When my cousin Shiraz is in town we head for the Kensington Market to absorb its exciting sights, smells and sounds. We leisurely walk the streets picking up some groceries and checking out the vintage wear. You never know what to expect in such places.

We decided to get out of the cold and have some wantons in a local Chinese restaurant. The front window displays meats and fowl hung under bright heatlamps. I have often shown up after hours and still been able to order from a full menu supplemented with ‘special tea’ - beer disguised in a tea pot.

As we were enjoying our soup, Shiraz’s face froze gazing straight ahead. I turned to see a young farmer boy scribing past our shoulders as he carried 2 pigs slung one slung over each shoulder. He slowly shuffled passed the customers from the front door all the way along a narrow aisle to the kitchen in the back. No one else seemed to bat an eye.

That same day we were walking up Augusta Street where most of the houses used the main level and front yards for retailing vintage clothes and nik naks. We came across a sign on a front door with a painted sign of Chinese character and a $4 on newsprint taped to the door. We felt curious so we opened the door and walked into what was an emptied living room with 2 plastic chairs against the wall and a floor covered with loose newspaper for ground cover around a wooden chair.

A little boy came into room playing with a plastic truck. He called to his father who entered the room with a pair of scissors. ‘four dollar’ he said gesturing to the chair. I pointed to Shiraz. Amused, he sat on the plastic patio chair surrounded by a mat of newsprint on the floor. They hardly spoke a word.
He just said ‘good! gesturing thumbs up when he wanted him to stop. The whole experience was very strange.

We listened to the trains from our bed. Always your body next to mine, as the sound of that long shadow moved through its corridor of blackness, crossing the city. The trains cut through bedrooms and back yards, through heat and snow, sleep and sleeplessness. Often we were already awake and imagined the number of boxcars, and what they carried - as the months went by, ever more exotic cargo. We imagined all the towns brought into boom by the laying of the rails, all those that gradually vanished because the rails passed them by.

On summer nights we lay in your dark garden, limbs still hot in the impossibly cold grass, as the whistle found its way to us, through the sound of the leaves, through moonlight. Weaving through the summer night neighbourhood noises of air conditioners and barking dogs, shouting games and night tag, and the metal lids of trashcans circling the sidewalk as raccoons cast them aside with one swipe of a paw. Every night the trains came, passing straight through that particular empty station of the heart, where some part of us longs to follow and is left behind.

As architects, we must pay careful attention to, listen to, and observe how our many culturally and ethnically-diverse communities are contributing to the development of our surroundings. Our urban conditions and the associated architectural manifestations are developing in ways that are informal and often unplanned. If designers fail to consider these changes, then we will have missed valuable opportunities to contribute to the spatial qualities of our communities. The current situation of the suburban strip malls for example, represents a type of space where complex socialization patterns occur across various socio-economic segments of the population that requires considered designed solutions. Commerce, religion, education, and public spaces are being developed, occupied and understood in these mall territories that will continue to arrange themselves as something distinctly heterogeneous and Canadian. Our challenge is to continue to facilitate the evolution of these cosmopolitan opportunities in our cities and ensure that design opportunities flourish as social trends evolve across cultures and throughout Canada. It is difficult to plan for elements of our city that are appropriated and mutated by our various populations. Nonetheless, the strength of Toronto’s character resides in these multiple readings being developed by our many ethnic communities, hence Toronto’s reading as Multipli-city.

My graduate seminar this year investigates the theme "Architecture and Utopia." Every week we gather in a fluorescent-washed room, under a cheap suspended ceiling, on mismatched chairs, and discuss big urban dreams, the visions of sprawling hope. Cities transformed into vast Edenic gardens, with sweeping throughways and radial residential blocks as far as the eye can see. Cities razed and rebuilt in futuristic layers, with floating railways stations and razored, hundred-story office towers. Dreamy cities, with snaking flaneur-friendly walkways and arresting juxtaposed street-culture. We read Le Corbusier, Sant'Elia, Benjamin. We entertain visions, images, pictures. We sit under the harsh electrified gas, our heads bent together, a dozen of us, architects and philosophers, probing to the logic of dreams.

Outside, with these north-facing windows, there is only the watery winter light of Toronto. The vista is bleak, a scene of nothingness. A parking lot. A snow-covered field where a stadium used to be. To the left, a small daycare centre and playground. Straight ahead, across Bloor Street, the banal concrete brutalism of the OISE building, one of those edifices apparently constructed to convey hatred for the street on which it sits. You must sidle down its edge even to get in. It could be a courthouse or security-conscious consulate. Next to it, a windswept and pointless parkette, a red stone wall blocking any decent view of a private club.

Inside the room, we look at pretty pictures and discuss big ideas. Tales of Paris, Milan, New York, Shanghai. We try not to look out the window, but it's hard, not least because someone has permanently removed the curtains from the windows, something we discovered only when we attempted to screen "The Fountainhead" in class. The dim light, those beige and grey structures under colourless sky, undid that dream.