I’m going to quote Jane Jacobs, to give my post a sense of weight it probably doesn’t deserve. “Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.”

I was talking to a friend tonight about Innovation Commons in Toronto. They were totally into the concept and stressed the importance of the place and particularly space, as criteria for deciding if IC might be a place for them “nice building, big windows” were the specified criteria I think.

Of place and space, place is perhaps the easier to specify. We know IC needs to be downtown, on a good transit line etc. Space, in my mind, relates to the feel of the place, it’s more difficult to define, but I think just as important as place.

I can provide a counter example though, what doesn’t feel right to me in terms of space though. In the same conversation The Toronto Writer’s Centre came up. Basically TWC is a space in Yorkville which is an IC for writers, I hadn’t come across it before. To be rather brutally critical, judging by the photos on the site the TWC space is the exact opposite of something I’d want to invest time, money and effort in being part of (which is fine, as I’m not a writer so they wouldn’t want me). Grey cubes and boring lowest common denominator ‘architecture’ were one of the things I was glad to get away from when I left the Ontario government. Now a space like the 401 Richmond Centre, for example, if IC found a space with that feel I’d get my cheque book out in a second.

I realise this stuff is very subjective, and everyone has different priorities and preferences, but it seemed worth throwing into the pot while this thing is bubbling.

Note: probably this belongs on the innovation commons site but 1) It feels rather personal, so posting it to my own blog makes some sense 2) It’s late and I couldn’t figure out how to link and format on the Drupal install (it says you can use HTML, but you can’t).