Welcome to Mabelle Park

Imagining a Place where everyone belongs

In Spring 2023, Mabelle Arts broke ground on a vision over fourteen years in the making. Thanks to substantial contributions from all levels of government and an exciting range of private foundations and corporations we successfully raised over $3.5 million dollars. In October 2024 we opened the reimagined Mabelle Park to the community.

Mabelle Arts is reimagining what Canadian parks can do and be

Mabelle Park is the first park in Canada designed to respond to the unique needs and desires of residents living together in a high density, low-income tower community. Together we are charting a new course for park use and redefining the role of public space in low-income communities.

Mabelle Avenue is a historically underserved, high density, low-income inner-suburban neighbourhood in Central Etobicoke, Ontario. Four of the seven rental towers lining the block are owned and operated by Toronto Community Housing - the second largest landlord in North America. The block is highly diverse and majority-racialized with a strong Muslim population from Somalia, South Asia and the Middle East. Over the past three years, the block has seen rapid densification with multiple new developments, which has made our work at Mabelle Arts all the more relevant. We see our organization as a bridge between residents and cultures and believe that now, more than ever, our neighbours need space to meet one another and become friends.

Mabelle Park Community Use Framework

Developed through a series of playful community conversations with over 200 Mabelle residents led by our intrepid team of architects and therapeutic clowns (sshhhmarchitects!).

A place to connect with nature

Mabelle Park is a vitally needed greenspace in a rapidly densifying neighbourhood. Residents have described it as a refuge and place to connect with nature. Design interventions must consider the natural environment and how residents will connect with plants, animals, land, water, fire and air.

A place to work

The park is situated in a low-income community. Design decisions reflect this and new park infrastructure supports local economic development.

A place to build relationships

The park must serve our diverse community with opportunities to come together and connect across real and perceived differences. Large scale community events bring people together and smaller workshops offer opportunities to connect, relax, and create.

A place to give and receive care

Maintaining park elements with regularity offers opportunities to connect and give back. Ongoing care and maintenance like gardening, caring for trees, maintaining furniture, cleaning and garbage collection are all potential economic opportunities for residents.

Introducing The Belle!

The Belle and the surrounding park are models for social and cultural innovation, designed to bolter community and collective resiliency within a densely populated neighbourhood. As a sculptural beacon, The Belle enhances Mabelle Avenue’s architectural and ecological landscape, inviting people from all directions with its tall roofs and shimmering shingles that draw in residents from the neighbouring towers.

The distinctive skin of the building is clad completely in aluminum shingles. Both durable and affordable, this material was selected to withstand the day-to-day wear and tear of a public park while providing a unique appearance and identity for the building in the community. A flawless installation elevates this simple material to an intricately woven metal quilt wrapping the building. With no trim pieces on corners and continues patterns folding from plane to plane The Belle comes together as a seamless form, its metallic skin catching the light and reflecting the natural foliage that surrounds it.

Putting low-income, racialized people at the centre

Cultural institutions across the country are at a crossroads, grappling with the aftermath of Covid-19; climate change and a call to examine how systemic racism has held Canadians back. The Belle takes a new approach by imagining cultural space as social infrastructure - we’re putting our low-income, racialized community members at the centre and designing a space that provides opportunities for self-expression, cultural reclamation, collaboration across difference and local employment.

Connecting to culture, nature, care and each other

An innovative approach to landscape design improves circulation and accessibility while introducing further naturalization to Mabelle Park. Residents of all ages are welcomed into the park to care for the over 1200 new native plants introduced this year. Ongoing park maintenance and community art and nature programs reconnect participants to the natural world, leading to increased mental and physical health.

Impact

1

Mabelle Park serves as a social and cultural innovation model for dense, urban housing projects across North America.

2

Mabelle Park represents a new kind of social infrastructure - one that can more nimbly respond to community needs and desires and increase collective resiliency.

3

Etobicoke has been deemed a “cultural desert” by OCAD University. Mabelle Park and The Belle bring vitally needed cultural space to over 365,000 Etobicoke residents.

4

Mabelle Arts hires Toronto Community Housing tenants as casual workers and staff. Since 2007, over $830,000 has gone back to the community as wages and honoraria. The new Mabelle Park is creating additional opportunities for hiring community members - increasing economic opportunities for residents.

5

Our work builds social capital. The pandemic showed us that connected neighbours make resilient communities. As our neigbourhood rapidly densifies, Mabelle Park brings diverse neighbours together across real and perceived differences to continue supporting and caring for one another.

6

Park beautification and public space engagement decreases crime and improves community safety. Compared to other neighbourhoods, Mabelle Park has experienced little to no vandalism. Community members are proud of their park. Their constant eyes on the street decreases crime on Mabelle Avenue.

Meet the Creative Team

  • Prime Architects and Project Managers

    LGA Architectural Partners is a skilled team of architects and building scientists based out of Toronto who create sustainable, contextually-sensitive and socially-minded architecture.

    Find out more about LGA here.

  • SHIFT is an award winning landscape architecture and urban design firm that views design as a change agent and generator of possibilities.

    Find out more about SHIFT here.

  • Mabelle Park Transformation Constructor

    Find out more about Desar Construction Studio here.

  • Indigenous Knowledge Keeper and Lead Artist (Outdoor Kitchen)

    Born in Winnipegosis, Manitoba, Val spent the most meaningful part of her childhood in the bush chasing foxes and pelicans with her Grandfather, a conservation officer. She draws from a background of photography, engineering, design, theatre, music, travel, and work with other indigenous peoples. Her cultural heritage makes her feel that she has a license to investigate all forms of art. Val has also been a (traditional) drum-carrier for 40+ years and teaches cultural arts. These workshops have been held throughout Manitoba, Scotland and Latin America. One notable public artwork, Education is the New Bison, a 12-foot bison made up of 200 steel replicas of books is installed at Niizhoziibean at The Forks. Val joined Mabelle Arts in 2019 as artist in residence in Mabelle Park to teach and plan with local youth and co-build a woven natural fence around the garden’s perimeter.

    Find out more about Val here.

  • Lead Artists - Community Table

    Formally the Black Speculative Arts Movement Canada (BSAM Canada), OddSide Arts empowers, elevates, and evolves outlets of representation for artists of Black African and Afro-Caribbean descent who push imaginative boundaries of Blackness within the arts and education industries.

    Find out more about OddSide Arts here.

  • Lead Artist - Fountain

    Shaheer Zazai is a Toronto-based Afghan-Canadian artist with a current studio practice both in painting and digital media. His practice focuses on exploring and attempting to investigate the development of cultural identity in the present geopolitical climate and diaspora.

    Find out more about Shaheer here.

Our Capital Supporters

What We Do

Build Relationships

Mabelle Arts brings people together across real and perceived differences to do something together. We prioritise doing over talking and focus on fun and creative projects with tangible impacts, including economic opportunities for the people who take part. By doing things together, we move from being strangers to becoming neighbours and friends. The resulting social capital knits people together to celebrate in good times and band together when times are tough.

Co-Create and Transform

Strong neighbourhood leadership built over time shapes ideas and projects that evolve into opportunities for community members. The best of these become permanent social infrastructure (community places and networks) that foster community connection and resiliency.

Respond and Change

Mabelle Arts is always changing and we love it that way. By remaining responsive to each other, the neighbourhood and world around us we are better able to meet the challenges and opportunities of daily life on Mabelle Avenue.

Mabelle Arts unlocks the creative potential of the neighbourhood

At Mabelle Arts we view our work as a reciprocal process. Everyone involved at Mabelle Arts, from TCHC tenants, professional artists to Etobicoke neighbours, has something to teach and learn.

Art making and public space transformation is the fertile ground through which this learning takes place. Life stories, imagery and themes are shared across immense differences, under the guidance of skilled artists and others. What results is knowledge, understanding and community connection where there was isolation, and a sense of shared power where there was powerlessness.

Our Pandemic Story: A Roadmap to Community Resiliency

Covid-19 showed us how essential our park can be! By teaming up with community leaders, partners and Toronto Community Housing, we’ve been able to use our park as a staging ground for vital food security programming that is supporting over 600 households on Mabelle Avenue through challenging times.

“Historically pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew.  This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.”  

- Arundhati Roy

For Mabelle Arts this pandemic was a portal

The pandemic showed us that connected communities are resilient communities. By co-creating vibrant social infrastructure with local residents, Mabelle Arts is redefining the role that art can play in our neighbourhoods.

We have always believed that artists are creators of worlds

Artists and the art we make offer new ways of seeing, being and doing. Community-engaged arts in particular offers moments to rewrite the story and imagine a different ending, together and in real time.

Together, we can build what we need

To imagine a new world where neighbours become friends and the deep, seemingly intractable challenges that face us become community opportunities that change us for the better.

Theory of Change

Woven together, these ingredients become the social infrastructure that supports community connection, ownership and care.

Relationships

Strong relationships between peopleand places builds shared power, a placeto stand together and an ability to support one another.

Art

Artmaking brings people together to do something fun, surprising and great. It gives us a chance to make instant change; to co-create something that has never existed before and to see things (and each other) in new ways.

Programs

Programs develop out of arts-based activities, experimental projects and shared learning. Together with community members and partners we respond to the problems we see with our artist minds and explore new opportunities to make our community better.

Places

Together we co-create places that respond to community needs and desires; reflect local cultures and concerns and welcome people across real and perceived differences.