Chasing Spadina

Toronto is a city that operates at the scale of automobiles \nand subways. Its environments are many and varied— \nlayers of infrastructure, geography, and history create a \nheterogeneous mix of urban fabric. The Spadina Subway \nLine is one of the primary routes of navigating this mix. It \nextends from the heart of downtown northwest to the edge \nof Toronto and into the neighbouring City of Vaughan. With \nno single street to follow the Spadina Line winds through \na fragmentary collage. On the surface the pieces have little \nrelation to each other—a collection of urban fabrics forcibly \nconnected by the subway. \n \nThis thesis is a performance. It performs a walk, a transect, \nalong the above ground line of the subway. This walk \nbuilds off the previous generations of theoretical walkers— \nthe saunterers of Henry Thoreau, the flâneurs of Charles \nBaudelaire, the surrealists of André Breton, the Situationists \nof Guy Debord—and Lee Freidlander’s eye for the cluttered \ncity to synthesize the perspective of the transient observer. \nA solitary figure that seeks out urban forms and artifacts to \ndiscover the layers of intentionality, the coincidences and \ncontradictions that coalesce into the messy city—a city that \nis fragmentary, haphazard, uncurated. \n \nDocumentation of the walk is done through mapping and \nphotography. Mapping describe the lands of the Spadina \nLine holistically and create a picture of how the Line \ninteracts with the wider city. Photographs describe the \nexperience of the walk itself. This is an exploration of the \npresent, of singular moments—the moments of encounter \nbetween a transient observer and a new urban form—that \nimplies both history and future. Through act of walking and \ndocumentation—the moments and the maps—a narrative is \nfound within the fragments of the Spadina Subway Line. It \nis a narrative of competing visions and failed ideal cities—a \nnarrative of a great urban laboratory with decades of \nexperiments in urbanity.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.