Confetti at Michael Phair Park

In the heart of Edmonton’s downtown core, a kaleidoscope of colour bursts out of a pocket park, inviting passersby into the celebration.  

In 2021, the Michael Phair Park renewal plan began when Phair, a former City Councilor and the first openly gay politician in Alberta, came together with the Downtown Edmonton Community League and Urban Development Institute to engage hcma to conceptualize ways to improve the parkette.  

Michael Phair Park’s Confetti is the result: a physical realization of Phair himself, it's vibrant, playful, celebratory, impactful, and welcoming. Confetti represents Michael’s years of positive impact on Edmonton and his passion, energy and optimism.  

Urban centers are freckled with utilitarian spaces and forgotten parkettes bursting with potential. These in-between spaces offer blank canvases for city builders to envision and create spaces that connect people through shared experiences centered around art, gathering, and play.

Michael Phair Park was until recently one of these spaces. The park had been named in 2016 in honour of Michael Phair, who as Alberta’s first openly gay City Councilor had had a distinguished career as a politician, LGBTQ2Ai+ community advocate, and overall champion for the City of Edmonton. However, budget constraints meant the original designs for the park were never fully realized, resulting in an underused micro-park with a lot of latent potential.

In 2021, Michael Phair himself, together with the Downtown Edmonton Community League and Urban Development Institute, began to conceptualize ways to improve the park. They successfully applied for a City of Edmonton Downtown Vibrancy Strategy grant, which proposed three interventions in the park: painted murals on the adjacent building walls, a permanent stage, and overhead lighting to increase safety and extend the time of day that the park feels comfortable.

hcma’s Edmonton office overlooks Michael Phair Park so we were thrilled to be invited onto the project. Our brief was to design a colorful mural as vibrant, playful, provocative, celebratory, impactful, and welcoming as Michael Phair himself.

The resulting design intervention is called Confetti with thousands of equally sized circles, in 16 vibrant colours, covering the park ground and surrounding building walls. Their placement is explosive, performative, and random, an exuberant proliferation of colour bursting into and out of the park. Since its installation in fall 2022, Confetti has reinvigorated Michael Phair Park, even inspiring an event series known as Confetti Fridays featuring live entertainment every Friday evening throughout the 2023 summer.

A physical realization of Michael Phair, Confetti is also much more than just a burst of colour and energy. It is an embodiment of Phair’s profound legacy, his passion for community, and the joy and service he continues to bring to the City of Edmonton.