The space between the old cold-storage building and the former printing house on Copper Lane was, for most of its existence, a loading corridor. Wide enough for a pallet jack, paved in cracked asphalt, smelling intermittently of diesel. For about forty years, nothing in particular happened there.
Today it is where three café tables sit under a string of lights that someone has trained over the gap between the two buildings. There is a small raised bed of lavender running along the eastern wall. On warm evenings, the corridor fills from end to end, and the sound carries through to the street in a way that makes passersby slow down.
Nobody planned this. The transformation happened in stages — a few chairs left out by the building's new tenant, then a table, then a neighbour asking if she could plant something. The lights were added when someone realised the space was being used at night.
Why courtyards, and why now
What is happening on Copper Lane is part of a larger pattern. Across Canadian cities, particularly in neighbourhoods where industrial buildings are being converted to mixed uses, the spaces between buildings — historically treated as service access or fire routes — are being reconsidered. Not redeveloped in the formal sense, but reclaimed through small, accumulative decisions.
The conditions that make this possible are specific: buildings that have changed tenancy, reduced loading requirements, and new occupants (often studios, cafés, or small offices) that have different relationships with the public realm. The spaces themselves haven't changed. What's changed is who's using the buildings beside them.
"A loading corridor exists to serve a function," says a heritage architect I spoke to, who has been involved in several adaptive reuse projects in the industrial quarter. "When the function changes, the corridor either becomes dead space or becomes something else. The interesting cases are the ones where it becomes something else without anyone particularly deciding that it should."
The design questions nobody asks
There is a tendency in urban design discourse to treat the creation of good public space as a problem of design — of benches and paving and lighting fixtures, of programming and maintenance. The courtyard examples I have been looking at suggest something more complicated: that the best public spaces are often not designed at all, but discovered.
The lavender bed on Copper Lane was not installed by a landscape architect. The tables were not chosen from a street furniture catalogue. The lights are the kind available at any hardware store. None of this was budgeted, tendered, or approved. And yet the space works in a way that many formally designed public spaces do not.
"The difference between a public space that people use and one they walk around is almost always invisible in the plan. It shows up in the way the sun hits it in the afternoon, or whether there's something to lean against, or whether it feels like it belongs to someone."
This is not an argument against design. It is an observation that some of what makes public space work is generated by use, not by specification — and that the urban spaces emerging in industrial courtyards seem to benefit from having no specification at all.
Three courtyards worth noticing
The examples below are drawn from my own visits over the past six months. They are not the only examples in the neighbourhood, but they represent different types of reclamation: one informal, one semi-formal, one the result of a deliberate but very light-touch design intervention.
Copper Lane Corridor — The example described above. Entirely informal. The café whose back door opens onto it has taken de facto stewardship without any formal arrangement. The building owners are aware and have not objected. The corridor functions as semi-public space for perhaps six to eight months of the year.
The Foundry Passage — A wider gap between a former foundry and a warehouse, now a studio building. This one has been slightly more formally addressed: the building's management added two benches and a notice that the space is shared. There is no programming and no enclosure. It is quiet in a different way from the Copper Lane example — less used, but more deliberately open.
The Elm Street Pocket — The smallest of the three. Barely four metres wide. Someone has placed a mural on one wall (the building owner commissioned it) and two moveable chairs. The chairs migrate. Some mornings they are facing the mural; some evenings they have been turned to face the street. This suggests use, argument about preferred orientation, and return — which is to say, a social life.
What makes a courtyard actually work
Based on these and other examples, a few conditions seem to matter more than most. First, connection to pedestrian flow — courtyards that work are almost always visible and accessible from a street that people actually use. Second, something to make you stop — not a programmed attraction but a material reason: shade, a plant, a view, something that changes slightly. Third, the sense that someone is responsible for it, even informally. The managed courtyards I visited were not better used than the informal ones, but they felt less precarious — more likely to persist.
What does not seem to matter much: whether the space was designed, whether it has formal public status, whether it has signage, and whether it has explicit programming. The Elm Street Pocket has none of these things. It has two chairs and a mural and it is in use almost every time I walk past it.
This should probably tell us something about how we talk about public space, and what it actually requires.