Architecture: Three ways we can make the most of our cities’ unused nooks and crannies

By Alex Bozikovic
The Globe and Mail, May 6, 2015

The bottom of a highway overpass. An empty field under a rail line. A parking lot next to a bus stop. If you’re going to transform the contemporary city, these spots are not obvious places to begin. And yet a recent ideas competition turned the attention of almost 300 designers to just such marginal places.

(Image: Undersky by Jorge Sanfulgencio, Julio Romero)

“These are the kind of spaces in between that are often overlooked,” explains Amery Calvelli, a co-founder of the non-profit d.talks, which ran the Calgary-based Lost Spaces Found competition. By focusing on these fragments of public space, the effort suggests that small-scale changes really can make large impacts on the culture and ecology of a space. “The idea was to really stretch how we think about the city,” Calvelli says. Read more…