Yesterday it was my distinct pleasure to be a respondent at the "Sustainable Cities Urban Design Conference" which was held at the UN. It was my first visit to the august institution and I have to admit to feeling like a kid from the provinces as I entered the modernist landmark. I'm writing this late Wednesday night having just arrived back from New York. I have another conference on high-rise building to attend in the morning and am moderating the Toronto Society of Architects discussion at 7:30 Thursday night (see Sunday's posting). I'm tired and any review of the UN experience will have to wait until the weekend. I will, however, leave Reading Toronto visitors with a few images from the UN.

In its closest sense, poiesis refers to acts of making or transformation. The German phenomenologist Martin Heidegger describes poiesis as "the arising of something from out of itself" and a "bringing-forth" of the true into the beautiful. In his famous essay, "The Question Concerning Technology", Heidegger argues that modern technological manufacturing 'challenges forth' objects and people and orders them as 'standing reserve', entities whose purpose is to be consumed and which have no life or meaning other than in being used up. He laments the loss of poiesis from manufacturing, writing that the originary meaning of technology, techne, referred to making as a poetic act that also brought forth the true into the beautiful.

I had occasion to consider Heidegger's commentary while contributing to the Juice Dialogues symposium at the Ontario College of Art and Design this past weekend. After noting the collection of books and papers spilling out of my too-small shoulder bag, Robin Uchida, the event's organizer and facilitator, gave me a large, stiff-sided fabric bag closely resembling a heavy paper shopping bag of the sort that might hold an afternoon's purchases or a day's burden of books. Grasping it by the handles, I was struck immediately not only by the bag's utility but by its poiesis, its fusion of the true and the beautiful. Here was a useful object true not only to its origin but to a broader purpose. A durable comment on transience and need, perhaps; a container for desire.

For almost all of my life I have collected empty containers. Empty bowls of wood and clay, little boxes, blank notebooks. Sometimes I would give such objects to others as gifts, on one occasion lining an otherwise empty tin with folds of deep blue velvet and dropping in tiny stars, beads, and stones in an attempt to allude to the universe I have always thought such objects contained. In fact, empty containers are microcosms not of the universe itself but of the universe's possibilities: they are metaphors of the future. As Gary Michael Dault writes at the beginning of Cells of Ourselves(Porcupine's Quill, 1989), his quite wonderful collaboration with painter Tony Urquhart,

Thresholds, though wider than the idea of doors, share their role as repositories of desire and of temptation. What is opened at a door? Onto what landscape of the imagination does a threshold gaze? Gaston Bachelard has written that a door is an entire cosmos of the half-open. A threshold is perhaps, by extension, a cosmos of the already half-understood.

For me, empty bowls and boxes and blank notebooks are metaphorical thresholds, points of departure. Perhaps that is why while writing sometimes I touch the blank pages, calling forth words.

The bag Robin gave me on Saturday is a threshold of a similar sort. The bag came with a little storybook called The Brave Brown Bag, narrating the bag's function as an invocation to journey. It turns out the Brave Brown Bag is an example of craft manufacturing turned global phenomenon. The brainchild of (...read more...)

I am on my way to New York to present at an urban design and sustainability symposium hosted by the United Nations.

I decided to take the only mass transit option to get to the airport rather than take a cab. I hiked to the TTC subway station and had a relatively easy 23 minute ride to Kipling station. Then things got funky. Instead of the 192 "Express" bus arriving on time, it was ten minutes late. One normal city bus connects the subway to Canada's biggest airport. It runs every twenty minutes. Sort of. There wasn't room for one additional passenger and their bags when the bus left.

Can you imagine if London, England or Paris offered similar system? Not easily. This is why Porter Air is allowed to exist. people have no faith in our public infrastructure and, if today's experience is an indication, it is understandable.

Think of how fewer taxis would be polluting our air if we could do something as simple as having a real express bus system leaving the Kipling station every five minutes. It would be an inexpensive solution to a grave problem. Even if it cost $5 more I know many people would pay if, only if, they could depend on it.

This Thursday evening I am moderating a panel (see Sunday's posting) with some local politicians. While the panel is not about our transit system per, it is about community development. Without a sustainable, effective transit system community development in our city will always be an illusion no matter how well-considered.

The familiar setting of Toronto's Kensington Market hosts fast paced intrigue in Vivian Meyer's highly readable new mystery novel, Bottom Bracket (just released by Sumach Press, 2006). In Meyer's novel, the double meaning of 'bottom bracket' (referring to the lowest socio-economic echelon as well as to the axle and bearing casing on a bicycle) comes vividly to life in the person of Abigail Faria, a bike courier and advocate of the dispossessed whose curiosity about a violent death in the Market brings her into contact with a heroin-addicted hooker and her murdered pimp, good and bad cops, corrupt developers, and an eclectic assortment of Kensington Market characters whose underworld and upper class connections, computer hacking skills, excellent coffee, and local solidarity combine to uncover dark deeds and bring their doers to a uniquely Kensington Market justice.

Abigail Faria isn't your usual sleuth. She's a hard-riding thirty-something bicycle courier with an appetite for good food and generous lawyers. Her tiny Kensington Market flat has a room reserved for her collection of ten bikes, including lovingly restored antiques and a $6000 road bike she's still paying for. Similarly, Bottom Bracket isn't your usual mystery novel. Vivian Meyer deftly turns the conventions of the genre on their head, inverting gender and class dynamics and narrating the bottom bracket as having the capacity to harness the resources of the wealthy and powerful to their own ends for a change.

In Bottom Bracket, Abby's dark-alley encounter with a hooker who has just witnessed the murder of her pimp leads the courier into a conspiracy that spirals around a crooked developer's desire to plant high end condominiums in Kensington Market. Abby hides the hooker, a non-status immigrant named Anita from the Czech Republic who had been sold into the business, and while trying to help her get status and secure a rehab spot, uncovers a dark scheme involving arson, blackmail, murder, and plenty of ill-gotten money. Abby's job as a courier brings her into fortuitous contact with the very developers she is investigating, giving her the opportunity to peruse documents (and borrow a few of them) and glean intelligence from imperious but gossipy receptionists. With this illicit information, Abby employs her own skills and those of fellow Kensington Market denizens to infiltrate a developer's network and covertly tape a blackmail-in-progress an an upscale Don Valley country club. She shrugs off a death threat and someone's attempt to run her down in an alley, her confidence and daring unchecked until trapped in a construction trailer with the blackmailed developer, trussed up by a bigger shark who plans to drown them both in concrete. Unlikely allies, the pair cut themselves loose and the conspiracy unravels in a confusion of double agents and gunshots and produces an unusual series of solutions to some of the Market's poverty, drug, and housing problems.

Bottom Bracket is an essential read for anyone familiar with Kensington Market. It joins a solid collection of novels set in and around the Market, including Sarah Dearing's Courage (...read more...)