main street boundaries micro-architectures of transgression, control and negotiation …I do not need to be the owner of an urban space to appropriate it. I appropriate it, but the city also appropriates me in a process that always operates in both directions…Appropriation, arising from spontaneous practices, is a part of the struggle for the right to the city. — Bernardo Jiminez-Dominguez 1
urbanism | street walls by victoria beltrano
appropriation control building edges markets informality
The street is the place where much of a city’s urban public life plays out, so naturally the buildings that line it are the backdrops which frame this stage. They mediate between the negotiated space of the sidewalk, and numerous privately owned spaces beyond. The openings therein – large and small, physical and visual– and their surrounding accoutrements reveal the attitudes of those on the private side towards the public beyond, while the public’s engagement with that edge can also reveal conflicting public voices and attitudes about the nature of the production of urban public space and the rights of use of that urban edge. The three urban fragments that follow begin to tell a story of how the richness and complexity of urban life is often mediated by numerous micro-architectures in downtown Toronto. They contribute to a continued negotiation of the boundaries between public and private space, and formal and informal use thereof.
Spadina’s Chinatown Centre: uncontrolled informal appropriation Chinatown Centre is a 1990s three-story urban mall which covers a 60 metre stretch of Spadina Avenue south of Dundas Street and just north of Wilson Place. With the exception of its corner entryway, the Chinatown Centre follows a typical mall typology and turns virtually all its merchandise and signage inwards, carefully mediating that internalised world. The resulting street presence is a solid wall cut off from the busy world on the other side of it. At what used to be a secondary entry to the centre’s now-vacant cinema, an blank set of doors is plastered with all kinds of small informal additions. Here, where the private world has turned its back on the city, public voices are most loudly heard. Posters advertising everything from concerts to phone cards, graffiti tags, paint, gum, food, various smells and cardboard have co-opted these walls and floors. Some users have even cleverly affixed and, in some cases, camouflaged small plastic hooks on the wall. These hooks become small micro-architectures of transgression 2 – elements which deliberately reclaim this space for personal need, particularly those of informal, probably unlicenced, street vendors. On busy days, the vendors use these hooks, adjacent electrical conduit and door handles to turn the wall into an unsanctioned marketplace. After a day of vending, or when the threat of formal authority arises, items are promptly packed away and any items left just add to the normal detritus that collects in the corners. Given the introverted nature of the mall, this boundary has no clear formal occupant keeping informal use in check – there are no ‘eyes on the street’ here. 3 Rather than engaging in some form of dialogue over these uses and additions, the micro-architectures and markings increase and appropriate the space until it reaches a point of saturation. At this point, the owner steps in and clears out any traces of use, leaving a blank canvas for these actions to start anew.
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On Site review 23 Small Things
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