#kingstreettransitpilot

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Ronna Bloom and PLANT bring Asphalt Poetry to YouTube

One of PLANT’s most enjoyable collaborations of 2018 was teaming up with poet Ronna Bloom for one of the two Everyone Is King curb lane parklet installations we designed as a complement to the King Street Transit Pilot. For the Asphalt Poetry parklet, we stencilled Ronna’s poem “The City” in foot-high letters onto a 30-metre stretch of urban curb lane. Check out Ronna’’s new YouTube video, in which she talks about her interdisciplinary collaborations with PLANT, a filmmaker, an artist, and others . . . and also explains why, when someone asks her for a poem, she treats it as “an emergency request.”

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Extra, extra: the words on the street are Asphalt Poetry

We will have paint under our fingernails for the foreseeable future, but the stencils are off and the results speak for themselves – in more ways than one. We’ve just finished installing Asphalt Poetry, the second of our Everyone is King ‘public space activators’ on King Street. (More about our other installation, Face to Face, here.) We asked one of our favourite collaborators, Ronna Bloom, to write something for the occasion, and then the PLANT team stencilled her poem The City onto King Street West near Brant Street. The Everyone is King installations are adding curb appeal to one of Toronto’s busiest traffic arteries while the King Street Transit Pilot is testing out the option of more streetcars and fewer cars on King. Our installation ensures that you can experience Ronna’s ode to urban exploration whether you’re on on the streetcar or on the sidewalk: we think it’s well worth reading from both perspectives.