Design a community Garden in Chinatown with Virtual Reality

The Planting Imagination Team is a group of Chinatown community organizations and X University (Ryerson) Toronto researchers who are working together to bring the local community together to come up with new visions for the future of Chinatown.

We’re working with project partners and local organizations to recruit up to 40 diverse Chinatown Community Activators from across the Chinatown community who will work together with community facilitators to co-design a community garden at Cecil Community Centre.

This project aims to promote community resilience, reduce stress and stigma, and support the affected groups in Chinatown through the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as ongoing displacement, by making use of VR co-creation and other tools of architectural design.  

Starting in January, we’ll meet as a group once every two weeks to:

• Talk about a future of Chinatown that works for locals
• Learn how to use Virtual Reality to create new visions for different parts of Chinatown
• Work together to redesign and then add to a community garden in Chinatown

Participants will gain various new skills, connect further with the community and be paid $20 per hour for their participation. 

Who can join?
Anyone who:

• Considers themselves a member of Chinatown’s community
• Is aged 18+
• Can commit to participating in a minimum of six out of ten 2.5 hour sessions over six months.
• Lives in the GTA
• Can join as an individual – you can’t be representing an institution
• Has conversational language skills in at least one of Cantonese, English, Mandarin or Vietnamese

The Project is led by Prof. Linda Zhang of X University and in collaboration from Project Protech. Drs. Josephine Wong, Kenneth P Fung, Alan Li and Mandana Vahabi are part of the investigators’ Team.

Please see the attached flyer for more information and how to register.

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