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on site identity 25

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on site

25 identity

Identity is more than behaviour or personality: it is constructed, deliberately, and sits like a stick of rock at the centre of all we do, the decisions we make. The first line of identity, whether as an architect, an artist, a building, a city or a nation should have some passing acquaintance with an authentic self simply to be understood. Here is where branding, celebrity and spin often falter. the individual characteristics by which a thing or person is recognised or known an individual ’ s comprehension of him or herself as a discrete, separate entity

It is complex, identity; it shouldn’t be subjected to simplification or reduction. We need deep description of who we are and how we work, where we live and how we fit.

Why look at identity, architecture and urbanism at this time? This is our twenty-fifth issue of On Site , a project that started very humbly and has evolved over the past twelve years to its present form. At its core is On Site ’s identity as a venue for new voices, ideas and wide interpretations of architecture and urbanism.

On Site describes the complexity of what we do.

Ned. his mark

In On Site 6 in 2001 we had a project by David Tsai, Blood Pen , which is worth re-visiting for this issue on identity.

Some projects are unforgettable.

David Tsai

blood pen

object design | need and deed by david tsai

Integrity The blood pen is meant to be used in contracts where one’s integrity is of the highest importance. The process of withdrawing and writing in blood signifies one’s intent and committment to an agreement. It reflects on the pain, difficulty and sacrifice one must inevitably face in fulfilling one’s work. Responsibility The ideal use of the blood pen is for a peace treaty, or in instances when a country’s leader has made decisions and statements directly resulting in bloodshed. Signing a peace treaty with the blood pen, the signature signifies both the end of the conflict and that this is the final blood shed. Identity Blood contains your genetic code. It contains you. Your signature then not only represents you, it is you.

on site

25 identity

contents

David Tsai Joanne Lam smsteele Department of Unusual Certainties Andrea Wong + Cody Spencer

Blood Pen Going Home: Hong Kong Who Are You?

2 4 5 6 8 9

World and Home Branding Victoria Illusion of Choice

Michael Panacci Lejla Odobasic Thomas-Bernard Kenniff Lisa Dietrich Victoria Stanton

Migration and Identity Barking Town Square Home Towns Roadside Atractions

12 14 17 20 22 25 29 31 36 41 44 46 48 50 52 56 60 63 66 70 72 76 78 80 84 86 87 88

Deborah Wang Amery Calvelli Reza Aliabadi Aisling O’Carroll Wes Wilson Frédéric Brisson Farzaneh Bahrami Corey Schnobrich

Stop-motion migration Forget not the street Urban Cardiogram Stolpersteine Spitalfields Incognitae Post-industrial Barcelona Tehran A Sea of Symbols in the UAE Identity in Collaboration You need sound in order to be heard Public Form at the Periphery Shifting City Disappearing Gwangju Animal Cities Embedded Identity A Room In-between: Soviet Kommunalkas First Contract Tearing Air by Drawing Displacement in Space Weedrobes Starting the Day Urban Design Identity

Peter Osborne Shannon Werle Alexander d’Hooge + Neeraj Bhatia Aaron Levine Miriam Ho Joshua Craze Giovana Beltrao Kira Varvanina Tim Sharp Catherine Hamel

Nicole Dextras Suzanne Ernst DoUC subscriptions calls for articles masthead

I do a 360, straining to identify traces that match the vague images in my head. I have been here before, many times in fact. Feeling dizzy, I try to steady myself at an extremely busy intersection in Hong Kong. I have to admit defeat. I am lost at home. Yet, I am right at home. Having been a Canadian immigrant grown accustomed to suburban houses and shopping malls for over two decades, I go back home, my first home, my original home. Nervous and excited, I make my way into the city. The place is an immediate plurality of adjectives: strange, dense, new, fast and overwhelming. However, amongst the seemingly organised chaos, the shape of Hong Kong is familiar, albeit taller and glitzier. The constant reinvention between the mountains and the harbour can only be appreciated from the tops of buildings these days.The macro-view is spectacular, offering an understanding of a city in terms of large infrastructural transformations. More land is being reclaimed from the Victoria Harbour. Underpasses are being shaped by an extraordinary amount of steel. Plans for an activated waterfront promenade are announced in multiple renderings. Alongside simultaneous infrastructural projects are skyscrapers ready to remake the skyline. I am in awe of the action. Up in the sky in Hong Kong, I imagine transplanting some of this activity to my other home, Toronto. A sense of impasse immediately washes over me. Often bogged down by bureaucratic wranglings, even one of these projects would take years of debate in the council chambers. My Toronto seems stuck.

Other than the harbour, space for oneself is in short supply, even within one’s own apartment. Not only do today’s Hong Kongers work, eat and shop in hyper-efficient mode, it is all conducted in impossibly small spaces. Naturally, real estate is an obsession and everyone knows square footage prices by heart. Not even the condos that have sprung up in Toronto in recent years have prepared me for the typical Hong Kong apartment. Having lived in suburban houses that are minimum 2000 square feet, I find myself trying to understand a family living in a three- bedroom apartment of 600 square feet. Granted it is efficiently laid out and every possibility for built-in storage is maximised. I stand in the miniscule kitchen, imagining and projecting my life if I had stayed. No doubt I would have adapted, just like everyone else, however I cannot imagine the effect it would have had on my psyche. It is no wonder that the streets are full. They are in effect everyone’s living room and backyard and everything in between. The built environment has supported and reinforced pressure cooker compact living at every level from the skyline to the apartment, leaving very little room for one to stop and think. A part of me understands and is envious of this lifestyle – after all, isn’t this density and activity the holy grail of all our mixed-use plans? At the same time, I am not sure I truly want to be a part of this.

urbanism | memory by joanne lam

going home

where is it?

Coming down from the dense skyline to the street level gives a different vantage point. Hong Kong streets are just as intense as I remember, except they remain so 24/7. Everyone needs to get somewhere in a hurry, above and below ground. Without the high-tech efficient public transportation system, the city would surely come to a standstill. The crowds are not only on the main streets but on side streets as well. I easily blend in, but have trouble keeping up with the average walking speed. The whole city is hopping, a true metropolis, every planner’s dream except it is not master planned by planners. Driven by scarce land and high development pressures, Hong Kong has willed itself into being. No one is untouched by the energy pulsing through the city – a far cry from the vast sprawling malls in the Toronto suburbs that pretend to reproduce this madness. On a closer look, the buildings that are so shiny from high up take on a duller sheen from street level. In the older areas, ground floors have been renovated for stores that rival those on Fifth Avenue, but the apartments from the second floor up are covered in a thick layer of gray dust, betraying years of pollution. Although I do not feel claustrophobic, the streets definitely feel saturated. I long for a breather, a break from the relentless movement. I instinctively head for the water. Many hours sitting by Canadian lakes have shown me the best place to find peace and quiet.

Joanne Lam

As I doubt my commitment to today’s Hong Kong, I question my loyalty to Toronto. Frankly, neither the hyper-compact environment nor the sprawling suburbs seems like home. Perhaps it is both a curse and blessing to immigrants; destined to continuously question the basic idea of home, I am also freed from its physical and cultural trappings. My home does not lie in one city or the other or both, but rather in-between. It shifts. It occupies a space in time, allowing one to be both insider and outsider simultaneously. I stop pretending and start to navigate Hong Kong with a tourist map. It is a blatant case of the city telling me that I do not belong. However, every now and then, I stumble upon a staircase, or a bridge, or an intersection from a particular corner that I remember so well, and I know. I am home.

smsteele

the poet sneaks behind Sgt Major’s back, disobeys his orders, uses the cooks’ blue rocket & washes her hair with contraband hot water! – notebook #4 smsteele

who are you | language poetry by smsteele

who are you

‘ sta maslak chishay da ? (what are you?)’ the ANA asked me. looked towards the translator, a weedy man with broken, rotting teeth. I carried no pistol, wore body armour. arrived in a tornado of Chinook dust with only a small pack. wore tan but no cammo. ‘poet’ I replied. my little moleskine tucked between my frag vest, my chest. ready. my black pen wedged between pages. the courtyard of the schoolhouse quiet in the way of all mid-day courtyards where the sun dictates.

‘ sha’ir ’ the translator told the skinny ranks clustered in a crescent around me.

‘ sha’ir. sha’ir ’ the Afghan soldiers nodded. smiled. turned and left.

a table of engineers playing cards looked up. resumed play.

poet. of course. poet. why wouldn’t these Canadians have a poet drop in on them?

this work is so damned undone.

identity formation | housing by department of unusual certainties

world and home A comparison of Canada’s post-WWII global identity and major CMHC events World and Home is an exercise in understanding relationships.We can continue to extend this chart, adding on new bits of information.What if we overlaid immigration numbers? Existing housing stocks? Or even the history of the Canadian deficit? Relationships such as identity reveal themselves through both time and experience.

In 1946 CMHC (Canada Housing and Mortgage Cor- poration) was formed to do two important things – to house returning soldiers from the second world war and to lead the nation’s housing strategy. A bold task for a bold nation; this is what Canada was. We were world leaders not because of what we said but because of what we did, this was Canada’s global identity — action.This identity permeated Canada and in particular the policies and actions of the CMHC. World at Home is more than a comparison between Canada’s post war identity and the CMHC, it is also a reminder of what Canada was and what it could be again. A look into our recent past reveals not a nation of hockey-loving Tim Horton’s coffee drinkers who dwell on a vast plain of sprawling suburbs and are passive by nature, but a people who acted on their values. It reveals a country who initiated the UN peacekeeping force, came out strongly against the Vietnam War (then took in over 69 000 refugees from Indo-China) and housed over 30 000 war veterans and their families after WWII. It is a country that experimented with housing and density (Habitat at Expo67) and shared its housing knowledge with the world (CMHC was awarded a UN peace medal in 1982 for sharing its practices on housing, building and planning with the Economic Commission for Europe). This was a country built on action. Identity Now Canada is not what it was. It no longer leads the world and in most cases, does not even follow.The housing situation in the country is embarrassing.The Toronto Community Housing Corporation is in shambles and is being threatened with privatisation, and in Vancouver, housing prices have soared to beyond the ridiculous (a postwar bungalow sells for $889 000). On the world stage we are constantly being condemned for our lack of action on climate change and for the first time since the UN was established, Canada has gone more than a decade without a seat on the security council. The Canada of the future will have to take inspiration from its past.The Diefenbakers and Pearsons of this country have long since passed.The world leader that was Canada has rested for so long on its laurels that it is not even a shadow of its former self.We have political dithering, uninspired urbanism and a country intent on thinking about meaningless economies while productive ones disappear. Action(s) Planners and architects can no longer sit on the sidelines, we must get our hands dirty in the everyday. Housing solutions in this country can no longer wait for nonexistent government procurements or high priced clients. We must start creating new typologies unsolicited, which deal with liveable densities, associated economic models and a multicultural ideology. We must rethink the economy beyond consumerism, creating new design solutions for both the goods and services we consume. We must plan for and design the spaces where this production will occur and we must maintain and protect our cities’ productive lands from speculation.

department of unusual certainties

Talia Este

negotiating regional identity through strange and irrelevant symbols

urbanism | landscape by andrea wong and cody spencer

branding victoria

Residents have also incorporated palm trees into their own private gardens. They are especially prevalent in Oak Bay where they appear among Tudor-style houses, Arts and Crafts bungalows, tea rooms and tennis courts. Since 2004, the annual Oak Bay palm sale has made the trees widely available. According to a citizen- led count, the number of palms in Oak Bay increased from 500 in 2003 to 2,669 in 2006, prompting some Victorians to proclaim the area ‘palm tree capital of Canada’. One palm species in particular has taken root in Victoria’s landscape: Trachycarpus fortunei , also known as the Windmill Palm. Indigenous to mountainous regions of central and eastern China, it is one of the few palm species that has difficulty growing in the tropics but thrives in temperate climates. As palm trees in general endure as globally recognisable symbols of warmth, relaxation and island holidays,Victorians can use this cool-weather palm to brand their climate as tropical, relative to the rest of Canada. In privately owned gardens, they read as playful expressions of pride in Victoria’s unique climate; shared with neighbours and passers-by, these trees become currency in local negotiations of regional identity. While the rest of the country lies leafless under a blanket of snow,Victoria’s gardens display green lawns and windmill palms. Those who seek tourist dollars stand to financially gain from the broadcasting of such comparisons, for palms are valuable signifiers in the national and international tourist markets. There is an irony in Victoria’s appropriation of the palm to engage with and to promote a defining aspect of its regional identity. Victoria’s climate actually becomes less remarkable when represented by a globalised, polysemous symbol that calls to mind any number of warm-weather locales. By employing a symbol that reminds us of so many other places,Victoria risks erasing what actually does make it unique.

With its warm dry summers and wet mild winters, the city of Victoria has a Mediterranean climate and a long growing season.A wide variety of flowers, trees, and shrubs flourish in the City of Gardens, including rhododendrons, ornamental cherries, daffodils and native species such as camas and Garry Oak. Pacific Madrone and Hairy Manzanita, two native species that range south to California and Mexico, link Victoria botanically to more renowned climates. However, rather than capitalising on such associations,Victoria has chosen to promote its desirably mild climate through the cultivation of a decidedly foreign variety of plant – palms. In 2003, the City of Victoria planted palms along Douglas Street, a major entry route into the downtown core. Palm trees have also been placed in prominent locations around Victoria’s Inner Harbour. Bordered by the city’s major hotels and numerous popular tourist destinations, the Inner Harbour is a locus of activity for tourists; as a setting for parades, festivals and holiday events, it is also a gathering place for Victoria residents. In this location, palm trees are highly visible and easily photographed.

Cleverley, B ‘City cultivates a tropical image for visitors’ Times Colonist , pB1. Sept 5, 2003 Hatherly, J ‘Counting on palms:Tropical plants find a haven in Oak Bay and Victoria’ Times Colonist , pB9. April 8, 2007 Jones, D Palms throughout the world . Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995 Riffle, R L and P Craft. An Encyclopedia of Cultivated Palms . Portland, Oregon:Timber Press, 2003

Oak Bay Tourism. ‘The palm tree capital of Canada’ Retrieved from: http://www.oakbaytourism.com/attractions/palm_tree_capital.htm (2010)

the illusion of choice ‘Here is urban renewal with a sinister twist, an architecture of deception which, in its happy-face familiarity, constantly distances itself from the most fundamental realities. The architecture of this city is almost purely semiotic, playing the game of grafted signification, theme-park building.Whether it represents generic historicity or generic modernity, such design is based in the same calculus as advertising, the idea of pure imageability, oblivious to the real needs and traditions of those who inhabit it.’ building the new society

Michael Panacci

architecture | branding by michael panacci

– Michael Sorkin, Variations on a theme park: the new American city and the end of public space 1

For years the streets of Toronto have been used as a cheap stand-in for many North American cities – Manhattan, Chicago, Baltimore and Boston among others, in major films. A recent urban design proposal for a new residential neighbourhood around the Pinewood film studios on the waterfront would push this phenomenon even further. The proposal calls for residential streets and buildings to mimic neighbourhoods of London, New York and Chicago and to act as living movie sets. People could buy a house in Toronto designed to look like SoHo in New York or the Loop in Chicago. 2 While this may be the first occurrence of Toronto developers actively aping other cities’ architectural identities, it is the continuation of a trend in the marketing of Toronto’s new condominiums. Perhaps it is the absence of a self-perceived civic identity that compels a developer to borrow one, because condominiums throughout the Greater Toronto Area have long projected the imagery and themes of distant international cities as a means to market themselves.

Disconnected from either project or city, exotic locales are cynically bandied about with little reference to the actual location. Condominiums in North York, Mississauga and Etobicoke are named Malibu, French Quarters, Chicago, South Beach – even Emerald City, the fictional city of Oz, is manipulated for its exotic connotations.The glamour of a seductive lifestyle promised by these names depends on a dissolution of place, evaporated in a miasma of exotic and unreal locales. Image > Reality In Toronto’s saturated condominium market, real estate developers have had to search for any edge, any distinction that will set their condo development apart, although many of a condo’s built qualities vary little from one development to the next. Aesthetic appearance, square footage, unit cost, amenities offered, location, finishes, security, parking, storage: all of these are products of the market and as such, remain consistent within the market.The reality of condos is that, for the most part, they are more similar than not. This is exacerbated by the nature of condo development that requires that most units in the building be sold before construction begins.

individuals…Each space should be a highly independent shelter where the inhabitant can fully develop his individuality’. 5 The rise of the individual is even more in evidence now, ten years after De Cauter wrote his essay, in the proliferation of laptops, blackberries and smart phones.These devices are made not for a family, group or company but for each individual.The ipod, imac, ipad, iphone…the one-bedroom condominium unit is the housing equivalent of this phenomena, the ihome. If the individual condo unit is the capsule, it relies on a series of heavily controlled networks (circulation, mechanical, electrical). In condominiums, these controls take the form of secured entrance lobbies, sterile hallways and collective spaces kept forever neutral so as not to diminish re-sale prices, everything kept in a perpetual state of ‘new’. These controls foster an active separation from the public realm of the streets and an insider/outsider mentality amongst condo-owners. Separation from the city is also conveyed in condo marketing. Websites are quick to advertise views, the city is always shown from a picturesque bird’s-eye angle, sections of the website labelled ‘neighbourhood’ are edited to include the fashionable and trendy options located within walking range. In all aspects, a very large component of the city is denied and edited out, fostering a subconscious retreat from the urban realm. This is the paradox of the apparent freedom of the capsular unit: as it promotes individuality and diversity, it also creates thresholds of separation: ‘If anything, it seems that as we move physically closer together, psychologically we’re moving farther apart… the condominium model is a physical manifestation of our changing attitudes toward home, family, and community. It is the housing model of the individual – designed to be unique, self-contained, and fully customisable to your lifestyle needs.’ 6

Pre-construction sales are used to secure financing for the construction; the longer this takes, the more money a developer loses in interest. In this pre-built environment, image becomes more valuable than the eventual built reality. Marketing trumps design. This creates a sharp division between image and reality. Illusion, fantasy and themes are all deployed in a marketing onslaught that sells consumers an image first and a home second. In the absence of any built product or design, marketers are free to target consumers in a variety of different ways. Entering the Capsular Civilisation The end-game of this consumer-marketing escalation is that it hastens our collective descent into what the Belgian philospher Lieven De Cauter terms capsular civilisation , an expansion of the ideas of capsule architecture first suggested by the Japanese Metabolist Kisho Kurokawa in his 1969 essay ‘Capsule Declaration’. De Cauter’s definition of capsule is ‘a tool or an extension of the body which, having become an artificial environment, shuts out the outer, hostile environment. It is a medium that has become an envelope’. 3 His fears about rising capsular civilisation centre on the disintegration of society through barricading, segregation and isolation. In today’s condo culture this is promoted through the rise of the consumer individual, the fostering of an insider/ outsider mentality and an active retreat from the public realm that encourages a growing separation and polarisation of individuals. The Rise of the Individual De Cauter introduces hyperindividualisation as the ‘massive disinterest in the concept of society in terms of sociability and solidarity’. 4 A ‘free society is centred on the individual, freedom and mobility’ with the paradox being that such a society is rooted in ‘separation, enclosure and confinement’. The capsule is ‘mutually independent individual spaces, determined by the free will of

Michael Panacci

New Opportunities Toronto is now the North American market with the most new condominiums and as such has a tremendous opportunity to test new territories in collective urban dwelling. Rather than promoting and encouraging the individual capsule through marketing there is an opportunity to discuss and think about the new collective spaces and forms of collective ownership that we are creating. Whether this is through the hybridisation of programming which encourages a diversity of user-types and opens the collective spaces of the building up to new publics, or through the creation of interior vertical urban networks which take advantage of the new forms that high-rise condominiums are taking, or by optimising site

adjacencies and creating new interior networks – by re-imagining collective dwelling, perhaps the illusion created by marketing can be erased in favour of truly original living options. g 1 Sorkin, Michael. Variations on a Theme Park: the new American city and the end of public space. New York: Hill And Wang, 1992. pp xiv-xv 2 For more information see Wong,Tony.‘Toronto streets to be living movie set’ Toronto Star, 14 November 2010. 3 Cauter, de Lieven. The Capsular Civilization: on the city in the age of fear. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2004. p 77 4 ibid. p 81 5 ibid. p 66 6 Maich, Steve, and Lianne George. The Ego Boom: why the world really does revolve around you .Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2009. p 121

migration and identity simultaneous cities

urbanism | migration by lejla odobasic

Toronto’s skyline has gone through a vast visible transformation over the past fifteen years spurred by high-rise condominium buildings that started first in the former industrial lands along the lakeshore and eventually spread into vacant pockets of available land all over the downtown.Although the quality of space, design, unit sizes, material choices and their general effect on the streetscape is often debated among the design community, condominium towers offer very appealing real estate prices that ensure their continuous sales. Of course it is not merely the square footage that is marketed here; perhaps even more importantly these places come with a promise of a certain lifestyle:The Cosmopolitan, King’s Landing, Cityplace and South Hampton – one is buying into a life of luxury and opulence depicted in polished renderings and a list of amenities. The majority of units are designed as one-bedroom with a den, geared towards young professionals and people moving into the city in pursuit of a career and the excitement of city living. In certain cases groupings of condo towers are revitalising entire neighbourhoods, for better or for worse, and we get Liberty Village, once abandoned industrial land just southwest of the downtown, now becoming the new ‘it’ place.

Lejla Odobasic

Crucial questions about condo living still remain. How will the building type accommodate family growth? How might this affect the city itself– are we going to have an exodus of entire neighbourhoods back to the suburbs once the kids arrive? Are these then just ‘transitional’ buildings? Just a few blocks west of Liberty Village along King Street West is another kind of transitional building typology, also with a promise of a new start. Jameson Avenue is a north/south street that runs just a bit over a kilometre from Lakeshore Boulevard to Queen Street West, in a neighborhood known as Parkdale Village. Jameson Avenue is flanked with mid-rise multi-storey apartment buildings mostly dating from the 1950’s. The majority of residents in these apartment buildings are new immigrants to Canada. Jameson Avenue is where their Canadian life begins. Jameson Avenue dates from 1810 when Parkdale was quite a wealthy residential suburb of Victorian mansions overlooking Lake Ontario. In the mid-1950s Toronto built the Gardiner Expressway creating a grave barrier between the city and its waterfront. In Parkdale this greatly devalued the once prime lake view real estate, reorganising the area’s streets with the demolition of over fifty houses at the foot of Jameson Avenue. This in turn gave rise to the multi-storey mid-rise apartment buildings that line the street today, changing it from single-family dwellings to the multi- storey mid-rise apartment buildings. During the 1970s, Parkdale went through a large demographic change. The provincial government, in the hopes of integrating many long-term mental illness patients from the two adjacent psychiatric hospitals, decided to convert many old Victorian mansions into boarding houses. Many illegal small units were also created further driving the down property values. Soon Parkdale developed a reputation as a neighbourhood endemic

with poverty, crime, drugs, homelessness and large numbers of people living with mental illness. In a vicious cycle this reputation drew the real estate prices even farther down allowing the apartment buildings lining Jameson Avenue to become an affordable option for the many new immigrants to the city. Today, walking down Jameson Avenue there is a strange tension, an oscillation between its dangerous reputation and the undeniable comfort of the street’s proportions. Unlike the condo typology, here the ratio of street width to building height is just right. The apartment buildings embody an ephemeral feeling of frozen time; brick buildings stand proudly with their dancing balcony patterns, all demarcated with distinctly 50s signage with names such as The Manor,The Royal Court, Sunset Tower and Concord. Many of these buildings have fallen into a bit of disrepair but one can’t help but wonder if, like the condos, they too bring a sense of promise to the people who inhabit them? Do they too sell more than just rental square footage? Are they part of the dream of a transition into a new life? g References: Slater,Tom.‘Toronto’s South Parkdale Neighbourhood: A Brief History of Development, Disinvestment, and Gentrification’. Research Bulletin 28 . Centre for Urban and Community Studies, University of Toronto, May 2005. Whitzman, Carolyn. Suburb, slum, urban village : transformations in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood, 1875-2002. Vancouver, UBC Press. 2009

project’s new public space as a ‘community focus’.The moment not only celebrated architectural vision, but the culmination of local regeneration efforts dating back to the mid 1980s. However, this effusive display slowly unravelled in the years to follow. At the end of 2005 the site facing Barking’s Town Hall remained untouched and the entire original team had left the project and been replaced. Yet in spite of these drawbacks, the project narrowly escaped the scrap heap and construction finally began in 2006. For the last year and a half I have been studying the Town Square project in its context. During that time I interviewed participants involved in the project and local residents and also stayed in one of the development’s new residential blocks. What emerges from this research is that given the ten years it took for the project to come to fruition, three significant aspect of identity come into crisis: first is the authorship of the designers, second the architecture itself, and last the conception of ‘the public’ associated with the project.

In the fall of 2010, the third and final phase of the Barking Town Square was completed. The Town Square is a mixed-use development by developer Redrow with buildings designed by AHMM Architects and a major new public space by MUF Architecture/Art.The project is situated in the east London Borough of Barking and Dagenham and has been celebrated by officials as the centre piece to a vast project of urban regeneration in the struggling post-industrial suburb. But this is, of course, not the whole story. Going back ten years, the story of the Town Square is one that raises critical issues about the very notion of identity. In March 2000, the team led by developers Urban Catalyst and Avery Architects was declared winner of the Barking Town Square competition. Both local media and the UK architectural press were effusive. The Barking and Dagenham Post reported on a ‘new heart for Barking’, transforming it’s ‘bleak town square’ with ‘Barbican style’ buildings.The Architect’s Journal clamoured that Avery had ‘triumphed’ and ‘struck gold’ in Barking, describing the

barking town square shifting identities in east London

urbanism | ownership by thomas - bernard kenniff

Authorship Although the original competition winning scheme and the built project differ substantially, elements of the design can be traced through the decade of ‘projecting’ the Town Square.Whether through the original project brief or the pass over from the changing architects (Avery to AHMM) some elements are seen to have carried through. This raises the issue that in the end, the project cannot be essentially attributed to a single author. We should also see a firm like AHMM not as a singular entity but as an assemblage of relations with other participants in the project.That is, most design decisions taken during their involvement in the project should be situated in their context;AHMM designing in 2003 is not AHMM designing in 2008. In other words, it is impossible to conceive of their identity outside of the relations that link them to others in the project, developers, public realm consultants and council representatives.

The Barking and Dagenham Post front page, March 15, 2000. Winning scheme by developer Urban Catalyst and Avery Architects.

Thomas-Bernard Kenniff

View from the Town Hall looking north across the stage to the wooded area of the Square during the opening ceremony for phase II, September 2009.

View across the main open space looking east with Town Hall on the right and library building on the left with residential above.

Thomas-Bernard Kenniff

View of Barking town centre from the south with the Town Square project in the centre.

Barking’s publics During the last decade, Barking experienced some of the highest immigration rates in the country.This influx was concentrated in the town centre, where the Town Square is located and which traditionally has been the area with the highest turn-over in the borough. As one local resident told me, the town centre is where people with little money move in to the borough only to move out as soon as they can afford it.This trend continues to this day firstly because most of the regeneration efforts in the borough are concentrated on the town centre, and secondly because the majority of the new apartments has been bought up by buy- to-let agencies in a sense ‘re-generating’ a highly transient and heterogeneous community. Given these changes it is not surprising to find out how little the ‘public’ of 2000 has to do with the ‘public’ of 2010. If we then wonder today whether the public has been consulted or involved in the development of the Town Square we should bear in mind this significant transformation. Which ‘public’ are we speaking of? One crucial question in this case is whether it matters if the public was consulted in 2000 for a scheme completed a decade later. It does, but only if the overall project makes a point of addressing these changes.The critical idea might just be the reconciliation of shifting identities with the notion of architecture as a process. For if we understand architecture not only as a ‘thing in itself’ but also as a socio-economic, cultural, and political process then the identity of designers, architectural objects and publics should be conceived of similarly. g

Architectural identity The identity of the architecture itself similarly shifts over time. The winning scheme of 2000 presents a more compact and homogeneous development than the final built project. Its formal identity struck, at that time, a chord with some of the resident population who recalled Barking’s glorious fishing past. The Barking Recorder claimed that the ‘Town Square will be all ship-shape’ and the council leader at the time projected it would be known as ‘the Barking boat’. The built project is more fragmented, colourful, orthogonal in form and significantly taller than the original, and apart from having buildings nicknamed after defunct local industries, does not have overt aesthetic links to local iconography. In many ways the resulting scheme expresses the aesthetics of urban regeneration linked to the politics and economics of the last five years: the tail end of the Blair government and a push for public-private partnerships. In January 2000 the finalists’ schemes were exhibited and the public were invited to vote on the one they preferred. But the transformation of the architecture over ten years means that those who lived in Barking in 2000 wonder why the finished scheme has so little to do with the one they voted on or saw represented in the media. On the other hand, residents recently moved to Barking wonder why they were never asked for their opinion.

Lisa Dietrich

home towns Toronto and Hamburg

urbanism | mapping texture by lisa dietrich

Identity is subjective; the identity of a city is no exception. Its character presents itself to everyone in a different way. The way in which we get to know a place shapes our vision of it. I believe that our first understanding of a city comes with our movement through it, by foot, bike, streetcar, bus, subway or car, maybe even by boat or by air. This movement can be mandatory, as in the act of getting from one place to another, or voluntary, in the form of exploring and wandering; for reasons of getting somewhere we need to be or just because we like to explore. Our paths of travel are defined by whichever modes of transportation are available as well as the layout of the streets and transit system. I moved to Toronto after growing up in Germany and living in Hamburg for almost seven years. Although both cities are formally comparable in many ways, their character always struck me as quite different. Both cities are relatively flat. Both are determined by their large bodies of water, although Hamburg more so than Toronto. Both cities have subways and street level transit. They are provincial but not federal capitals and come with large universities, famed TV and radio towers. However, a significant difference is that Toronto grew along a pre-determined street grid while Hamburg grew within and around a walled town.This growth is reflected in their respective street and transit patterns. My first image of a new city is always a simplified graphic representation of the place – a map. My first face-to-face experience is the view out of the window of a bus, streetcar of train. In Hamburg long stretches of the subway are elevated above street level. A passenger can enjoy fantastic views of the river Elbe or the Alster lake. As opposed to the streetcars in Toronto, these elevated subway routes do not necessarily follow the streets and may also take you along the rear of apartment blocks and elegant turn of the century mansions, even cutting diagonally through blocks, loudly rumbling past bedroom windows only a couple of metres away.

Lisa Dietrich

below,Toronto: Little Italy as seen from the 506 Carlton streetcar

above, Hamburg: Looking towards the new Opera House from Landungsbrücken station, 2 storeys above street level

Lisa Dietrich

had caught my eye. My walk was more or less an extension of what I had already experienced from my window seat. When I had just moved to Hamburg, I had no understanding of my route at street level when I left a train station.This was the case even if I had only travelled above ground. My pedestrian knowledge spread more or less centrically around the station as a starting point. It took weeks or even months until two of these areas overlapped. Suddenly relationships I had previously known only theoretically were manifested in reality and filled with images and realtime connections. My mental map of Hamburg grew into an agglomeration of places, each with their distinguished character, but blended into one another, forming a complex

In other parts, such as around the Altona train station, you may find yourself in the midst of a vast old railway yard, passing water towers, derelict storage buildings and crumbling garages as well as long distance trains waiting for departure – a view inaccessible to a cyclist, pedestrian or driver. In Toronto, many of my travels happened by streetcar, always following the street grid, rarely changing directions. Just by looking out of the window I quickly became acquainted with long stretches of those streets which bear streetcar tracks. I loved exploring new areas in this easy, comfortable manner: automated urban window shopping. After being shepherded past a display of interesting shops, cafés and parks, I would get off and backtrack to whatever

Tr iplom

above, Hamburg:The S3 train on its way to the Hauptbahnhof

below,Toronto:The 504 King streetcar at Metro Hall

to an important structure or square, even City Hall and Nathan Philips Square are neatly integrated into the orthogonal system. The omnipresence of the grid is further repeatedly brought to mind when giving directions by listing the number of intersections and a cardinal direction rather than going by landmarks as is common in Germany. Hamburg is considered a beautiful city even by European standards, and I agree. While it is currently undergoing a giant urban development, the new HafenCity does not really feel like a part of the city proper, despite being immediately adjacent to the downtown area.To me, Hamburg is largely defined by its old buildings, parks, lakes and waterways. All these have been around for a long time and will be there whenever I decide to visit.The city has a lot to offer and I don’t even know half of it. New landmarks are created, but are integrated into the existing complex fabric in such a way that changes appear to happen slowly. Maybe it’s only because I am so far removed, but Hamburg seems settled and complete. Toronto is still new. It is stretching, cracking and new things emerge unexpectedly from out of nowhere.Though based on a strict layout, the way places are arranged within the grid seem almost random, the connections between them accepted as given fact, no brain power is needed to tie them together. On the one hand this will never fully let me transcend my abstract image of Toronto as a system of perpendicular lines, while on the other hand, it means that new things can pop up here and there as nothing really grows consistently in a predictable pattern. Its identity is constantly shifting and Toronto will continue to be a subject of exploration. g

Christoph Lange

network of the most colourful associations. One network I could physically explore on my own by foot, and another superimposed layer that I could only ever pass through as a voyeur, looking out of a train’s window. I left Hamburg for Toronto three years ago and have felt at home here ever since. I am growing quite familiar with this city and am treating my neighbourhood as an extended living room. But although frequently referred to as a city of neighbourhoods, to me Toronto is much less a city of adjacent and overlapping areas as implied in the term ‘neighbourhood’ than a city of long streets and large intersections.The presence of urban centres is not anticipated in the street layout. Streets basically never lead up

Victoria Stanton, still from an HD video shot in Saskatoon

performance | arrivals by victoria stanton

roadside attractions

For the last two years, in several cities and towns across Canada and abroad, I have been exploring a travelling performance/ process called Roadside Attractions . I became interested in visually mapping my strategies for arriving, trying to literally embody transitional space in order to find meaningful connections to the landscape around me. Investing what I think of as a ‘performative consciousness’ into multiple sites, I track movement between places by means of small-scale public intervention.This has had a significant impact not only on how I perceive my surroundings but also on my understanding of the elusive process of acclimatisation.

Who am I when I’m not at home? Anxious. I’m not a good traveller. A good traveller gets there in one piece. It takes me days to arrive. First my nose, feet, and eyes. Next my hands and skin. Then my head, though still cluttered with cobwebs and clouds. Then my stomach, bundled in knots, brimming with fizz. My shoulders – up around my ears. And finally my heart: wondrous…alert…porous…timid…morose… hungry. Sore. Alone. I unpack my bag. I put some of my clothes on hangers. Others, folded, stay in the suitcase. I get groceries. I put them on a shelf in the kitchen. I buy flowers and scour the cupboards for a suitable receptacle. A dirty Mason jar will do. I separate the stems into two small bouquets. This way it fills up more of the room. I plan a bedtime routine: bring the toothbrush, already smeared with paste – along with a towel, soap and moisturizer – to the bathroom down the hall. The first night is clumsy; I splash water all over my feet. The next morning it’s a little bit better. The following night, I have it down pat. I figure out just how much force to use to rinse my face without flooding the floor and how low to put the heat on the hot plate so as not to burn the rice. I place a few drops of lavender oil on the lamp next to my bed, just before going to sleep. Now, it smells like home. Before I know it, three days have passed… How do I find a sense of home when I am away? Creating familiar spaces and comfort zones in otherwise unfamiliar settings. Attempting a sense of stability through a measured combination of intensely managed micro-routines and unconventional public actions. Familiarity Through Repetition. Repetition with slight changes. Attempting a sense of stability through a measured combination of intensely managed micro-routines and indiscreet meandering.

Is this how I get there? I enter the street. Extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territories. Expanding into the horizon. One corner at a time. One space after another. A succession of in-betweens caught unawares, the places you don’t usually see in the picture. Feeling grass on my hands, cement on my face. Folding into a wall, onto the ground. A handrail, a tree trunk, a metal fence, a rock. Actions form a visual map and become the concrete associations that trigger memory cues: how to get from my (temporary) home to the grocery store, from the grocery store to the gallery, and back again. It becomes a personal lexicon of sites, allowing non-places to become… extra- ordinary. Attempting a sense of stability through measured repetition, creating familiar spaces in now familiar settings. Meandering. Recognising the texture of that building.The sunlight at four o’clock. Brushing my teeth. A fence. A rock. Equilibrium is gradually achieved as the world becomes navigable; the trajectory, processed and ordered, now resembles my bedtime routine.The micro and the macro gently collide. Extending beyond the art context, the deliberate, perforated space between performance and travel creates familiar places; comfort zones for an identity confirmed through repetition. Making so many in-betweens into a whole.

Is this how I get there? This is how I arrive.

Christian Richer

from the exhibition Roadside Attractions: From A to B and Back Again

Christian Richer and Victoria Stanton

Stop-Motion Migration is a series of almost- maps and almost-tours. It performs a different kind of psychogeography, one that doesn’t actualise an experience of mobility through walking, but offers a mobile experience that is apprehended from a static position. If, as sociologist Vincent Kaufmann claims,‘psychogeography is fundamentally an experience of mobility, applied to space as much as to time’ 2 , then a projected tour of space and through time is possible. Stop-Motion Migration produces a peripatetic experience that more closely approximates artist Richard Long’s description of a walk as living in the imagination of anyone, 3 which is another space too. Stop-Motion Migration finds and maps gallery movements as a way to locate ghosts or trace absences in the city. This project focuses on the idea of ghosting, or the accumulation of absences in specific places, rather than a walking tour of the city. It reveals in an abstract way where and when certain galleries appeared, migrated or disappeared, using the ads and listings in Canadian Art magazine as a barometer for this. Its primary intention is not to enter a discussion on the effects of gentrification so commonly (and importantly) associated with the migration of cultural sites, but rather to focus on movement and motion, an ever-changing constellation of appearances or presences in the city.

Stop-Motion Migration No.1 (1985), 2010. 22 x 17” digital print on paper

stop-motion migration

To intervene on a territory is not merely an act of planning but an act of creation, an attempt to assemble contradictions and transform them into poetic relationships: ultimately one is more attentive to modifying how space is perceived than the way space itself exists. — Stalker, Manifesto 1

urbanism | projects for the city by deborah wang

1 Stalker, Manifesto . 5 March 2010 <http:// digilander.libero.it/stalkerlab/tarkowsky/manifesto/ manifesting.htm> 2 Vincent Kaufmann, Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry , trans. Robert Bononno. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. p111 3 in R.H. Fuchs. Richard Long. London:Thames and Hudson and New York:The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1986. p 236

Stop-Motion Migration No.2 (1990), 2010. 22 x 17” digital print on paper

In Stop-Motion Migration , movement in the city is mapped by systematically sampling an incomplete archive of what happened, where and when.These phenomena are translated and represented through a set of lists and diagrams.The list of names and addresses forms a text, while the diagram creates a series of visual relationships and pure movements unburdened by names and annotations. Collapsed on the same plane as the diagram, the list is simultaneously a terrain and a directory. It is a way to partially interpret and understand the diagram and, by extension, the city. Similar to the pairing of map and tour, where a tour functions as a participatory three-dimensional realisation of the two-dimensional notation of the map, this project pairs diagram with list.While each list and diagram is static, the series of composite images (each representing a year from 1985 to the present) are active and unfold in time and space from drawing to drawing. Like the delicate increments of individual response that needed to be reinscribed on that certain cataclysmic night for Hickey, 4 I propose the idea of rethinking space as something incremental. The relatively small peripatetic experience in the gallery is a tiny analogue for a larger movement that took place in a past time and in a past city that is different yet similar to this one now. The slow movement of galleries from space to space, across and through the city, is suspended in each frame, by each diagram that forms a distinct constellation. Every dot represents a moment of permanence, a period of time, while every vector signals the migration of a gallery from one space to another. The diagram optimises each move by taking the shortest distance possible across the city without regard to the physical things or temporal occurrences – traffic jams or meandering walks – that may have stood in its way. Together, the diagram and list collapse the three-dimensionality of space onto a two-dimensional surface to make a single record of what happened before.

Stop-Motion Migration No.3 (1995), 2010. 22 x 17” digital print on paper

4 Dave Hickey.‘The Delicacy of Rock-and-Roll’ Air Guitar . Los Angeles: Art issues Press, 1997. p98

Stop-Motion Migration No.4 (2000), 2010. 22 x 17” digital print on paper

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