Chasing Spadina
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Date
2018-09-10
Authors
Huang, Terry
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Waterloo
Abstract
Toronto is a city that operates at the scale of automobiles
and subways. Its environments are many and varied—
layers of infrastructure, geography, and history create a
heterogeneous mix of urban fabric. The Spadina Subway
Line is one of the primary routes of navigating this mix. It
extends from the heart of downtown northwest to the edge
of Toronto and into the neighbouring City of Vaughan. With
no single street to follow the Spadina Line winds through
a fragmentary collage. On the surface the pieces have little
relation to each other—a collection of urban fabrics forcibly
connected by the subway.
This thesis is a performance. It performs a walk, a transect,
along the above ground line of the subway. This walk
builds off the previous generations of theoretical walkers—
the saunterers of Henry Thoreau, the flâneurs of Charles
Baudelaire, the surrealists of André Breton, the Situationists
of Guy Debord—and Lee Freidlander’s eye for the cluttered
city to synthesize the perspective of the transient observer.
A solitary figure that seeks out urban forms and artifacts to
discover the layers of intentionality, the coincidences and
contradictions that coalesce into the messy city—a city that
is fragmentary, haphazard, uncurated.
Documentation of the walk is done through mapping and
photography. Mapping describe the lands of the Spadina
Line holistically and create a picture of how the Line
interacts with the wider city. Photographs describe the
experience of the walk itself. This is an exploration of the
present, of singular moments—the moments of encounter
between a transient observer and a new urban form—that
implies both history and future. Through act of walking and
documentation—the moments and the maps—a narrative is
found within the fragments of the Spadina Subway Line. It
is a narrative of competing visions and failed ideal cities—a
narrative of a great urban laboratory with decades of
experiments in urbanity.
Description
Keywords
Walking, Spadina Subway Line, Photography