ABANDON TIMMIES CUPS:
SOCIAL INTERACTIONS & CONTROL AND APPROPRIATION OF SPACE
ARCH4016 Cultural Sustainability
Casey Ouellette, Brook-Lynn Roy, Cat Daigle
TIM HORTON PARKING LOTS
“..all too often, the custodians of public spaces ... have opted for the lowest common denominator when making design and landscaping choices: grass, a few sports courts, some benches, and picnic tables, and maybe a piece of public art or a flower bed.” —John Lorinc
SITES OF STUDY
New Sudbury, Hanmer, & Downtown
In an aim to capture the entirety of Sudbury Ontario's public spatial usage and designed environments, the urban context of 3 separate Tim Horton parking lots has been analyzed through a socially inclusive lens.
The integration of key design principles demonstrating the characteristics of what defines a social space and how they influence the way in which users will experience the site can be broken down into a series of categories responding to their surrounding site context, surface materials of choice, green space integration - or lack of,
objects and other programmatic elements, and demographics for the given area.
The idea of a Tim Hortons restaurant is well known, and the inclusion of a parking lot is more or less a given, where the overall concept offers a sense of comfort and community to each location. Sudbury holds a very horizontal manner of dealing with vehicle traffic, and the problem lies not in storage but in where these large flat asphalted areas take over what public spaces could be available to inhabit other programs. As users and designers,
we need to take a step back
and put the car second.
