Name: How public spaces can have a positive effect on a community
Uploaded: 2025-11-05T22:07:18.285Z
Duration: 3 min 53 s
Description: Marc Halle is an award-winning landscape architect. The former Saskatchewan resident now resides in Montreal but is back in the province for SK Design Week. He joined Saskatoon Morning to talk about the effect Meewasin Trail had on him and what makes a great public space.

Marc Halle is an award-winning landscape architect. The former Saskatchewan resident now resides in Montreal but is back in the province for SK Design Week. He joined Saskatoon Morning to talk about the effect Meewasin Trail had on him and what makes a great public space.

Montreal

Award-winning landscape architect Mark Halley highlights the significant role public spaces play in fostering community identity and well-being. He credits Saskatoon's Mewasin Valley for its foresight in preserving natural corridors, which has allowed the city to grow around a continuous park system, a rarity in major urban centers.

Halley also shares the example of Berksey Park in Toronto, where diverse community interests were unified through the creation of a central dog fountain. This feature not only honors the park's history but also serves as a multifunctional space for families, businesses, and pet owners, demonstrating how creative design can address varied stakeholder needs in limited urban spaces.

How public spaces can have a positive effect on a community

Well, public space is more than just a place for people to wander through. It can bring joy, comfort, and help define what a community is all about. To find out how public spaces can have a positive effect on us, we're joined by Mark Halley. Mark is an award-winning landscape architect originally from Saskatchewan, and he's helped design many fantastic public places. He now lives in Montreal, but is in our city today to deliver a keynote lecture as part of SK Design Week. Good morning. Hi, good morning, Stephanie. Now, I mentioned you're originally from our fine province, and I understand that the Mewasin Trail actually had something to do with you becoming an architect. How so? Well, I've always been interested in design and always wanted to be an architect. So my first step into that was to study engineering at the University of Saskatchewan. So I had the good fortune of living in Saskatoon for four years, and it's really great to be back. But the Mewasin Valley is really something, and Saskatoon should be really grateful for the foresight and some really great leadership that made the decision not to do much with it, just to leave this natural system flowing through the city. There's so many cities, for example, in Toronto that has just spent over a billion dollars doing exactly that, restoring, naturalizing the mouth of the Don River in Saskatoon. Luckily, it has kind of led its own course throughout time, and the city's been able to grow around it and still enjoy it and identify with it. What exactly, though, has Mewasin Valley Authority done so well in preserving this space? Well, I think it's because the zone has been protected for such a long time, but also been planned so that encroachments are limited. And it's almost a continuous, unbroken corridor from the south ends, from Cranberry Flats all the way to Owanuskewin. It's really, I think in many cities, unprecedented to have such a great, unbroken park system in the heart of your city. Do you have any favorite public spaces? Doesn't have to be in Saskatoon that kind of really portray that? Well, I'm thinking maybe of a few, maybe just talking about our own work, that speaks to what I'm talking about. There's one called Berksey Park in Toronto, which was a park revitalization in the old town of the city. And it's a park that has its anchor in many different communities. And when the park was being developed, it's a small park. When it was being revitalized, there were three main stakeholder groups. One were the BIA. They wanted a postcard to be able to track business and visitors and tourists. They want something beautiful. Families recently moving into the neighborhood wanted a park just for children to play. And then the dog owners or the pet owners only wanted a dog park. But the park was too small just to do that. So in a way, curiously, taking conflict and turning it into consensus, we consolidated all these interests into one central feature. And that was the dog fountain. And the dog fountain, because this was a site of something that used to be called Wolfstock. It was like the largest dog festival in North America used to happen in this park. And so there was always kind of this identity, this soul that has been left over from that experience of the site. And so we created the dog fountain and it did all the three. It satisfied all the three stakeholders. There was the BIA, it's probably one of the most photographed sites in the city of Toronto. If you go to Pearson Airport, you're going to see it as you land in the airport. Welcome to Toronto. And there's the dog fountain. The second one is a place for playing. The children play with the dogs all the time. They can sit on the dogs and play with the water spouts. It becomes a central feature for that. And then the dogs themselves, curiously, find themselves engaging with the sculptural dogs too. There's a drinking water fountain for them around at the bottom. And you see these three things happening all at once. And when you have a small space, that's where you maybe need to think a little bit harder and be creative to try and bring these things together. Instead of checkboxing them into separate locations, conflate them to make something even more interesting as a hybrid.

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