In the exurban regions or Toronto, the city recently built itself the capricious Yonge-Sheppard subway line that is grafted onto the main Yonge Street subway arterial. This subway line runs along an under-developed suburban corridor and terminates essentially at an Ikea store and a North York General Hospital. Along the several subway stops, one can find a series of public art projects. One that is particularly thought provoking is Stacey Spiegel's Immersion Land. Using a panoramic camera, Spiegel processed a series of photographs onto millions of tiny porcelain tiles. These tiles present images that are clear from a distance but pixellated and abstract when viewed at close range. The murals are in many ways representative of the city. Spiegel's installation suggests a displaced landscape of nostalgia and one of an imagined farmland that might have existed several metres above the transit platform before succumbing to the inexorable urban sprawl and development of the past fifty years.

1975 Friend’s backyard, Summer: favourite sea shell

1976 Centennial Park, Spring: first kite

1977 Gymnastics club: fear of backflips

As the L.PC.Village becomes further gentrified by places like the Drake, this community of artists is finding it time to move on [again]. Rents and housing prices have made it impossible for artists and cultural producers to move into this neighbourhood.

It is ‘interesting’ to watch the change in the neighbourhood. Now – artists are the discounted wallpaper needed to grease the wheels of cool and hip for the new owner and his desired patrons. We’re now the flavouring for the neighbourhood so that the folks with the expense account lunches can – as we say – come slumming.

The utopian impulse is so often foolish, or dangerous that is sometimes hard to take it seriously; it is, indeed, a ready shorthand for the reckless ideologue, the heedless architect of change. The critic Mark Lilla calls this overweening desire "the lure of Syracuse": the desire to make a shiny political idea real, as Plato tried -- and failed -- to do with Dionysus the Tyrant, leaving the scholarly safety of Athens for the hurly-burly of ancient Syracuse. Dionysus was a ruler who, despite his sobriquet, struck Plato as proto-philosophical, noy tryannical: mouldable clay for the master of the transcendental Forms. He was wrong, as most utopians have also been wrong.

And yet, we need utopia. Its energy and drive, its optimism that things could be better than they are. Once transcendental, as in Plato or Augustine, then geographical or spiritual, as in More or Butler, the impulse now seems largely temporal: the future as the site of our dreams, the notional undiscovered country of time, now that there is no physical country left to discover.

Of course, a desire that big is not to be trusted. There is too much associated destruction, too much associated faith in staamroller ideas like reason or technology or socialism. Good cities, as we know, are less planned from the top down than they are grown, from the bottom up. Utopian desire, given too free rein, reveals itself as a kind of inner tyrant, a dark overwhelming form of hope, that pecuilar desire to be, as the critic Wayne Koestenbaum has said, "somehow simultaneously avant-garde and dead."

In the seminar, we read Jane Jacobs for the usual cure to soaring urban ambition. We note that she lives not far away from where we sit. Also, however, that her ideas, so often celebrated, are actually confused and vague. She lauds street life, but only at one scale; she doesn'tseem to know what inspires or edifies, only what merely functions. So much here is about blocking things, keeping things from happening, halting the imagined. A distrust of the grandiose pervades. Fine for Boston's North End or the West Village, maybe, but here, looking out, we feel the need for large scale, not small. Big ideas, transformations, something to enliven the dead zone of our gaze, the junkspace of Toronto.

We cannot ignore the thought, too, that the North End is nowadays a virtual theme park, artificial and tourist-addled, with gangs of college-logo'd teens lining up for pizza or cannoli. The West Village, meanwhile, has become a supermodel haven, priced into the stratosphere by Gwyneth Paltrow and Helena Christensen, pushing their babies along Hudson Street in limo-expensive prams. Before her incarceration, Martha Stewart bought a floor in the new Richard Meier building at the corner of Perry Street and West. Martin Scorsese too. The building was featured in a recent New York Times spead, its unihindered view of the Hudson rendered as a two-page photpspread of lifestyle porn. Good neighbourhoods, kept good, just get expensive: gentrifiction without regulation, (...read more...)