Welcome to

MABELLEpark

Imagining a Place

where everyone belongs.

This Spring, MABELLEarts breaks ground on a vision over fourteen years in the making. An investment of over $1.3 million from the City of Toronto combined with over $700,000 from the Federal Government and gifts from committed partners brings us over two thirds of the way to our $3 million goal. Join us as together we make this dream a reality!

MABELLEarts is reimagining what Canadian parks can do and be.

MABELLEpark is the first park in Canada designed to respond to the unique needs and desires of residents living together in a high density, low-income tower community. Together we are charting a new course for park use and redefining the role of public space in low-income communities.

Mabelle Avenue is a historically underserved, high density, low-income inner-suburban neighbourhood in Central Etobicoke, Ontario. Four of the seven rental towers lining the block are owned and operated by Toronto Community Housing - the second largest landlord in North America. The block is highly diverse and majority-racialized with a strong Muslim population from Somalia, South Asia and the Middle East. Over the past three years, the block has seen rapid densification with multiple new developments, which has made our work at MABELLEarts all the more relevant. We see our organization as a bridge between residents and cultures and believe that now, more than ever, our neighbours need space to meet one another and become friends.

MABELLEpark Community Use Framework

Developed through a series of playful community conversations with over 200 Mabelle residents led by our intrepid team of architects and therapeutic clowns (sshhhmarchitects!)

A place to connect with nature.

MABELLEpark is a vitally needed greenspace in a rapidly densifying neighbourhood. Residents have described it as a refuge and place to connect with nature. Design interventions must consider the natural environment and how residents will connect with plants, animals, land, water, fire and air.

A place to work.

The park is situated in a low-income community. Design decisions reflect this and new park infrastructure supports local economic development.

A place to build relationships.

The park must serve our diverse community with opportunities to come together and connect across real and perceived differences. Large scale community events bring people together and smaller workshops offer opportunities to connect, relax, and create.

A place to give and receive care.

Maintaining park elements with regularity offers opportunities to connect and give back. Ongoing care and maintenance like gardening, caring for trees, maintaining furniture, cleaning and garbage collection are all potential economic opportunities for residents.

Introducing The Belle!

Deeply responsive to community needs and desires, The Belle has been right-sized to provide flexible, indoor community space. Workshops and events, indoor/outdoor celebrations and an anticipation of future crisis and opportunity all influenced this malleable design.

Putting low-income, racialized people at the centre.

Cultural institutions across the country are at a crossroads, grappling with the aftermath of Covid-19; climate change and a call to examine how systemic racism has held Canadians back. The Belle takes a new approach by imagining cultural space as social infrastructure - we’re putting our low-income, racialized community members at the centre and designing a space that provides opportunities for self-expression, cultural reclamation, collaboration across difference and local employment.

Connecting to culture, nature, care and each other.

An innovative approach to landscape design improves circulation and accessibility while introducing further naturalization to MABELLEpark.

Complete Landscape Plan

Anticipated Impacts

  • MABELLEpark will serve as a social and cultural innovation model for dense, urban housing projects across North America.

  • The MABELLEpark represents a new kind of social infrastructure - one that can more nimbly respond to community needs and desires and increase collective resiliency.

  • Etobicoke has been deemed a “cultural desert” by OCAD University. The MABELLEarts and Culture Centre brings vitally needed cultural space to over 365,000 Etobicoke residents.

  • MABELLEarts hires Toronto Community Housing tenants as casual workers and staff. Since 2007, over $500,000 has gone back to the community as wages and honoraria. Park improvements and the new building will create economic opportunities for residents.

  • Our work builds social capital. The pandemic showed us that connected neighbours make resilient communities. As our neigbourhood rapidly densifies, the MABELLEpark will bring diverse neighbours together across real and perceived differences to continue supporting and caring for one another.

  • Park beautification and public space engagement decreases crime and improves community safety.

 Another World

 is Possible.

   Help us build it in MABELLEpark.

$1,000 ↑

  • invite to community celebration honouring donors 

  • named recognition on the MABELLEarts website

$2,500 ↑

  • invite to community celebration honouring donors

  • named recognition on MABELLEarts website

  • named recognition on all social media platforms

$5,000 ↑

  • invite to community celebration honoring donors

  • named recognition on MABELLEarts website

  • named recognition on all social media platforms

  • ceramic tile on thank you wall (size -)

$25,000 ↑

  • invite to community celebration honoring donors

  • named recognition on MABELLEarts website

  • named recognition on all social media platforms

  • ceramic tile on thank you wall (size +)

  • donor profile on MABELLEarts website and all social media platforms

$75,000 ↑

  • opportunity to speak at community celebration honoring donors

  • named recognition on MABELLEarts website

  • named recognition on all social media platforms

  • ceramic tile on thank you wall (size +)

  • donor video profile on MABELLEarts website and all social media platforms

$100,000 ↑

  • opportunity to speak at community celebration honoring donors

  • named recognition on MABELLEarts website

  • named recognition on all social media platforms

  • ceramic tile on thank you wall (size +)

  • donor video profile on MABELLEarts website and all social media platforms

$500,000 ↑

  • opportunity to speak at community celebration honoring donors

  • named recognition on MABELLEarts website

  • named recognition on all social media platforms

  • ceramic tile on thank you wall (size +)

  • donor video profile on MABELLEarts website and all social media platforms

  • Onsite named recognition connected to specific park amenities for five to ten years.

Our Pandemic Story: A Roadmap to Community Resiliency

Covid-19 showed us how essential our park can be! By teaming up with community leaders, partners and Toronto Community Housing, we’ve been able to use our park as a staging ground for vital food security programming that is supporting over 600 households on Mabelle Avenue through challenging times.

For MABELLEarts this pandemic was a portal. The pandemic showed us that connected communities are resilient communities. By co-creating vibrant social infrastructure with local residents, MABELLEarts is redefining the role that art can play in our neighbourhoods.

We have always believed that artists are creators of worlds. Artists and the art we make offer new ways of seeing, being and doing. Community-engaged arts in particular offers moments to rewrite the story and imagine a different ending, together and in real time.

Now, we have the opportunity to build what we need to imagine a new world where neighbours become friends and the deep, seemingly intractable challenges that face us become community opportunities that change us for the better.

“Historically pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew.  This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.”  

- Arundhati Roy

Meet The

Creative

Team

  • LGA

    Prime Architects and Project Managers.

    LGA Architectural Partners is a skilled team of architects and building scientists based out of Toronto who create sustainable, contextually-sensitive and socially-minded architecture.

    Find out more about LGA here.

  • SHIFT Landscape Architecture

    SHIFT is an award winning landscape architecture and urban design firm that views design as a change agent and generator of possibilities.

    Find out more about SHIFT here.

  • Desar Construction Studio

    MABELLEpark Transformation Constructor.

  • Val T. Vint

    Indigenous Knowledge Keeper and Lead Artist (Outdoor Kitchen)

    Born in Winnipegosis, Manitoba, Val spent the most meaningful part of her childhood in the bush chasing foxes and pelicans with her Grandfather, a conservation officer. She draws from a background of photography, engineering, design, theatre, music, travel, and work with other indigenous peoples. Her cultural heritage makes her feel that she has a license to investigate all forms of art. Val has also been a (traditional) drum-carrier for 40+ years and teaches cultural arts. These workshops have been held throughout Manitoba, Scotland and Latin America. One notable public artwork, Education is the New Bison, a 12-foot bison made up of 200 steel replicas of books is installed at Niizhoziibean at The Forks. Val joined MABELLEarts in 2019 as artist in residence in MABELLE park to teach and plan with local youth and co-build a woven natural fence around the garden’s perimeter.

    Find out more about Val here.

  • OddSide Arts

    Lead Artists - Community Table

    Formally the Black Speculative Arts Movement Canada (BSAM Canada), OddSide Arts empowers, elevates, and evolves outlets of representation for artists of Black African and Afro-Caribbean descent who push imaginative boundaries of Blackness within the arts and education industries.

    Find out more about OddSide Arts here.

  • Shaheer Zazai

    Lead Artist - Fountain

    Shaheer Zazai is a Toronto-based Afghan-Canadian artist with a current studio practice both in painting and digital media. His practice focuses on exploring and attempting to investigate the development of cultural identity in the present geopolitical climate and diaspora.

    Find out more about Shaheer here.

MABELLEarts

unlocks the

creative potential of

the neighbourhood.

What We Do

Build Relationships.

MABELLEarts brings people together across real and perceived differences. We prioritize doing over talking and focus on creative projects that yield immediate results. Through doing, people who take part get to know one another and move from being strangers to becoming neighbours and friends.

Respond and Change.

MABELLEarts is always changing and we love it that way. By remaining responsive to each other, the neighbourhood and the landscape; we are able to meet the challenges of daily life by creating new ways of being together on Mabelle Avenue.

Co-create and Transform.

Strong relationships and resident leadership built over time shapes ideas and projects. Our initiatives evolve into permanent artworks, programs, community and social infrastructure that address community needs and desires.

At MABELLEarts we view our work as a reciprocal process. Everyone involved at MABELLEarts, from TCHC tenants, professional artists to Etobicoke neighbours, has something to teach and learn.

Art making and public space transformation is the fertile ground through which this learning takes place. Life stories, imagery and themes are shared across immense differences, under the guidance of skilled artists and others. What results is knowledge, understanding and community connection where there was isolation, and a sense of shared power where there was powerlessness.

 

Our Capital
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