What is the People’s Queen Street Initiative?
The People’s Queen Street project was initiated by EN Consulting Group as a response to questions of how we use our streets and public realm. In a response to call from Evergreen who were launching the citizen engagement initiative 100in1Day in Toronto, we designed and planned public space intervention on Queen Street West in Toronto, that turned a parking layby into a pop-up park in June 2014. With a strong response from that initiative we organized a number of further activities over the course of two years: re-staging the Queen West Park in 2015, a public interpretive walk of the 14 kilometre run of Queen Street (East and West), a temporary park in Toronto’s Corktown neighbourhood during the 2015 Pan Am Games in collaboration with the members of the Corktown Residents and Business Association, and day long charette that sought to re-imagine Queen Street, at the Centre for Social Innovation in Toronto. In dialogue with the Queen West BIA, work on this initiative was put on hiatus while significant on the road and streetcar track work was undertaken on Queen Street and subsequent to the launch of the nearby (now permanent) King Street Transit Pilot program. Given the strong positive response to our work on this project we are in the early planning stages of launching a new phase in 2020.