DIG IN: Green Walking System WALK HERE
As a way for both the city and its citizens to stay engaged and healthy we need to ensure that we have a walkable city.
The best way to make safe, healthy, vital communities, where things get noticed, improved and celebrated is by encouraging people to walk their neighbourhhood.
WALK HERE — a community and public artwork that helps green and connect the Dupont West neighbourhood by creating an art-embedded walking system throughout the community that pulls it together as a place.
The intention is that walkway will become a source of attraction, pride and indigenous expression. This project will work with the many talented local people in the arts, crafts and trades to design and develop individual walkway sections. The walkway will become a fabric of changing original patterns and a beautiful, complicated motif reflecting the multi-cultural nature and skills of the community. It will be a unique attraction and will add a stable, individual character to a neighbourhood that is threatened by rapid change.
The walk would start along a revitalized Wallace Emerson Park and move west to Emerson Ave. connecting down to a greened Lappin Avenue, onto and across the CN railway lines, to an improved Campbell Street Park.
This walk is anchored by two massive developments now in progress or in planning stage. The Galleria Mall development now being discussed will add an addition 1400 plus families to the area and will look over the Wallace Emerson Park. The Standard development will add another 1400 plus families to the area across from Campbell Park but separated by the CN rail lines.
Revitalizing and improving access to these two parks will be vitally important in helping to accommodate these many new neighbours to ensure that they become integrated into the community. By linking the parks with a clearly signaled walkway we expand the sense of neighbourhood, create destinations for walks, courage exercise, foster relationships, keep more eyes on the streets, helping to make the area safer and more engaged.
Phase Two ensures that the walk will continues from Campbell Park down Campbell Ave. to Wallace Ave and stretches along to the Wallace CN/CP walkway rail overpass and the rail path in planning/progress along the rail lines south from the Junction to King. This would connect our neighbourhood with the downtown communities.
Phase Three will work with the Parks Department and its efforts to develop a bike path
along the hydro corridor north of Dupont that will help connect our neighbourhood to the east.
Phase Four plans to improve and connect all the parks in the area along streets that will develop greener landscapes, plant more trees and introduce traffic calming elements.
DIG IN has supplied a grant proposal for the Parks Department to start the first link of the green walking system as well as improve safety and access issues for Wallace Emerson Park. The proposal details creating a walkway that resolves safety issues in the park by the park being accessed through the Galleria’s Mall’s busy parking lot. The walkway would reconnects the park to its internal sites and the surrounding community and provides better entrance points into the park as well as becoming the first link of the green walking system. The artwork inlayed into the walkways surface will focus on activities and games providing for an enhanced appearance that will also provide an additional level of recreational park activity.
See the Walk Here Website for more information www.walkhere.org