An Adventurous Souls Passion for Beautiful Spaces & Places

Hi! My name is Rebecca Alam and I'm an urbanist in Toronto passionate about finding creative design solutions to make our built environment a more beautiful, vibrant, sustainable, and engaging place to live in. Here, I will share my projects, inspiration, learning experiences, and diverse range of interests and how I use them in understanding ways we can implement more efficient design strategies to develop stronger self-sufficient communities in urban city fabrics. A strong believer of freedom and beauty, I tend to live life with a minimalist approach and find most inspiration through embarking great adventures to explore and connect with our natural environment and meet people from all walks of life.

[mariemogreen]

[buildingresiliency]

jardin d’amour

[incolours-deactivated20241026]

You’re all welcome!

Bucharest by DincoloDeFatade

[buildingresiliency]

Up until my recent visit to Grenada’s Chocolate Company, I hadn’t given much thought to the process behind the cocoa industry, despite chocolate being so ridiculously available throughout the Western world. Any kind of occasion you can think of and aisles upon aisles of every store is already stocked up and ready to sell you all the different brands of chocolate you can name. It’s one of the biggest and employable industries out there, yet even with chocolate, it appears that some of the name brand companies and governments own a monopoly on the cocoa industry.

This is an inside view into how a small sustainable initiative founded by late American Mott Green in 1999, opened up a wide range of opportunities for the local farmers and people of Grenada as well as allowing them to try locally produced organic chocolate for the first time. The private business was started as a co-op to get around the Grenada Cocoa Association regulations of only allowing cocoa farmers to sell their cocoa to the government in return of a small percentage. Not only did the GCA regulations keep farmers from earning a living wage, but let their cocoa go to rot when the government didn’t have high enough cocoa demands. Instead, this company - a team of local workers, is certifying local farmers as shareholders to invest their cocoa into the company. The company produces the chocolate to sell and then farmers receive their fair share of profits. Now the estate has their very first own chocolate shop too, selling all kinds of nice special selections mixed with local fruits you’ll only find on their island.

It’s nice to see another great working initiative towards the sharing economy making even this little Caribbean island become more self-sufficient. 

[buildingresiliency]

Quite a magical moment at last weekends park summit (@parkppl) with @kaejaddance showing the crowd how to do a flock dance. Thought the performance was perfect in representing that overall theme of the event to teach people how to use their parks and connect with public spaces. Check out #torontoist 's article covering the event here: http://torontoist.com/2016/03/how-toronto-can-improve-its-parks-system/ This is the 3rd summit I've attended out of the 6 they've held and so happy to see how far this organization has grown since I first joined them 2 years ago. #parkTO #poliTO #parkpeople #parks #summit #toronto #culture #community #publicspace #urbanism #dance #kaeja #regentpark #danielsspectrum #cities (at Daniels Spectrum)

[buildingresiliency]

How to create functional livable spaces in high density cities for young urbanites, singles, and temporary renters. Always thought of this idea for Toronto with the increasing population growth creating higher density in the city. We need to be more wise about how we build and use our spaces as in the video above, to be able to accommodate for more people in smaller square footage. Although I’m not too fond of the design of this building, in terms of creating that welcoming comfortable atmosphere they were aiming for, it’s the vision that I admire most. Maximum efficiency, no wasted space and a sense of community to enjoy the city-dweller life. In Toronto, developers are constantly bulldozing up land and over the past decade we have yet to see functional layouts/more sustainable building technology for the current units on market or even more thought and planning into creating a sense of community for the surrounding space of the developments. It seems as if the developers here prioritize short term goals to maximize profits over providing long term benefits for condominium owners and renters. Hopefully if we can educate people more on why having more sustainable buildings in practice can increase their own standard of living, we would have more willing to spend money in investing on creating greener buildings. That way there’s less money spent on building restoration in the future - keeping renting/buying costs relatively balanced, and we can come closer to achieving that goal of a more creative looking and healthier city where people are more inclined to stay on a long term basis.

[victoriousvocabulary]

Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.

Carl Sagan, Cosmos  (via victoriousvocabulary)

[enochliew]

[buildingresiliency]

What's to replace the iconic Honest Ed's Jan. 2017 #mirvishvillage #honesteds #theannex #toronto #hellomoreglasstowers (at Mirvish Village - Markham House)

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Eminent Domain. An installation from over the summer showcasing the names of thousands of affected ecologies and species gone extinct as a result of globalization and human led activity. #eminentdomain #bikvanderpol #exhibition #installation #environment #degradation #extinction #globalization #thepowerplant (at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery)

[buildingresiliency]

This is probably the most innovative homeless man in Toronto. He created a mini library for himself under the Gardiner and even built a sense of community and purpose for himself with a sign reading "The Free Underpass Library, Enjoy 😃" #gardinerexpressway #underpass #toronto #homeless #innovation #freelibrary #shelter #publicspace (at Gardiner Expressway)

[buildingresiliency]

A mini phone timelapse I made a few weeks ago while mapping and watching cities from the cool hidden SilverSnail Black Canary Espresso Cafe a few weeks back. Not to mention, they also have the one and only best nutella latté in the city!

[buildingresiliency]

Changing Education Paradigms

This RSA Animate was adapted from a talk given at the RSA by Sir Ken Robinson, world-renowned education and creativity expert and recipient of the RSA's Benj...

I remember coming across this video back in high school sometime in 2010. It was around the time I started to become more aware and interested in learning how hierarchy’s and different systems work and the effect they have on shaping a culture, society and our economy. What rung a bell back to this video, which to my surprise is still as relevant as it was 5 years ago, is an encounter I had at the NXT City Prize design awards show last Thursday.

NXT City Prize is a competition held by the city for youth under 35 to submit their best innovative design initiatives to reinvent public space in Toronto. This is the second year it was being held and although I didn’t have time to submit a project, I wanted to be involved somehow so decided to volunteer to help with the set up and organization of the event. 

During the event night, I met two women - one a grade 6 teacher and the other a principal - both from Riverside’s Queen Alexander Middle School. The principal, Emma Nichols, was mentioning to me how they have been trying to change the curriculum to get their students more involved in the process of sustainable design. She did this by getting them to think of creative ways to make better use of public space in the city that would benefit the environment and increase a sense of community and then actually went on site visits to visualize and learn how they could implement their ideas.

I thought this was absolutely brilliant and inspiring! (FORGET elementary school..., but I didn’t even have these opportunities back in high school!) If we want to see better design solutions that can sustain and foster growth in all aspects of our communities and cities, then we need to start with education. More schools like this one, need educators to create programs that stay ahead of time to match the current needs of our society and environment. This way we can better engage and give a sense of purpose to the impressionable youth to stay inspired and be able to accomplish something where they can see the direct impact in their lives and the world.

[skp1088-blog]

“The crucial fact about sustainability is that it is not a micro phenomenon: there can be no such thing as a ‘sustainable’ house, office building, or household appliance, for the same reason that there can be no such thing as a one-person democracy or a single-company economy. Every house, office building, and appliance, no matter where its power comes from or how many of its parts were made from soybeans, is just a single small element in a civilization-wide network of deeply interdependent relationships, and it’s the network, not the individual constituents, on which our future depends. Sustainability is a context, not a gadget or a technology.”

(via skp1088)

Quote on sustainability from one of my favourite environmental books, Green Metropolis by David Owen. 

[buildingresiliency]

How to Make an Attractive City

We've grown good at making many things in the modern world - but strangely the art of making attractive cities has been lost. Here are some key principles fo...

Great video with an overview on everything I have been thinking about lately on how we can build better cities and on a lot of the existing problems we face in North American cities.

[the-bored-cat]

The Condo Game (2014) Exposes traps in the Toronto condo market

[buildingresiliency]

all the worlds a stage (via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zMCxmdkcRY)