronto and made the event one of the most popular during the Festival of Architecture and Design held each May. The event has been hosted once at Fort York and three other times at the Fermenting Cellar in the Distillery District. We are currently working on the 2009 location with details to come soon.
We’ve programmed the evening with different themes and games, with the most popular activity being our giant map of Toronto — eight feet high and eighteen feet wide. We ask attendees a question like “where is the heart of Toronto?” and have them place a sticker on the map identifying their preferred location (see photos above and below). The only catch is that the map shows buildings and green spaces, but no street names. It forces people to look at the map in a different manner — in order to find your desired spot you need to understand Toronto in a deeper way by being able to recognize the unique qualities of intersections, like a curve in the road or the shape of specific buildings.
The map also encourages people to talk to the stranger standing beside them, something totally un-Torontonian.
For the last two years, the kind folks from Wireless Toronto have provided us with an interactive feature that allows anyone to text a message to a displayed phone number and have that text projected onto the wall within a few seconds (see photo below). The messages can be provocative, poetic, and, um, immature. Of course, things get a little silly the later the night goes, thanks to the wine and the folks from Mill Street Brewery.
We’re making preparations for the 2009 edition of Toronto The Good. We want to hear from you what kind of programming and activities you’d like to see this year. We’ll definitely have the giant map and hopefully the texting game again, but what other fun things can we add to the event?
photos by Yvonne Bambrick
17 comments
The texting thing is a cool idea… maybe something involving twitter?
Perhaps have a projected screen of anything on twitter tagged with #torontothegood?
Here’s the #toronto tag, for example.
Great event idea! I hope to make it out this year(*been living in Sudbury for the past few years)
I’d like to contribute very much to this discussion but because i’m at work, i have priorities(boo) I’ll try to follow up soon and contribute.
Regards,
*Oops.. i should add that i’m not living in sudbury now, but parkdale(haha)
How about:
– An indoor “street food” fair, where local folks can show off and sell all the great food we could/should be selling from carts on the streets of Toronto;
– Inviting the people who did knit-in during Nuit Blanche, which created a giant knit Toronto. Maybe there can be a special commission for the event;
– Bicycle-powered stuff;
– A [murmur] station to record stories on the spot relating to Toronto the Good parties and the connections people make these kind of events;
– Being the five year anniversary, how about some kind of “Five years from now…” visioning exercise – charette style with paper and plain old markers, or texts, or building blocks, cut out pieces of felt city infrastructure, chalk and chaldboard, whatever. Have people suggest ideas on the city they want to see in five years and what they/we can do to reach that goal. Over the course of the night, the crowd would build a collective plan for making Toronto a better place. I see a horizontal flow chart with lots of arrows…
What I’d like is for conflicts of interest to be declared for once – e.g., if somebody who works for Spacing also works for ERA and ERA is a sponsor, that’s a conflict of interest. Now, I’m accustomed to Spacers’ acting like the Mafia and just ignoring such conflicts, because obviously you’re just one big happy family that hires each other and puts on swell parties, but some of us would prefer a more ethical approach.
Since many design / architecture firms don’t have a ton of work at the moment, what about inviting a few “up and coming” offices to do proposals for improving the city, along the lines of the recent thinkToronto competition, but more focused on the infrastructure and design aspects?
That’s a great idea, archinista.
Joe seems to ignore that each time I do a post that involves ERA I mention I do occasional web site work for them. Its in my bio too for the world to see. We’ve gone through this before but Joe has selective memory issues when it comes to Spacing and his critiques. But I find it rich to have to declare a conflict of interest over a party! We know Joe has a sense of humour, so we can only chalk his request up to that. Good one!
Remember those dudes that built the faux streetscape…get them to design the party. Each storefront representing one of the sponsors…and if you need someone to light it, I know a guy 🙂
Something involving Twitter seems a given.
Perhaps have a tug of war competition between BlogTO, Spacing, Torontoist and Urban Toronto. 😉
And the Cyclist Union…but they have to do the tug of war on bicycles!
I propose a “Toronto Heritage appreciation” t-shirt contest to be voted on during the party. The winning design get’s city-wide recognition(and a little money)
Projected???
It would be cooler to have the text messages sprayed on the Distillery walls in fluorescent colours.
http://www.thegreeneyl.com/appeel
Everybody loves stickers.
The Toronto Cyclists Union will definitely be there! We’re thinking of proposing GoldSprints stationary bike races – not quite a tug of war on bikes, but close 😉
Yvonne, you might want to reconsider the tug-of-war. It’s such a bad idea that you’ll likely have the honour of being the first people to try it. There’s got to be something to that…
No, I take Blackett’s employment, and attendant conflicts of interest, with deadly seriousness. Somebody has to, since he clearly isn’t.
The condescension never ceases to amaze me. But thanks for your invaluable ideas to this party.