Urban Life – davidhadwen's website

Lessons From Toronto – Jennifer Keesmaat On Complete Communities

This image shows Jennifer Keesmaat at a Toronto mayoral debate. — Keesmaat (centre in blue) running for Mayor in 2018.

Jennifer Keesmaat was once Toronto’s chief urban planner and ran for mayor of the city in 2018 (she lost badly). These are notes from a presentation Keesmaat delivered on “complete communities”.

Toronto is the third largest region in North America by population. It’s one of the largest tech hubs outside Silicon Valley and the financial capital of Canada.
Over 50% of Toronto is foreign born. Immigration and refugees are seen as central to the city’s character and economic growth. It’s “a beacon”.
The hook that brings together every single planning decision: vibrant neighbourhoods and complete communities.
This opposed to a live/work view with “super fast highways” that take you from one place to another.
Affordable housing will be achieved by planning for it and recognizing it as part of every complete community.
Toronto has the unfortunate honour of making the list of the most expensive cities. There’s been a complete seperation between local wages and house prices.
“The market can no longer provide affordable housing for all.”
Housing has become commodified, an asset to be traded, something to generate wealth vs. a vision of housing as a home (where families “eat dinner”).
If we don’t get this right (housing), who cares about walkability, who cares about complete communities, who cares about sustainability, if we’re only designing for a small and lucky portion.
An affordable high quality transit system is the backbone that allows complete communities to be connected. It enables the option of never needing to own a car.
A vibrant downtown designed for connectivity and innovation that can attract and facilitate stable and high paying jobs is essential to the overall health of the city. The complete community vision has the creative economy in mind.
All nine of our beaches in Toronto are “blue flag beaches”. Clean air and water right where people live is a part of the complete community vision.
Green spaces of a variety of different sizes and public squares that bring people together. When we design public spaces right they provide for spontaneous interaction that expands the humanity of everyone in our cities.
Options for recreational activities should be provided. The notion that you have to leave the city for outdoor recreation is an old model. With complete communities you can walk out your door and undertake recreational activities in close proximity to home.
How we design and plan our waterfront is critical to ensuring that our waterfront is a shared asset, not an asset only developed for the super wealthy which was the old model in Toronto (the wealthier the closer to the waters edge). The waterfront should be a shared resource where we can all come together.
Cultural facilities that celebrate the best of city living are an important part of complete communities, they help us tell our story and understand ourselves.
When we get architecture and urban design right that becomes a magnet for people and we astonish/inspire as part of everyday life. Complete communities are intentional about design and don’t leave it as something that’s superfluous but rather essential to how we live together.
All growth isn’t good but when we get the design right, have mixed-use and attend to streetscape we can deliver places that are livable.
The greenbelt is a matter of emphasizing where growth WILL NOT go in order to assert where growth will go. The greenbelt is the policy framework for the transition from sprawl to density.
One of the other drivers of change in the GTA is shifting consumer preferences. Millennials have a fundamentally different preference and want to walk to work (either driven by experiences with commuting or environmentalism).
We want to attract the 16-34 demographic because Toronto’s vitality is contingent on attracting young people into the core.
When we paint this vision of the future, of complete communities, the vast majority of the public put their hands up and says “I’m in”.
Very few people in the overall Toronto region can walk to work. In the downtown core its 75%. But when we scan the entire region and give people choices many would take a smaller house adjacent to transit (36%).
Queens Quay makeover: generous public realm, separate bike lanes, prioritizing the transit corridor.
Recent adapation of taking the cars off a transit corridor (King Street).
Private investment is responding to the opportunity of providing walkable communities where people can live work and play right within their neighbourhood.
The Greenbelt has driven growth into the core. The area of the city that’s the most walkable with the best transit and the best parks is growing four times faster than elsewhere. If we can create walkable communities everywhere can we attract investment everywhere? Can we begin to adapt the city in a variety of different places? Growth follows consumer preference and sustainability increases.
But this only happens when we link employment with residential growth. The two must be linked together to deliver on this option/opportunity (of complete communities).

How Toronto Switched From Buildings And Infrastructure To People And Complete Communities

1. Detailed Precinct Planning

The details matter. We have to deliver on the ground level. Prioritizing the public realm is essential if we add density. We have to think about public space and pedestrians first rather than the character and quality of individual buildings.

2. “Extreme” Mixed-Use (The Distillery District)

In the distillery district over forty buildings are linked by an exclusively pedestrian realm. These are Victorian era buildings. It’s a college campus, there’s light industry, it’s an event venue, there’s a brewery, it’s a residential neighbourhood, an employment district, a district for artists, a place for children and senior citizens. We broke all the rules and it’s a place people want to be.

3. Strategic Site-Specific Infill

A big part of planning is urban repair. Neighbourhood example of Sheppard and Don Mills: we added new density to a poorly serviced suburban area, added buildings to create main street retail, added community and social events, added a library, a school and community centre. There were no clear public spaces and places for pedestrians. The “beacons” (public art) draw pedestrians into the site and terminate in the neighbourhood where theres a new school, pool, library and community hub. This is urban repair and not “one use” thinking. There’s a new subway station at this location. Adapt the urban environment and deliver the dream of walkable communities.

4. Urbanizing Avenues: Adding Density And Creating Main Streets

The Golden Mile: repairing and transforming the environment. A new LRT will serve as the backbone for how people can move. Also adding cycling infrastructure and widening sidewalks. Adding green infrastructure, new mid-rise buildings and a mix of uses. An old suburban street transforms into a complete new community.

5. Urbanizing Classic Suburbs (Gentle Density And New Housing Types)

Humbertown: a 1950’s strip mall, the adjacent area is very green with ranch-style 1950’s suburban homes. There’s nowhere you can go within walking distance of your home. Transformed: all parking put underground, green roofs, new public square in the centre. You can downsize by moving into a new multi-residential unit of seniors housing. New retail has been added to complete the hub.

6. Adaptations In The Public Realm

We’ve wanted to link together the public spaces in Fort York and the waterfront. Adapting the infrastructure below the highway that currently creates a barrier between eight different hoods and the rest of the downtown core.

7. Transforming The Discourse

We need to talk about the city in a different way, talk about about how we might live differently, why this matters and how we can elevate quality of life. We’re changing rapidly and the risk is that people will resist change if they don’t buy into the rationale of why this is good and valuable.

None of this matters if we don’t get affordable housing right. We’ll be designing places that only get more and more exclusive.

Murtaza Hussain On Immigrant Politics

Liberals and progressives have very strong faith in their assimilative powers. Elites share the same transnational culture, they are a class unto themselves. There is a parallel between Baathist curation of a diverse elite and the current diversity-represented liberal elite. Immigrants tend to be more socially conservative and religious (examples: Caribbean, South Asia).

Immigrants can also be very patriotic (anecdote of a call centre co-worker who would hum the national anthem to himself every day). In general, immigrants reject “avant-garde” progressivism. Immigrant conservatism makes the democratic coalition untenable. Immigrants show up to the USA and are excepted from black/white racial politics.

The party saying “law and order” sounds good as many immigrants live in poorer and high crime neighbourhoods. Eric Adams, the former cop and mayor of New York, was voted in by black and ethnic votes in Brooklyn. The things that progressives see and assert as obvious are not apparent from a minority/immigrant perspective.

Trump got one third of Muslim votes in 2020. Muslims were triggered by social issues as they have conservative views on sex and family. Trump is a macho guy and some immigrants like a macho leader and want a tough seeming president, the Democrats are “a little limp”. Some successful immigrants have a business-libertarian view and this can also play into machismo.

With American seculars, a huge amount of weight is put into politics. It’s actually good that there isn’t a pure racial divide in politics. Avant-garde liberalism is patronizing, unstructured, diffuse and suffers from purity spirals. Local Republican representatives and officials say “we like you” and apologize for and contextualize Trump.

It isn’t good to teach kids into racial polarization (as avant-garde liberalism does) and imply a racial/moral hierarchy. Avant-garde liberalism is like a religion and its adherents are extremely pious. Which current left-wing figure is funny? The left-wingers used to be the funny ones, Trump filled the vacuum and the left has become even more righteous in response.

Waiting for Ricky Tantrum by Jules Lewis (review)

Many classic scenes persist in the new Old Toronto.

This work takes place in approximately my childhood neighbourhood about ten years ahead of me. Those ten years made a big difference: what was an immigrant working-class environment became middle class in only about twice as much time. While it has adult themes, the book is borderline “young adult” as there is little introspection. That said, the main characters lack of quality guidance and his role as a passive receptacle for the adult refuse around has melancholic weight to it. I was very glad to encounter my high school gym teacher and soccer coach immortalized on the page. Some characters you can’t make up.

Feminine descriptions: “peacock eyes and pouty lips”, “crimson, puffy, moist”, “droopy, loose-lipped, hound-doggish”, “snooty, racoon-like”, “perky, poodleish”, “her soft pastel fingers”, etc.

“How Toronto Lost Its Groove” John Lorinc’s Toronto Mega-Take 10+ Years Later

“Yet in Toronto… well, Torontonians complain endlessly about congestion but refuse to give their political leaders the tools to do anything about it. They boast about the city’s ethnic diversity but don’t much mind if immigrants are warehoused in vertical ghettos. They aspire to live in a creative-class city with serious cultural ambitions, but only if they can pay Walmart prices.”

Gridlock and congestion have major costs in lost productivity, no transit improvement so roads “bursting”.
Sprawl continues unchecked, increasing cost of municipal services.
“Should the rest of Canada care? Yes, because the GTA is the country’s economic hub, accounting for one-fifth of its gross domestic product; New York, by contrast, produces just 3.3 percent of the United States’ national income.”
“…tens of billions more in tax revenues flow out of the GTA than come back in the form of services and public sector investment, which means GTA wealth subsidizes government services across Canada, including health care and social security.”
METRO Toronto was created in 1953 and seen as a success, admired.
Bill Davis established two tier government in the 905 and this was the GTA’s “original mistake” as powerful municipalities compete for public and private investment
In 1994 Ann Golden proposed a Greater Toronto Council for greater services (transportation, waste management, and economic development), leave lesser services for cities (essentially METRO for the GTA).
“Despite Harris’s ambition to reduce government, the GTA remains staggeringly over-governed, with 244 municipal office holders, including twenty-five mayors. By comparison, New York, with 8.3 million residents, is governed by fifty-one councillors, five borough presidents, and just one term-limited mayor.”
The Ontario government is reluctant to create something like a Greater Toronto Council as it doesn’t want a political rival or to be seen as favouring the GTA.
“But in the 1980s and 1990s, as development took off north and west of Toronto, the municipalities of Vaughan and Markham enthusiastically pursued beggar-thy-neighbour tax policies that enticed businesses to avoid or flee Metro and its higher commercial and industrial taxes. The result: a slow but painful decline in Metro’s non-residential tax revenues; growing tracts of fallow land; and fewer jobs in the inner suburbs, such as Scarborough and East York.”
Harris took responsibility for education from municipalities and downloaded transit, housing, parts of welfare.The TTC was aging at this point and province absolved itself, services were cut and plans stopped.
TRBoT study predicted 1billion shortfall by end of decade and suggested cut/priv. vs. new revenue “sales taxes, hotel occupancy levies, and parking fees” suggested by others (David Miller brought in vehicle registration and land transfer taxes).
The Ontario government spent on commuter rail and bus service, municipalities did not invest.
None of what was proposed in the 1975 Metro Toronto Transportation Plan Review was built, Network 2011 (1985) included three new subways. Harris cancelled one and only partially funded another. Harris believed transit should be funded by munis but eventually reversed and funded GTA commuter rail.
Liberals/McGuinty set up Metrolinx in order to take the politics out of transit planning (vs. Greater Vancouver’s TransLink, Metrolinx does not have predictable revenue, relies on provincial govt.)
The argument for David Miller’s Transit City: bring LRTs to suburban areas that could not support subways at 1/10th the total cost. Province, initially on board, scaled back funding and Ford cancelled all lines but one (Eglinton) and said to go underground. The same politicians who approved Transit City approved Ford’ in gutting it’s gutting of it.
The GTA is the world’s most ethnically diverse metro by proportion of foreign born residents, four in ten immigrants to Canada settle in the GTA.
Class polarization: Hulchanski study and decline in middle income neighbourhoods.
The GTA takes the lions share of immigrants but lacks the resources to absorb them.
In the 1970’s a federal Liberal government built co-op housing, in 1980’s Mulroney pulled out, Chretien continued cuts in 1995 and Mike Harris downloaded housing.
Affordable housing now has a “market-oriented, self-financing formula”.
Affordable private rental has not been built so many immigrants live in 1960’s towers “Toronto contains more suburban high-rises than any other North American city”.
A 2006 report called Poverty by Postal Code 2: Vertical Poverty highlighted spartan buildings, disrepair.
The 2005 Greenbelt Act and Places to Grow Act set a target of 40% of new development into urban areas.
“virtually no connection exists between land use and transportation planning”
2011 study: 54% percent of GTA’s 200 million square feet of office space is far beyond the reach of rapid transit.
“The net result: Toronto, like many large North American cities, is now ringed by a huge band of intensely car-dependent suburbs.”
Development charges treated infill and greenfield the same, effectively subsidizing sprawl.
Kyle Rae pushed for expropriation to create Y-D square, politicians and landowners fought the vision but he prevailed. Kyle said/says “we have a culture of no”.
Toronto has a poor public realm, trash cans are bad, trees die.

“Six decades after the beginning of its epochal postwar transformation, it’s fair to say that Toronto has become a very big city, and a somewhat accommodating city, but not a great city—at least not yet. Which is more than a little strange, because the GTA contains an abundance of talent and energy, tremendous wealth, and intimations of a distinctly Canadian cosmopolitanism. What’s lacking is the will to abandon the story Torontonians have always told themselves, which is that they can’t afford the things big cities need and crave, that they mustn’t exercise the political clout that naturally accrues to large urban regions, and that they shouldn’t manage growth in the intelligent way that the twenty-first century requires.”

Transit Oriented Development? Mississauga’s LRT and Condo Building (I Wrote Something)

Suburban styles including the “Marilyn Monroe” buildings at Burnhamthorpe and Hurontario.

I’m interested in what’s called “transit-oriented development”. TOD aims to maximize the amount of walkable urban life near public transit and thereby increase transit ridership by reducing reliance on private vehicles.

On a related note, I recently wrote a guide to the condo projects being built around a light rapid transit project in the Toronto suburb of Mississauga. While it’s written with immediate business interests in mind, it’s still one of the more informative things on the internet about the project.

Retail From Scratch in 2022

These are photos of a newly renovated storefront on Yonge St. in Toronto. I found it interesting to see an array of retail/tech features on display just before the outlet opens.

A list of some notable stuff:

Four self-serve payment kiosks in a very small location.
A street service window. Street service was very rare in downtown Toronto pre-pandemic but is getting more common.
Two standard Point of Sale setups (one of which is oriented to the street service window). If you add up all the “points of sale” that’s six in a small location.
Three security cameras covering the entrance area, including one on the exterior just aside from (and pointing at) the street service window.
A very cramped back area almost completely cut off by a counter. This implies a process whereby customers will place an order and be handed their products.

Based on a Google search this is an “Asian grocery store”. Job ads for the company desire Mandarin speakers.

Companies providing the features: Cisco, QuikServ (street service window) and globalpayments.

Italian Futurism: art, design, national rivalry and diagonal lines

*La Rivolta* (“The Revolt”) by *Luigi Russolo*

After Italy unified in 1861 it looked back to ancient Rome.
Subsequently, Italian architects fashioned Art Nouveau into a local strand.
Everything was subject to design: curtains, cabinets, staircases and door handles. Function persisted intact with new trimmings. With Marinetti, nothing was to remain intact.
Marinetti proclaimed a new Italian order, remaking an “agrarian backwater” into a nexus of cultural innovation.
Clothing, theatre, music, poetry and the built environment. Futurists took the city as the crucible of modernity, celebrated “throbbing boulevards”.
Boccioni offered a manifesto on futurist architecture.
Boccioni’s art: even a bottle sitting on a table is interpenetrated by various angles, intercepted by geometries. Still and static objects as bound up with their environment.
Futurist ideal: a chair with tacks on it that would make you stand back up. Futurism had an ambivalent relationship with objects because they are static and Futurism was about motion and movement.
Boccioni used Futurist watchwords like dynamism, said Italian art and architecture had to liberate itself from past glories and European trends.
Futurism came with increased functionalism and utilitarianism (anticipating “form follows function”).
Sant’Elia’s new cities drawings (Cita Nuova) included soaring trains and power stations, a ceaseless mobility that would defy the inertia associated with architecture. An Italy and a world stripped of history and constantly rebuilt.
Sant’Elia was killed during WW1 but his drawings transformed the architectural imagination. A 1930’s fascist architectural journal was published in his name.
Virgilio Marchi’s delirious “Fantastic City” looked like Disney and was first conceived as set designs for theatre.
Wenzel Hablik: new age mysticism, transcendence and passage to a new plane. Futurism, for all its emphasis on technology, has “flighty metaphysical tendencies” as well.
The notion of interpenetration was hardly amenable to architecture construction.
“Art into life” was the modernist Avant-garde drive, aesthetics not as a mirror of history but its engine.
Giacomo Balla painting: Abstract Speed + Sound.
Balla/Depero proposed transforming everything and demonstrated their ideas with models. They wrote “The Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe”, a manifesto.
The spiral staircase at the Guggenheim should be seen in light of Italian futurist precedents.
The futurist insistence on motion, mobility and activism.
Coat racks, bookshelves, end tables, bottles (work for the Campari company). Furniture and clothing in futurist terms, fashion designs. Even dress habits could contribute to this new sensibility of living.
The Futurist movement was frequently misogynist but many women contributed. When modernist male artists set about applying aesthetics to actual design it was women doing the work.
“Balla’s field of futurist flowers”: futurist flora and animals, rendering the organic world as something synthetic.
Balla named his daughter “Propeller”.
Italy didn’t produce an art-design school to rival the Bauhaus or Russia.
Mussolini said “fascism is a glass house”, implying complete transparency. Abstract murals, architecture of rationalist simplicity and chrome tubular chairs all feature in the Casa del Fascio.
Balla designed a FuturFascist sweater that can be seen in comparison to Alexander Rodchenko’s design for workers clothes, clothes as ideology.
Balla/Depero worked in the fascist cause into the 1930’s.
Balla’s “house of art” in Rome served through the 20’s/30’s as a nexus of experimentation, walls painted in Futurist style. It’s not just the canvas you’re painting but everything around it, the world itself is transformed.
Aeropainters painted from the perspective of flight. There were many Futurist and fascist motifs of flight.
The Futurists had a diagonal drive, used diagonal lines. The diagonal means something is in the process of moving. Horizontal and vertical are about stasis and solidity, the diagonal is in every example of Futurist design/architecture/painting. Example: a mirror unit made for Italy Balbo was tilted but still functionally vertical.
Marinetti hated symmetry because symmetry is about stasis and order.
The 1925 Paris Art Decoratif exhibition (ARTDECO). The pavilion incorporated seemingly futurist trees. Balla wrote back home and said “we won, Futurism has taken over Paris”.
In the 1920’s there was sympathy and rivalry between France and Italy. They fought on the same side in WW1 and considered themselves Latin brothers.
The Futurist trees are another example of synthetic nature.
Futurism had a problematic relationship with fascism. Most elements, designers, architects actively supported (or at least in no way dissented) from the regime.

Q&A

Italy and Russia were both seen as “backward” nations in the early 20th century.
Milan was the only industrial city in Italy at the time.
Progressive Avant-garde artists of the 20th century were working in synch with industrial production and turning away from the artist as individual genius.
Within Italian fascism, fascism was considered a revolution. Italian fascism was tolerant of modernist Avant-garde culture.
Under Mussolini a certain pluralism of culture was tolerated as long as it pledged allegiance to the regime. There were traditionalists who labeled the modernists degenerate.
The “Square Colosseum” building was a modernist version of the Colosseum.
A logic of pluralism and competition: have Futurism compete as one cultural current under fascism and it will contribute.
Fascism included superficially contradictory cultural phenomena under its umbrella. After fascism, people could claim they were being anti-fascist due to this ambiguity.

Urban Geography by Micheal Pacione – Chapter 1 Notes

The distribution of population, the organization of production, the structure of social reproduction and the allocation of power.

Urban geography seeks to explain the distribution of places and the socio-spatial similarities within them.

19thC capitalism was “competitive capitalism”, Fordism (mass production, assembly lines, mass consumption) was “mutually beneficial”, now it’s globalized advanced/disorganized capitalism (a shift to services, esp. financial and niche markets) and each phase has changed the urban environment.

“the new international division of labour in which production is separated geographically from research and development and higher-level management operations”

The command economy created the “socialist city” of urban industrial development and large estates of public housing whereas there are capitalist tendencies to “suburbanisation and social differentiation”.

In the global-local nexus, global forces are held to be more powerful but cities modify and embed globalization in local context.

Globalization has highly uneven impacts and the unevenness is apparent at all levels (booming vs. declining regions, social polarization in one city etc.).

“In labour market terms globalisation is of relevance only for a small minority of workers with the skills necessary to compete in international labour markets”.

“Changes in the relative importance of geographic spaces/scales are reflected in changes in the distribution of power among social groups”.

The “hollowing out of the state thesis” contends that the nation-state has been disempowered relative to the local and supranational.

Completely dead space in the city

This photo of a storefront in downtown Toronto shows completely dead space. The chainlink fencing was recently installed making it newly dead space. I’m sure there’s an urban planning term for this type of situation.

Since the coincidence of Covid-19 and a huge run up in local housing costs, Toronto’s city centre has entered a whole new era of “houselessness” and street life. Basically, Toronto now has an “underclass” in the style of a USA city. This fact is obscured somewhat by a policy of hoteling the houseless.

It’s safe to assume that this fencing is a response to the new social situation. This “Subway” location happens to be across the street from one of the hotels functioning as temporary housing for a bunch of people on the wrong end of things.

Presumably the property owner is entitled to fence in his or her property even if it’s effectively been part of the sidewalk over the long term and even if there are no entrances (or anything else) to enclose.

This particular example of dead space really draws the eye as it’s well lit, in a high trafficked area and features a window into a busy retail location. It’s like a glowing cube.

Public space, Hannah Arendt and Toronto

“If cultural homogeneity is no longer an option, how do we live together? An indispensable precondition for peace and harmony is to have place and spaces where we tread the same sidewalks, see each other, simply walk to a park or public square to meet friends, take our kids to play, walk our dogs, and through unscripted interactions learn to cope with our inevitable differences and understand our commonalities. Virtual space does not replace that. As with many other earlier communications advancements – telephone, movies, television – new technological capabilities are absorbed and become complementary to this still-basic need for face-to-face encounters.
Encountering the “other” in public has something fundamental to do with self-actualization. As philosopher Hannah Arendt observed, humans appear before others in public in order to be recognized. Personal identity is exposed and revealed. This “revelation” of identity cannot happen in isolation; it cannot result from self-reflection alone. Our public self is revealed in a public place. In our city, we cannot help being aware that we have been born into a world that is inhabited by many others who are different from ourselves. We can also see that, in large part, we benefit form that reality and thus we consider it a positive condition of our shared lives as city dwellers.
A pervasive desire for some form of sociability in true public space seems to meet a fundamental human need. On a personal level, many of us have a longing for the unscripted possibilities – a life of absolutely “no surprises” is deadly dull. Too, the experience of seeing and being seen among our peers in public confirms our own place in the universe as humans and the connectedness of things. In true public space we can reveal and communicated our uniqueness as individuals and at the same time recognize the differing identities of others. These interactions, even when they provide something as simple as awareness and familiarity, speak to our collective viability as an urban society. In the absence of public spaces where such mingling can occur, problems of exclusion can easily arise. When citizens do not meet their fellow citizens – in all their variety – there emerges the very real danger that the unknown “other” will be seen as in some way threatening. In our heterogenous city, we have an obligation to ensure the existence of a space for communication and interaction among all citizens; and it must be inclusive enough to allow access and use by everyone.
There is an important political dimension, as well. The presence and stability of the commons is critical to democracy.We need space for political freedom, places where people can demonstrate, express dissent, and freely vice opinions in public.”

Counterpoint: Nathan Jurgenson in The Social Photo

“‘The Moment’ is not just a solitary experience. And, often, when people praise disconnecting from the digital in order to be ‘in the moment together,’ it really is a privileging of mere geography. The fetishization of contiguity has a long tradition and is echoed in our everyday language: each time we say ‘IRL,’ ‘face-to-face,’ or ‘in person’ to mean connection without screens, we frame what is ‘real’ or who is a person in terms of their geographic proximity rather than other aspects of closeness-variables like attention, empathy, affect, erotics, all of which can be experienced at a distance. We should not conceptually preclude or discount all the ways intimacy, passion, love, joy, pleasure, closeness, pain, suffering, evil, and all the visceral actualities of existence pass through the screen. ‘Face to face’ could mean much more than breathing the same air.

Geographic proximity remains important to whether we call something ‘close’ or ‘in person’.or ‘face to face.’ At times it is perhaps the most significant variable. But it certainly should not be the only one. To start from the prerequisite that co presence is solely dependent on proximity in space devalues so many other moments where closeness occurs and happens to be mediated by a screen. Physicality can be digitally mediated: what happens through the screen happens through bodies and material infrastructures. The sext or the intimate video chat is physical-of and affecting bodies. Video chat brings faces to other faces. You are aware of, learning from, assessing, stimulated by, and speaking through bodies and the spaces around them, as details of those spaces filter in and are noticed or foregrounded. This screen-mediated communication is face-to-face, in person, physical, and close in so many important ways, and distant in only one.

Likewise, being geographically close does not necessarily assure the other qualities of proximity. You can be in the same room with someone, but that doesn’t mean you are actively caring for or about them: maybe you are not listening; perhaps you are there out of obligation. You can be distant in all the ways you were close in the video conversation, not ‘in the same place’ at all. To be sure, mediated communication comes with miscommunication, degradations in the fidelity of the message, the loss of meaning. But to downplay mediated communication is to downplay the cultural and social possibilities of communicating with those who are far away, to exchange across culture, to send messages to those in the future, to speak to yourself from the past, to interface with the dead.”