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Wallace-Emerson Park Master Plan
Forty years ago Wallace-Emerson Park was reclaimed from a complex of industrial properties and brought to life by grassroots community leadership. This great start wasn’t enough to fully overcome the park’s overall lack of cohesion and the challenges of its inadequate public frontage. Now, with the growth of the neighbourhood and adjacent redevelopment, this humble but beloved park will be expanded and re-conceptualized with new amenities to create a true 21st Century Park shaped by and for the community.
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Location
Toronto, ON
Scope of Work
Park and Public Realm Master Plan
Project Size
7.8 acres
Role
Landscape Architecture
Client
City of Toronto
Collaborators
Perkins & Will (Community Centre Architecture)
PUBLIC WORK Design Team
Marc Ryan, Mary Liston Hicks, Asuka Kono, Ben Watt-Meyer, Niloufar Makaremi Esfarjani

PUBLIC WORK lead a highly engaging design process with the community to re-focus a discussion around high-performance park spaces that balance programmatic intensity with strong place-making and experiential quality. The process was guided by re-defining what inclusive community green space can be for an evolving neighbourhood.

PUBLIC WORK worked collaboratively with the City and the community to create a park Master Plan with 3 Distinct Areas:
The Community Heart seeks to provide hardworking social infrastructure for the neighbourhood, providing much needed flexible space shaped by and for the community. It creates a venue for an open, integrated park and Community Centre, capable of fueling community connection and inclusive, equitable public space in an all-season, indoor/outdoor social forum.

The Play Heart seeks to provide an interpretative platform for free-form play, for all ages and user groups. The Play Heart’s diverse mix of spaces—flat and flexible, sloping and sunny, quiet and canopied—provide natural gathering places for a diverse community of users, including young people, children and families.

The Nature Heart seeks to provide an ecological structure that fosters a full experience of nature for the community. The Nature Heart encourages community members to participate in the landscape as cultivators of a space that allows for fluid and organic interaction and exploration, immersed in a setting that feels green, wild, free and ecologically productive.