Suburbia
Social Space in the Planametric City
The map is open and conneciable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation.
Mapping is a fantastic cultural project, creating and building the world as much as measuring and describing it. Long affiliated with the planning and design of cities, landscapes and buildings, mapping is particularly instrumental in the construing and constructing of lived space. In this active sense, the function of mapping is less to mirror reality than to engender the re-shaping of worlds in which people live.
OVERVIEW
In teams of four or five, you will investigate and interpret a large-scale suburban environment. Through a series of mapping studies, derived from personal observation and supplementary research, you will isolate and represent the historic, cultural, economic, ecological and spatial conditions that characterize your site. Subsequently, through the creative recombination of these variables into a synthetic analytical drawing, you will reveal insights into the challenges and potentials of your site.
Don Mills Station
Downsview Station
Finch Station
Kipling Station
McCowan StationYour preliminary observations should cover a minimum area of approximately one kilometer square: 500m from the station exit in all directions.
PART ONE: DUE SEPTEMBER 25, 2008, 8:30AM
With your team, visit your site. Actively observe the forces at play. Record your observations through a combination of media: writing, sketching, photography, audio recording, video recording or any other technique you may be comfortable with.
On returning, review the results of your observations. Post five items to the blog - passages, images, clips or a combination - that you feel are representative of five different forces that affect the social space under investigation. In one or two sentences, describe the force that you are representing.
Possible forces include, but are not limited to: traces, decay, transformations, momentous occasions, groups, ethnicities, locals, festivals, boundaries, ownership, traffic, government, tags, formal exchanges, informal exchanges, illegal operations, scales, business type, business size, employment, employees, venues, variety, waste, production, human habitation, wild space, vegetation, forgotten places, water flow, toxicity, traffic, vehicles, corridors, forgotten places, vacancy, density, geometry, grids, axes, repetition, edges, hierarchy . . . to name but a few.
Lastly, please read James Corner's essay The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention.
EVALUATION
Annotated Observations: /5
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