Filling the gaps

There’s an art to making cities more enjoyable places to move around in – it’s called having a citywide wayfinding strategy. London, New York, and Vancouver have them, and now we’re developing one for Toronto.

Wayfinding strategies can make cities more attractive and competitive – they make them easier to navigate, encourage walking, better inform visitors, and increase transit use. And that’s exactly what Toronto is hoping to do as the city experiences a burst of new developments and gears up to host the 2015 PanAm Games.

City wayfinding makes a city’s streets, neighbourhoods and places more “legible”, encouraging walking and helping people to find their way. Wayfinding is more than signs - it includes names, maps, new media, and elements of the public realm such as lighting, street furniture and public art.

In Toronto, the CN Tower is probably the best known and most easily recognized landmark, rising over a kilometer from the heart of the city’s downtown. It’s this and other distinctive high-rise buildings that provide an intuitive understanding of the city from afar. Beyond the downtown, industrial areas are rapidly transforming into recreational, residential, and mixeduse developments. These new districts are extending the fabric of the city’s traditional neighborhoods, many of which represent the diverse international communities that made Toronto their home long ago. And, while many of the traditional neighbourhood understanding how they connect, moving between them, and linking to systems such as public transportation and the PATH underground pedestrian network is frequently challenging.

To address these issues, the City of Toronto appointed Steer Davies Gleave and local partners Dialog to deliver Phase One of their citywide wayfinding strategy, which covers research, wayfinding design principles, outline business case and delivery strategy. The strategy is constructed around a framework of five themes:

• Consistency – ensure the information hierarchy and conventions are consistently applied
• Inclusivity – cater to the needs of all user types
• Sustainability – consider whole-life cost and adaptability to change
• Transition – enable people to move seamlessly between modes, systems and areas
• Being local – celebrate and promote the city and its districts, and empower community input

An outline business case, based on a Multiple Account Evaluation, will inform the City’s decision on whether to proceed with the Phase Two pilot implementation and determines the potential return for investment for funders and delivery partners. It references international experiences to demonstrate benefits to public health, the local economy and the
urban environment. A recommendations report is due to be presented to the City Council in the fall of 2012.