Urban Life – davidhadwen's website

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.”

The smartphone screen as railcar window

“With speed, there is quantitatively more for the brain to deal with. This is not specific to the railroad but part of modernity more broadly, including the rise of the city. The classical social theorist Georg Simmel described this urban perception as an ‘intensification of nervous stimulation,’ as opposed to slow, lasting impressions which ‘use-up, so to speak, less consciousness than does the rapid crowding of changing images.’ The modern condition was thought of as a general onslaught of things to pay attention to, newly positioning the urban railroad-riding individual as a kind of spectator to an existence slipping quickly by.

The railroad positioned the world for the traveler as some thing passing, distant, to be taken as scenery framed by a cabin window. Schivelbusch expands on philosopher Dolf Sternberger’s description of this way of seeing as a ‘panoramic vision,’ a view that foregrounds the back—the passenger barely noticing that which is most near, reduced to an incon sequential blur by rapidity—and detaches the passenger from this space immediately surrounding the train car. Opposed to slower travel, where the passing landscape can be lingered upon and seen in great detail, railway speed produced a panoramic vision where the landscape is not seen for as long or intensively, its particularities are instead taken in as a part of an ongoing flow instead of discreetly. Always quickly vanishing, the landscape becomes more impressionistic, evanescent; panoramic vision is seeing the world as montage. This panoramic vision produced by the rapid succession of imagery is a useful way to frame the contemporary type of vision that social photography encourages, both in how we make and consume the images. The social photo is often viewed through the grid, stream, or story to be finger-scrolled, swiped, and tapped. The images in their proliferation and rapidity create an emergent stream in aggregate, and for the person doing the swiping, there is a more panoramic view of social life, akin to the montaged scenery from the train window.”

A historical timeline of 20th century “mass culture”

“In retrospect, the rise of mass culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries looks like the development of national cultural markets. National culture industries producing mass-reproducible forms — films, vinyl records, radio broadcasts, and illustrated magazines with half-tone images — displaced the city as the site not only of live performance and exhibition, but even of book and newspaper publishing. They also enclosed the cultural commons as all sorts of vernacular art forms that had circulated as common property, or part of the public domain, were recorded, copyrighted, and sold as commodities.
Before the 1980s and 1990s, these ‘national media systems were,’ as Robert McChesney has noted, ‘typified by domestically owned radio, television and newspaper industries.’ Despite ‘major import markets for films, TV shows, music and books . . . dominated by US based firms, . . . local commercial interests, sometimes combined with a state-affiliated broadcasting service predominated.’ Nevertheless, the years after World War II saw the beginnings of a global cultural market, often experienced as a tide of ‘Americanization,’ because of the prestige of US films, products, and musics. Against this stood the powerful, if unsuccessful, alternatives posed by the Second and Third Worlds: the attempt to delink the culture of the Communist world from the world cultural market, and the struggle by postcolonial states to orchestrate a new world information order.
In the wake of the age of three worlds, a radical privatization and deregulation of mass communications established a global market in cultural commodities, dominated by a handful of world-spanning corporations, among them Sony, News Corp, Disney, AOL-Time Warner, Viacom, and Bertelsman.”

William J. Mitchell on mass media, context independence and facilitated immersion

“…the mass media of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries transformed the global information dissemination system by radically separating the contexts of message transmission and reception. Novelists writing for thousands of readers, musicians in recording studios, and radio performers at their microphones could not know all of the potential reception sites for their productions, and could not assume uniformity among these sites, so they could not count on site features to help clarify or elaborate their meaning. This condition favored the production of works that were not only repeated exactly at different times or in different places, but were also as self-contained and independent of the context of reception as possible.
A closely related outcome was a growing demand for places and devices that masked the consumer’s immediate surroundings in order to facilitate immersion in standardized, modular, mostly self-sufficient information structures: quiet places for undistracted reading; darkened movie theaters where all attention is focused on the screen; the white-walled, minimalist art gallery; the Walkman or iPod that plugs into your ear; and—at the logical limit—the immersive virtual reality installation. Open a book, enter a movie theater, or dial up a track on your iPod and your attention is instantly shifted to another place or time. The dense embedding of these discrete media spaces in the urban fabric yields a city that, like a film with jump cuts and flashbacks, is experienced and understood as a sequence of spatially and temporally discontinuous scenes—some of them expressions of the current, local reality, and others ephemeral media constructions.”

Notes: with smartphones, endless media spaces of one? (Williams’ mobile privatization?) “Addiction by Design” the ultimate immersive media space?

London’s super-rich: geography, mobility and visual exposure

Quoted from Alpha City by Rowland Atkinson

“The mobility of the alpha city’s rich is facilitated by a Möbius-like remaking of city space. The lifeworld of the city becomes a kind of a continuous strip over which rapid movement can be made, stepping from one zone to another, or from one mode of travel to another. These characteristics are important because being on the move also entails a kind of vulnerability in terms of feelings of exposure, unwanted attention or the security risks that may be experienced, although the latter may be influenced by national background. For the super-rich, visibility is often seen as a problem. This is particularly so in an increasingly synoptic age in which the many watch the few through social media, and where cameras, drones and mobile phones enable reports on the activities of the wealthy to be relayed far and wide.
The photographer Dougie Wallace highlights this unease in his series of portraits of the wealthy as they cross the last few feet of pavement -the vulnerable somatic world of the street- from a private car or taxi to the environs of Harrodsburg (London, not Kentucky). Many of them appear startled or on the cusp of furious indignation as they stare into the lens.”