Eye of Mexico, a 33-foot-high sculpture by Toronto-based MASSIVart, at the Neuchâtel Polanco project in Mexico City.MASSIVart
Real estate developers around the world are increasingly looking to Canada for inspiration on public space experiments known as “creative placemaking” that attempt to fuse artistic expression, community consultations and cold, hard commerce.
“They come to us because they realize, ‘We need to do something different, and we don’t know what it is,’” said Coralie Olson, managing partner with MASSIVart a placemaking consultancy that focuses on engaging artists with public space. At speaking events in Canada or the U.S. for organizations such as the Urban Land Institute, Ms. Olson has found herself fielding more and more inquiries about her own company’s projects or those of her Canadian peers, mainly from real estate developers looking to understand how they can add “something” to a housing or office site to capture the public’s attention.
“The classic we hear a lot is The HighLine. ‘This is great, how can we create something like that!,’” Ms. Olson said of the 2.4-kilometre long elevated former railway viaduct. The structure was handed over to New York by CSX Transportation in 2005 after local groups agitated to retain the chunk of unused infrastructure. It became an international tourist draw when it reopened as a linear park in 2009.
“When you’re thinking about a new master-planned community or a mixed-use development, it’s really competitive, and you need to stand out,” she said. Figuring out how to do that is no paint-by-numbers exercise. “It’s more than just dropping art in for art’s sake. You’ve got to go beyond that. This is a vehicle to help create that sense of place through art and culture.”
One of MASSIVart’s signature projects was the Eye of Mexico, a massive 33-foot-high sculpture at the Neuchâtel Polanco mixed-use project in Mexico City developed by Montreal-based Ivanhoé Cambridge. The sculpture uses AI to generate and project constantly evolving videos. It’s become one of those “Instagrammable” sites that tourists snap themselves next to, and since its installation in 2022 has appeared as a backdrop for numerous commercials and other media in Mexico.
The other question developers often have is more prosaic: is it worth it?
“I have to figure that question out all the time; how do we keep justifying what we’re doing,” said Mitchell Marcus, executive director of site activation and programming for Northcrest Development’s redevelopment of the massive 370-acre Downsview Airport lands. Mr. Marcus is effectively the “Placemaker in Chief” for the project. The redevelopment is planned to take 30 years, and will likely cost billions of dollars to complete. Northcrest CEO Derek Goring is a booster of the placemaking concept and Mr. Marcus has been collecting data on the potential return on investment.
Some of the data speak to the impact of the multiyear and multidisciplinary placemaking ideas. By his count, in its first year of programming, perhaps 100,000 people visited the site, now branded YZD. In 2025, the number of visitors is on track to pass one million. Mr. Marcus keeps track of media coverage and is attempting to evaluate what it would cost to achieve the same “earned media reach” with paid advertising. He also says that community engagement work, such as signing up 20,000 people to come for events and workshops on storytelling, pottery, painting and sustainable fashion (happening in April and May of this year), will generate goodwill and perhaps speed up approvals for future phases of the project.
A functional art installation at The Amazing Brentwood just outside Vancouver.Amrin Prasad/Amrin Prasad
An annual event called Play on the Runway has been one growing success. “You’re completely isolated from cars on this unobstructed 2.4-kilometres of crazy-wide linear space. We had kite flyers, bicycles for 30 people, dogs on scooters,” said Mr. Marcus. Starting on June 14, as part of the Luminato art festival, the site will host an installation called Runway Rivers by Toronto artist John Notten. Visitors will ride huge, wheeled canoes that will be piloted down a course that’s been painted on the runway to represent some of the lost rivers of Toronto. It’s just one of a number of installations called Beyond the Tarmac that will let visitors explore the runway, which has now been added to the site’s master-plan as a permanent fixture for the future community’s use.
Mr. Marcus is not your typical real estate guy. He was the founding artistic director and chief executive officer of the not-for-profit Musical Stage Company for almost 20 years (during which he also ran events for Canada’s Dora Awards, Luminato and The Hilary Weston Writer’s Trust Prize for Nonfiction).
“My specialty was indoor and ticketed, then COVID happened and indoor-ticketed got shut down,” he said. But he was blown away by how arts programming flourished – by necessity – in outdoor settings. “In the theatre world, we were always talking about diversifying our audiences. When we opened up a hangar for roller-skating [at Downsview], I couldn’t tell you what the dominant background was. This actually feels like Toronto; it truly is for everybody when it’s in public space. There’s a sense of belonging and welcome.”
MASSIVart supported a 2022 study by Toronto Metropolitan University, A New Bottom Line: The Value & Impact of Placemaking, that suggested there were benefits beyond just good vibes.
The study of 586 people attending programmed and unprogrammed events found that 74 per cent were likely to share information about a placemaking site, essentially putting a numerical value to the “buzz factor.” Other studies have found that people’s interest in visiting a space could be boosted by as much as 50 per cent if there was some placemaking effort behind it.
According to Ms. Olson, the artistic mission of MASSIVart founder and CEO Phillippe Demers has always been tied together with the commercial.
“It really started with the fact that he had a lot of friends who were artists and didn’t see how they could make a commercial living,” she said, given the limited avenues for exposure for emerging creators in the traditional art world. “How can we bring art outside of the classic institutions; incorporate it into everyday spaces? It evolved into this opportunity to expand into creative placemaking.”
As a vote of confidence in the Canadian approach, the second-ever Global Placemaking Summit (presented by the organizations Placemaking Canada and PlacemakingX) will take place in Toronto this summer, beginning June 8.