Group wants to light up laneways
Fundraising effort underway to start installing lights this summer into Toronto’s vast network of alleys and underused spaces
While the future may be bright, Michelle Senayah says the present is dim for people walking and cycling through Toronto’s laneways.
Toronto Hydro provides patchy light- ing throughout the network of 2,400 laneways across the city, but community advocates like Senayah say the lights are designed for cars, not people.
“Cars obviously come with their own headlights,” said the executive director of The Laneway Project, a non-profit organization working to revitalize the city’s tiny, underutilized spaces.
“If you walk into a laneway at night, you’ll see pools of light along the laneway but also dark or underlit areas in between, which makes it feel kind of unsafe as a pedestrian.”
Senayah is leading the charge to make laneways more pedestrian friendly.
LANEWAYS continued on GT7
With the support of local residents’ associations, BIAs, city councillors and developers, the organization has launched the Light Up the Laneways initiative.
Two laneways have already been identified for a pilot experiment: a 200-metre laneway in the Ossington area and a100metre laneway in the Bloordale neighbourhood. A fundraising campaign is underway, and depending on the amount of funds available by this summer, the plan is to install wallmounted solar LED porch lights, hard-wired LED sconces or programmable LED fixtures.
“This will be ambient lighting, not like targeted harsh light,” said Senayah, noting the overarching goal is to add to the beauty and character of a laneway. “Lighting is what makes a space either appealing or kind of not so nice to be in.”
Toronto’s laneways have the potential to do more than improve walkability and host public art. Last year, city staff started considering a policy that would give homeowners clear guidelines to build secondary suites on laneways to ease housing woes — something cities such as Vancouver and Ottawa have already started implementing.
The Laneway Project also recently introduced an initiative to bring cycling infrastructure to laneways in order to give cy- clists more options.
While the laneway-lighting effort is unprecedented in Toronto, Senayah said they found inspiration in other cities across the world.
Melbourne in Australia, for example, has a network of shops along laneways, and shop owners have added porch lighting to complement municipal lights.
Montreal has a green laneways program, with a lighting component run in partnership between local communities and the city.
In Vancouver, laneway housing projects have allowed homeowners to add lighting to what’s provided by the municipality.
“From our perspective trying to get pedestrian-friendly lighting into laneways, it’s actually more efficient to do this in partnership with local private-sector and community members,” said Senayah, noting the fundraising campaign will bring a sense of community ownership and more transparency.
Benj Hellie of the Ossington Community Association said the grassroots effort will bring an additional layer of creativity to the neighbourhood and make it feel “personalized.”
“People want something more inviting in their neighbourhood,” he said. “This is about businesses and individuals thinking about building a city that works better for themselves.”