photo : ryan tan

The Junction Maker District is an imagined and developed theoretical project in The Junction — a mixed-use industrial neighbourhood in Toronto. As in many North American cities, pockets of industrial sites — zoned employment lands — are being re-zoned and converted to market-rate condos. This move prices housing and available workspace out of the reach of the working and creative class.

The way we live our lives, use our homes and envision our workplaces is changing. Single-use zoning is a basic model that has not evolved to create appropriate solutions for today’s increasingly complex cities.

The Junction Maker District explores what happens to a neighbourhood if a portion of the employment lands are re-zoned and re-purposed to a “live/work/make” zoning, where domestic space is encouraged to legally co-exist in proximity to light manufacturing space. This “maker” zoning could keep creative entrepreneurs in the city, as it provides fertile ground for small businesses to flourish in an age of an increasingly dominant corporations.

The hope is this re-envisioned combination of domestic and work space can provide vital and needed opportunity for “affordable housing,”affordable entrepreneurship,” and an invested, equitable, and sustainable form of community and city building.

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