At the time of their assessment, the Smithsons viewed sprawl and its lack of legibility as a threat to the civic consciousness of Los Angeles. Legibility was considered integral to the identity of both the individual and collective, and of critical importance in configuring the pluralist city. At the same time, in the late 1960s, identity politics were evolving and group identities began to fragment at an accelerated rate into various niche audiences, complicated by struggles between determinacy and indeterminacy, and the difficulty of identifying a public with competing and often irreconcilable values. Providing legibility to such a public was a dilemma. Isaiah Berlin located the emergence of this dilemma in the Romantic period, when romantic nationalism proved both the irreconcilability and the validity of differing desires and identities. 2 Pluralism was the conflict between divergent beliefs; accordingly, Berlin’s proposed pluralism would not allow for synthesis of such competing identities but rather leave them in an uneasy coexistence. Berlin quotes Schumpeter’s call for the civilised man to differentiate himself from a barbarian through the understanding of the relativity of one’s convictions (in the light of the equal value of other opposing positions) and to stand for them unflinchingly 3 – in other words, to have a clear sense of one’s identity and stance. It is only through such a clear stance that pluralism and democracy can ultimately function. How does one organise form, create legibility and provide identity in such a state of ‘agonised pluralism’? This is most pertinent in the peripheries of North American cities that resemble mid- twentieth century Los Angeles – vast territories of homogeneous and unplanned sprawl without formal limits and without formal legibility or identity. One such territory is Scarborough, on the eastern periphery of Toronto. It contains a ‘failed’ project for a modernist civic core (Scarborough Town Centre), which was meant to, but does not, provide identity to the periphery as well as connect it to the rest of Toronto. A reconfiguration of this core could yield the template for Berlin’s concept of agonised plurality.
Existing ‘almost’ districts have neither individual nor overall coherence or legibility
Fragmented and redundant road network breaks from Toronto’s supergrid to service the incoherent sprawl.
below: Legibility within generally undifferentiated suburban sprawl Proposed plan retaining several existing buildings and clarifying the edges of each district
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Kristin Ross
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