Five Screens the City Kept: Toronto’s Sankofa Square and Its Civic Signage

The corner where Yonge Street meets Dundas Street in Toronto is said to be the busiest intersection in Canada. Ringing the square on all four sides are large-format digital spectaculars that sheathe entire building walls. Branded Cities, one of the operators here, holds roughly 90 per cent of the corner's digital and traditional media, and advertises that it can supply, as a single vendor, more than 50,000 square feet of "domination." TEC Tower (2017), Tenor South (2020), Rogers Tower (2022) — video crawling across curved facades fills almost the whole of a passer-by's field of vision with product logos.

In the middle of that sea of advertising there are five screens, and only five, on which no advertising is sold at all. They belong to the square itself, and what runs on them is visitor information, joint projects with other city agencies, and public art. Where the spectaculars around them work for maximised exposure, these five work not for exposure but for the city's own side. This is a slightly different animal from the thing this journal usually follows — the few minutes of empty interval opened up in an advertising surface, that temporary margin in which a street screen halts the commercial cycle and shows a work. Here the interval is secured on the city's side not as time, but as ownership of the surface itself.

Taking a Name Back

On 23 August 2025 the square was formally unveiled as Sankofa Square. It was the renaming of a place that had been known as Yonge–Dundas Square for more than twenty years, since it opened in 2004.

The impetus lay in the origin of that name. Dundas Street is named after the eighteenth-century British politician Henry Dundas, who is recorded as having delayed the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. Following the movement for racial justice that spread across the world in 2020, the City of Toronto began a review of civic assets tied to colonial-era figures and policies. In July 2021 city council voted to rename Dundas Street itself, and that autumn a twenty-member advisory body — the Recognition Review Community Advisory Committee, composed of Black and Indigenous leaders together with residents and businesses — was convened. After two years of consultation, on 14 December 2023 council adopted the new name "Sankofa Square," and the following year, in 2024, a city by-law was amended so that the change was settled in institutional terms as well.

Sankofa is a word in Twi, the language of the Akan peoples of Ghana, meaning "go back and retrieve." The Akan proverb the city cites is plain: there is no shame in going back to fetch what you have left behind. It is a way of thinking about looking back at the past, recovering what can be learned from it, and moving forward. Rather than erasing a place name that carries the memory of colonialism, the renaming is positioned as an act of going back for something that had been forgotten — and that word has become the name of the most heavily advertised intersection in Canada.

The Dominated Surfaces, and the Ones Not for Sale

The renaming is not confined to the wording on a sign. This square makes visible, in an extreme form, a question of ownership: for whom does a screen in the city work?

Most of the giant spectaculars ringing the intersection are commercial inventory run by advertising operators. Branded Cities calls the scale of its supply here "domination," and offers as a selling point the fact that a single operator can cover the entire intersection. To fill the screens of one block with an advertiser's imagery, for as long and at as great a size as possible — that is the rationale of the commercial spectacular.

Against this, a different principle governs the five screens the square owns itself. The operator's explanation is unambiguous.

In keeping with the Square's focus on the community, advertising is not sold for display on these screens.

— Sankofa Squaresource

The five surfaces that will not be sold are given over to visitor information, video projects, collaborations with other city agencies, and public art. Residents and community organisations may use them free of charge, and what goes up follows the Display Policy the square sets. Inside an intersection ruled by the logic of advertising, a small set of surfaces deliberately placed outside that logic has been fenced off as a matter of institutional design.

Measured by area, five screens are far too small against the "50,000 square feet of domination" surrounding them. But that very asymmetry is what states the square's design thinking. The city neither withdraws from the screen altogether nor surrenders all of it to advertising; it reserves a small part for the citizens' side — and that reserved surface becomes one of the few markers afloat in a sea of commerce.

What Runs on the Five Screens

A surface declared not for sale will end up as nothing more than a notice board if it is left alone. Sankofa Square has brought editing to it.

In 2026 the open-call programme "Art in the Square" turned the square's own infrastructure into artwork. Fourteen benches and ten waste receptacles — twenty-four pieces of everyday equipment in all — carry imagery by four artists: Sharn Bassi, Apanaki Temitayo, Chantelle Dorafshani and Adams Kofi Amaning. MakeRoom Inc., which handled the curation, drew more than 150 submissions through the open call and selected the artists through a community-led jury. Apanaki Temitayo's Oju Olorun: What Sees Us layers Yoruba cosmology with African textiles; Adams Kofi Amaning overlays the patterns of kente cloth with the iconography of Toronto — the cultural affirmation of the Black community that underlies the renaming, pasted onto the physical skin of the square.

The five digital screens, too, have been used as a vessel for seasonal programming. For Indigenous History Month, an attempt was brought in to turn the street-facing displays temporarily into a "living digital art gallery"; there have been editions for Black History Month, and editions showing student work from the city's art and design schools. All of them have this in common: their subject is the memory and the ecology of the city rather than an advertiser. At an intersection where permanent advertising surfaces go on saying "buy this," these five alone say "remember this."

A Margin of Time, and a Margin of Surface

This journal has followed a number of margins opened up in the city's advertising surfaces. At Piccadilly Lights in London, advertising sinks away for three minutes every night and a single artist's work is kindled — a globally synchronised network of screens. In New York's Times Square, a few minutes of the small hours are surrendered to art — Midnight Moment. Both are arrangements that borrow the time of a commercial screen by negotiation and empty it temporarily for a work. When day breaks, the screen returns to advertising. The margin exists only as promised time.

What Sankofa Square secures is a margin not of time but of surface. The five screens are not a loan handed back every night; they are a permanent parcel that the city owns and has decided not to sell advertising on. The difference is not a small one. A margin of time holds only for as long as the media operator's concession continues. A margin of surface is written into the structure of ownership itself — into the question of who holds the surface. The particularity of this case lies in the way a symbolic act, the renaming, coincides with this material reservation on one and the same square. Taking a name back, and keeping a surface in one's own hands: both are different appearances of the same gesture — going back to retrieve what has been left behind.

The reserved screens remain small, of course, and the dominating surfaces around them remain large. The civic surface does not push back the sea of advertising. But in ink-wash landscape painting, what brought a scene to life was never the mass of mountains covering the picture; it was the single figure or boat set down within it. The small presence that kindles meaning in the scenery of a street — tenkei. At the most heavily advertised intersection in Canada, the five screens on which nothing is sold function as exactly that. The harder the rationale of domination pushes towards maximisation, the more sharply outlined the small margin secured inside it rises up.

The square's difficulties have not gone away. Debate over its cluttered environment and its redevelopment has continued since the renaming, and the programming of the five screens is not underwritten by any generous budget. Even so, the choice a city makes when it decides that part of a screen is "not for sale," and then keeps editing from the citizens' side what appears there, is quietly rewriting the meaning of an intersection covered in advertising. To open an interval — a ma — is the work of the vessel; what is kindled on the surface thus opened is the work of editing. The five screens of Sankofa Square are a rare site where those two meet on a single square.

Sources

1. fig.001Toronto celebrates the grand opening of Sankofa Square — CityNews
2. fig.002Inaugural Sankofa Day kicks off at Sankofa Square Saturday — CP24
3. [3]Digital Signage — Sankofa Square (the no-advertising policy on the five screens)
4. [4]Becoming Sankofa Square — the meaning of Sankofa and the course of the renaming
5. [5]Toronto City Council approves “Sankofa Square” as new name for Yonge–Dundas Square — City of Toronto
6. [6]Media Release: Sankofa Square Transforms Everyday Infrastructure Into Public Art With New Site-Wide Installations
7. [7]Public Art — Sankofa Square
8. [8]Yonge & Dundas — Branded Cities (media scale at the intersection and the "domination" claim)
9. [9]Branded Cities towers over Yonge–Dundas — Media in Canada

Operations Record

OPERATOR

Sankofa Square Board of Management (a City of Toronto agency)

LOCATION

Toronto

MODEL

Open call — Branded Cities runs roughly 90% of the intersection’s ad screens; only the five city-owned screens bar advertising, reserved for open calls, community use and public art

CADENCE

The five city-owned screens run visitor information, public art and video projects year-round (free for community clients, under the Display Policy)

SPEC

Five city-owned non-commercial digital screens, ringed by Branded Cities’ large-format spectaculars (TEC Tower, Tenor South, Rogers Tower, The Atrium; c. 50,000 sq ft)

SINCE

2004

STATUS

Active

View on the registry