Developing a Public Realm Vision for Pickering City Centre

All great designs start with a vision. And some of the very best visions for complex designs that need to account for multiple objectives often develop their focus in a collaborative, collegial environment that involves different perspectives. This is how our team worked with the City of Pickering to develop a public realm vision for Phase 1 of Pickering City Centre–a 55-acre, master planned, mixed-use community by developer CentreCourt.
 
Our combined efforts have yielded a public realm design that features imaginative pedestrian clearways, a coherent language across all street furniture types, distinctive lighting fixtures, and a material palette that will a create strong sense of place for the ambitious development, which will convert a suburban mall into a vibrant urban core and transit centre.
 
STUDIO tla is leading the design of outdoor spaces with the larger consulting team on the project, which includes (4) residential towers that will offer approximately 2,200 residential units and approximately 111,483 m² of residential and commercial density. Ensuring that all contributions to the overall design from each discipline integrates with the public realm vision is a key part of our role on the project.
 
For example, our design–through collaboration with BA Consulting Group Ltd. and adherence to the City’s urban design vision–will promote an active transportation system in Pickering City Centre through a network of paths and mid-block connections that encourages pedestrian porosity to make moving through the development safe and efficient for community residents.
 
Collaborating with Diamond Schmitt, we aligned the design language between the interior ground-level workspaces and outdoor spaces to allow people to move freely between indoor and outdoor environments.