Written by Danielle Goldfinger
In April 2024, I stepped into the role of Executive Director of The Laneway Project. For the first year and a half, I worked quietly. I tend to put my head down and focus on delivery, and that instinct served me well in rebuilding a beloved organization. But staying connected to practice and participating more actively in the broader conversations are essential to the work ahead. And so, this is the first entry in Laneway Fieldnotes, a space to reflect on practice and to think critically about how we design, govern, and care for public space.
Stepping into this role was intimidating. I felt a responsibility to steward something precious. While The Laneway Project exists because of many people over many years, its vision and durability were deeply shaped by Michelle Senayah. Her work reframed how laneways could function as shared, community-led spaces. There was a legacy here, and it mattered to many people across the city.
Early on, it became clear to me that I could not simply continue the organization as it had been. Michelle and those alongside her had effectively run The Laneway Project as a social-enterprise urban planning firm focused on laneways, and it worked. I am not a planner or designer, and I do not have the skill set to run an urban planning practice. I realized that carrying the work forward meant evolving the model, not replicating it.
Using Michelle’s vision as a foundation, I spent my first six months listening and learning. I reviewed past projects, spoke with communities we had worked with, and connected with partner organizations. I looked outward as well, studying how other cities approach laneways and alleyways.
Two things became clear early on: Communities want this work. They are willing to invest their time, ideas, labour, and care into the spaces they live in every day. At the same time, city systems move slowly. Not because of a lack of care or commitment, but because they are complex and under-resourced.
These two realities are not at odds. In fact, one supports the other. The strong desire and capacity within communities helps to address a gap that cities struggle to fill: the proactive governance and care of public spaces.
When we look at these things in tandem, it fundamentally changes what is possible. When residents are trusted and supported, meaningful public realm improvements do not need to be initiated, designed, and maintained solely by the City. This does not replace the role of municipal government, but it does challenge long-held assumptions about where initiative and stewardship can sit.
Montreal offers a compelling example. Through its resident-led Green Alley Program (Ruelles Vertes), hundreds of laneways have been revitalized with residents playing a central role. The result is a network of green, lived-in neighbourhood spaces that reflect what happens when municipalities share power and resources with communities.
From this learning, and alongside a group of amazing volunteers, came our flagship program, Laneway coLabs. This project is about giving residents the opportunity to deeply engage in building a space that reflects their needs and interests. Residents are given decision-making power, and TLP’s role is to listen, facilitate, and help bring the community’s ideas to life. Community engagement is not a phase - it’s the project.
Our first two coLabs projects, delivered in 2025, were proof-of-concept. When residents are given the opportunity, time, and tools to improve their neighbourhoods, they do engage deeply. And the outcomes are not only a new, beautiful, green public space, but a community that is more connected and resilient than it was before.
Understanding the power of that collective action has been my single biggest learning since I started this role. It has reshaped how I think about scale, impact, and power in city-building. I now believe that laneways are a victim of limited resources; they are an opportunity we are failing to govern.
Toronto has approximately 250 kilometres of laneways threaded through nearly every neighbourhood. Imagine if those kilometres were understood as connective tissue rather than leftover space. This is an opportunity for everyday social infrastructure to emerge where people already live.
Yet laneways tend to appear on the City’s radar only when something goes wrong: flooding, dumping, safety concerns, or conflict. They are treated as issues to be managed, not spaces with potential.
Toronto’s laneways are also liminal spaces, sitting between public and private, between city departments, between uses. Rather than seeing this liminality as a limitation, we have used it to our advantage. Instead of placing design interventions in the public right-of-way, Laneway coLabs leverages private property (with owners’ consent) to benefit the public realm. This approach allows laneways to be transformed relatively quickly, but only when communities are meaningfully engaged. Property owners are far more willing to offer up space when they have real ownership over the design and planning process.
The City does not have the resources to proactively revitalize every laneway. But if we put some governance into the hands of residents, we shift what is possible. While resident support can defray municipal resources, let's be clear that resident stewardship is not a workaround for limited municipal capacity. It is a better model because of the social outcomes it produces. When people shape space together, they build relationships, trust, and shared responsibility. Reduced pressure on City resources is a secondary benefit.
Figuring out how to scale laneway revitalization is not about activations or the right design intervention. It is about governance, and about how ownership, responsibility, and care are structured in our laneways. This is the work The Laneway Project plans to focus on over the next few years.