Districts of Difference The development of Scarborough’s core emerged from generic suburban planning, resulting in a group of various unfinished developments with no boundaries or limits. Nevertheless, the centre has the potential to be a major civic node for eastern Toronto, tied to regional infrastructure lines – the highway, rapid transit and major arterial streets. Looking closer at the site,‘almost-districts’ emerge, based on formal zoning identities: commercial, institutional, industrial, mixed-use, greenery. While each of these districts contains a clear building type and associated demographic user, the district as an entire project was never completed.This has resulted in a site with seemingly no logic and an equally confused network of redundant roads to support it.What if these districts of various identities could be clarified and made into legible entities? A Void of Possibilities Separation and fragmentation have allowed these distinct islands to have coherent yet competing identities, all of which frame an infrastructural node with a rapid transit stop, bus drop-off and automobile routes at the centre. This has the potential to be the connective device between the various districts: claimed by no one, it therefore belongs to everyone and could define the public sphere in Scarborough. Present surface parking and uses of the site can be reconfigured to link the districts and their diverse users: flow infrastructures could define a transfer station, superimposing soft programmes (markets, theatres, bingo halls, recreational activities) onto its parking platforms, taking advantage of the space during moments of commuter-inactivity and reaffirming the public spirit of the building. People and infrastructure could come together on a democratic platform of plurality, the plinthesis . This project was produced as part of the Cities Centre Workshop: Build Toronto , carried out at the University of Toronto, John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design. Team Directors: Alexander D’Hooghe, Neeraj Bhatia, Shelagh McCartney and Francesco Martire Design Team Phase 1: Nathaniel Addison, Justin Cheung, Song Deng, Gaston Fernandez, Robert E Fiorino,AndriaYa-Yu Fong, Zachariah Elan Glennon, Meagan Donkin Gumbinger, Darius Gumushdjian, Martin Hogue, ManYee Stanton Hung, Negar Jazbi, Ada-Nkem Juwah, Zeena Hashim Kammoona and Mandy Allison Wong DesignTeam Phase 2: Nathan Bortolin, Dave Freedman, Han Liu, Salome Nikuradze, Mahtab Oskuee, Sanford Riley, Kristin Ross, Steven Socha and CelinaYee
1 Alison and Peter Smithson, Ordinariness and Light: Urban Theories, 1952- 1960 and Their Application in a Building Project, 1963-1970. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1970. p182 2 Berlin, Isaiah. ‘The Lasting Effects’ in The Roots of Romanticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. pp 146-147 3 Berlin, Isaiah. Two Concepts of Liberty. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958. Public life is foregrounded and contained; architecture sets the backdrop of public life. Each clarified district is identified through its legibility. These grouped islands, each containing their own irreconcilable utopia, stand with unflinching conviction against the ubiquitous sprawl around them. Creating the outlines of a political space by clarifying its edges, we can understand difference and thus form an identity. Without such edges, legibility and identity, we are no more than a mass of popular opinion swimming in the grey goo of suburbia. g Forming Identities for a Pluralistic Public Framing and containing the confluence of flows, the plinthesis is continually invigorated by the mixed demographics within the site and the city. Its neutral form creates a legible figure of connectivity and links atria and infrastructure to local and regional transportation. Diversification of the mall atrium While conventional ‘good’ urbanism – as proposed by the Congress for the New Urbanism – involves continual attempts to animate the street, this approach is not tenable in Scarborough. The only public space that functions on the site is the existing mall – a romanticised, weather-controlled version of the street. If the mall atrium is made the template for connection in the suburban context, liberated from commercial interests it could be used as an internalised connective network. Five distinct atria could connect the various districts internally as well as to the transfer station and its associated infrastructure.These climatically controlled spaces, liberated to be unconditionally open to all, would reconfigure the mall into a micro-city, the compacted public realm of Scarborough connected with the world at large through the plinthesis.
0pposite: options for soft programming take advantage of off-period times, the shelter of parking and regional infrastructural connections. Neutral platforms allows for the greatest flexibility and diversity of activities. below: the collective container at the intersection of flows and legible islands
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