Cambridge, Temporarily

One of the beautiful things about an academic planning exercise is that you can indulge in a little flight of fancy. A recent exercise at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design let people imagine a temporary urban intervention in one of Cambridge’s famous squares.

A “square”, in Boston parlance, really just refers to an intersection between two streets, and fittingly, many of them do look like an afterthought. Kendall Square, home to MIT, is one example: when JFK decided it was going to be the headquarters of the US’ future space program, the entire area was cleared of its population. While that didn’t quite pan out, the area gradually became filled with high-tech spin-offs from nearby MIT. That, however, didn’t prevent Kendall Square from being filled with 70s campus-style architecture, which lent it a creepy extermination camp vibe quite at odds with homey (if a little staid) Cambridge.

The following is a little blurb about the proposal:

Kendall Square on a winter evening is bleak, empty, but also potentially atmospheric. Reminiscent of the menacing and enigmatic cityscape in Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical paintings, there is a psychological tension to this empty space that we seek to exploit in the installation Phantom City.

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“Give Them Bread and Circuses, and TV Ads on the Subway”

The usual assortment of passengers on the train:
cellphone fiddlers, ad-gazers and the lone reader

With typical New China audacity, even hubris, Shanghai authorities opened up more than 100km of subway tracks on a single day this past December, nearly doubling the metro system in a single stroke. This puts it well on its way of becoming the world’s largest–at least by the length of trackage–in two or three years of time.

Yet there doesn’t appear to be anything about the Shanghai Metro that marks its soon-to-be special status; nothing like the claustrophobic confusion of the Tokyo Metro, the steam-punk appeal of the NYC subway, or the hi-tech sheen of London’s Canary Wharf underground station. Superficially, what the Shanghai Metro does offer are the familiar standards: free daily newspapers, automatic vending machines, contactless smart cards, platform screen doors, annoying LCD screens, inoffensive-looking station interiors, neutral voices announcing the next stop, and respectable-looking riders mostly engaged with their cellphones.

I think I caught him red-handed

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Three Amigos: Dupont Street Edition

An empty factory at 1000 Dupont Street.
Its glassy aloofness beckons at the edge of downtown

As mentioned in my previous post, Dupont Street is something of a physical and psychological demarcation line, a former industrial artery running along the CP tracks separating downtown and midtown, between “there there” and nowhere in particular. It’s a tribute to the city as a work in progress, with warehouses-cum-lofts next to shockingly empty parking lots, and industrial monoliths across the street from working class Bay-’n-Gable. It may also be the perfect embodiment of the post-modern city, as North Toronto JAPs, Portugese immigrants and downtown types come to shop and hang at a stone’s throw from each other, in the shadow of Dupont Street’s messy, weird, and (sometimes) startlingly beautiful architectural jumble.

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Eight Thousand Meters Around the Block

Dupont Street, photo by Jack Lo P

Blessed Toronto is probably one of the best cities in the world for city running–the streets follow a flat and mostly predictable grid, and there are just enough people on the street to maintain a sembalance of visual interest and security. I’ve tried to run in places like Shanghai (way too many people) and London (frustrating street pattern). Sudbury, with its non-sensical streets and ghost-town desolation, should only be attempted by those with a taste in macabre.

What these cities also don’t have are Dupont and Harbord , two westside streets that run parallel to Toronto’s main east-west thoroughfare, Bloor St. Lovingly referred to as expressways by those in the know, these two streets share the unfortunate characteristic of being bypasses for busy Bloor Street. Here, cars seem to drive faster and the pedestrians look more hurried.

What best desribes these two streets is “smalltown main drag”, with all its connotation of earthiness and hominess–but with a smattering of hints here and there that you are in fact in the middle of a big city. To be fair, Dupont and Harbord had vastly different beginnings. Dupont, north of Bloor and running parallel to the CPR tracks, cuts through a curious mix of late 19th century Toronto Bay ‘n Gable and industrial buildings; on the other hand, literary Harbord lies in the heart of south Annex and contains a wealth of bookstores and bookstore patrons. But both streets look and feel as if they were an afterthought: brick row houses with paint chipping off, blank walls facing the street, and a liberal number of 50s gas stations whose ugliness no adjectives like “charming” or “quaint” can help to conceal.

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Ghetto in the Sky

Suburban Toronto at night. Photo by Dennis Marciniak

In 1970, Toronto was in the throes of Apartment Fever; nearly 40 years later, we are paying for it, and dearly.

It seems like a cruel joke for a city that tries so hard to become a centre of good design, but concrete evidence of this mid-century orgy of high-rise construction exists in hard statistics: Toronto, with more than 1,700 completed high-rises, has the second largest number of skyscrapers in North America, most of these being the mid-century apartment blocks in question. For a more tangible sense of the situation, however, one only needs to walk down a random inner suburban thoroughfare, like Don Mills St. or Finch Ave.

The immediate impression is the striking banality of these apartment blocks, whose shabby air is instantly familiar to anyone from Vancouver or Sudbury. Toronto’s distinction lies in sheer numbers. On any given major avenue in Toronto’s outer boroughs—North York, Etobicoke, Scarborough—these buildings can line the street as far as the eye can see, 30-storey concrete slabs thrown haphazardly together with wind-blown voids in between, the only attempt at adornment being the brick facade (choice of red, brown, beige) and novel building shapes (Y or X). In other words, they are about as charming as Victorian mental wards.

Enter one of these buildings (note the ragtag curtains behind the windows) and one may encounters either a spartan but well-cared-for lobby—or a scene of squalor. But invariably one can smell curry or some other fragrant ethnic cooking, and white faces are hard to come by–these buildings may be eyesores, but a deeper problem is the fact that they’ve worked wonders in accomplishing segregation (racial and economic) and isolation.

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Barcelona: A Week in Snippets

Expats

Even without knowing anything about Barcelona, I knew this was no place for the indie-minded traveller looking for the pristine virginland or the earnest college student bent on “finding himself”. Being neither, I nevertheless found myself fleeing to the English-speaking sanctuary that is the Elephant bookstore, wondering aloud if this jet-lagged, high-strung boy had bitten off more than he could chew by showing up at this tourist mob scene, a linguistically confusing mob scene, no less.

The owner, Ann, was sympathetic but not particularly attentive. “Yes, it was hard when I came here in ’69. Nobody here spoke any English and I didn’t speak a word of Spanish.” She had come from England to marry a Catalan, who she loved enough to brave General Franco for. I glanced aside at the old guy sitting in the far corner engrossed in computer games. “Oh there’s Frank. He’s Canadian, too.” I thought better of inquiring after the Catalan.

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One City, Two Faces: Roppongi Hills

The geography of Tokyo can be read into as a metaphor for its social stratification. There are the lowly pockets of Shitamachi, or the Low City, that lie on the literally low flood plains closer to the shore and the rivers. West of here are the few rarified districts of the Yamanote, a name that means “hand of the mountain” and aptly denotes the area’s hillier terrain. Away from here, the city stretches out in all directions in an unending sprawl of glass and concrete blandness, inhabited by the quiet, industrious, dignified, conformist, white-shirt -and-dark-suit-wearing Japanese middle class of lore—this is a city middle-class to its core.

One can find subtle signs (if he looks hard enough) as the train roars past Tsukiji, westwards and uphill. A platoon of well-dressed middle-aged men with indistinguishable faces get on at Hibiya station, epicentre of the central government bureaucracy; the ladies start to look more expensive, respectable, demure. Unmistakably, many of them are bound for Roppongi Hills.

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One City, Two Faces: Tsukiji Market

The hardest thing for me as a kid growing up in the vastness of suburban Tokyo was to imagine a place different from my own—I was merely one amongst the tens of millions who lived on lands far from the city centre and dominated by the postwar glass-and-concrete aesthetic, and who, via Tokyo’s impeccably efficient train system, poured into the city’s downtown (an unfamiliar and decidedly North American concept), itself a vague place to which the usual definition—anywhere within the famed Yamanote loop line—does no justice.

Life was and still is organized around single train lines: you take it to work, to shops, to the dentist’s etc. Patterns of life literally do not intersect, and one’s world at times becomes a partial reality, composed of the landscape along the morning train ride and people (often the same ones) you bump into on the train platforms and around the train stations.

Which explains why I’d been to many of the fabled sites of Tokyo for only so lamentably few times, and to some never at all; a fact, nevertheless, a sensible Japanese person would take as a matter of course. Take Tsukiji Market (so highly regarded by Lonely Planet) for example—why would a middle-class college-going kid travel to a place for fish mongers and restaurant buyers?

I went regardless, armed with a camera, an academic, collegiate curiosity, and a copy of Lonely Planet which simultaneously identified me as a gaijin and exempted me from Japanese sensibilities.

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Transit Myth-Making, One Button at a Time

The true mark of a city that has shed its pimply adolescent past and gained preeminence is the development of a larger-than-life personality, a personality that is based on layers of collective memories, recollections, human dramas real and ficticious, observed and enacted by oneself. A story of one’s adventures in Camden Town will almost certainly be echoed by someone else’s tale of a London romp; likewise, a hispter’s salacious anecdotes of Saturday night debauchery in the Lower East Side will solicit from others more than just a few recollections of the Lower East Side, and not just from fellow hipsters alone.

It is precisely here that Toronto’s city-building efforts flounder a bit, and the problem is certain even more acute for the multitudes of smaller cities that find themselves on the losing side of the battle for population and talents. Sure, the air might be cleaner, the people friendlier, the street safer, but what does all this matter if your place is constantly mistaken for Anyplace? The occasional appearance in Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje novels aside (and same goes for Montreal and Mordecai Richler/Leonard Cohen), does the Toronto myth mean anything to anyone?

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Three Years Later, Moving Along

Toronto Mayor David Miller. Photo by Rannie Turingan.

Those seeking thrill from Toronto’s municipal politics were, unfortunately, left disappointed by last Monday’s election. In a city that at times seems to be in love with the status quo, the re-election of incumbent mayor David Miller was hardly surprising, and the campaign seemed at times bereft of passion and new ideas.

That is a stark change from only a few years ago. There was something almost messianic about Miller’s 2003 mayoral bid in a city still reeling from SARS, post-amalgamation fiscal hell, and bad governance. What he brought was a palpable sense of beginning anew and making big plans. Within a year both the Royal Ontario Museum and the Art Gallery of Ontario unveiled their starchitectural expansion plans, and urban issues became something they couldn’t have possibly been: hip—with the launching and subsequent success of Spacing magazine being perhaps the most telling sign of changing times.

To be sure, some of the campaign promises were promptly carried through: his first act as a mayor was cancelling the highly contentious bridge link to the Island Airport. Relationship with the city’s creative community also remained cordial, with Miller being a major proponent for a “creative city” and a regular attendee of “cool” parties.

But those enamored with Miller-the-visionary had good reasons to feel a little disenchanted.

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Savage Beauty

Manufactured Landscapes follows Edward Burtynsky’s photographic exposition of unprecedented human transformation of the landscape.

Edward Burtynsky’s China photos explore what has always been a veritable fount of intriguing images.  Recalling Antonioni’s 1972 Chung Guo China, which in a coolly detached manner examined the ordinary, everyday facet of a society that was nevertheless rife with political tension, his work, with equal detachment, goes underneath the surface of prosperity, and discovers tension of an entirely different kind: us vs. nature.

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Nuit Blanche 2006, Toronto

A whole night of street art comes to Toronto.