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Canadian Urbanism Uncovered

The life of death in great Canadian cities

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My psychogeography column in the Eye Weekly this week examines how death and location collide and overlap in the city. For a number of reasons notable locations have a particular attraction but the places of death perhaps most of all. This isn’t out of any morbid curiosity — morbidness is boring — but rather something I can only describe uncharacteristically in supernatural terms. The place where people left us — for either nowhere or somewhere depending on what you believe — is a portal to somewhere else, and a connection back to that person. And yet these sites are often bedrooms, sidewalks, alleys, front stoops, parks, railway corridors and just about every other quotidian place in the city.

Thinking about these sites is like examining an alternate near-invisible map of the city. We see it sometimes, while other times, not so much. In the article I mention the  Toronto’s Star’s homicide map. It makes for disturbing reading as each murder site is marked with a bubble you can click that reveals a short bureaucratic haiku of the details of death, each likely with a novel’s-worth of story behind it. The Toronto Police’s unsolved homicide page is also compelling, complete with maps of the location of death. For more recent events in the city (of all types, not just murder) check the newsreleases page as well as the major news reports page on the police website.

Perhaps the most up to the minute way of dramatically changing your mental map of Toronto is by checking Toronto Fire Services constantly-refreshed list of active incidents. You can judge the size of the incident by how many units have been dispatched, and as with the homicide map the bureaucratic prose — a sample taken just now: “Fire – Subway”; “Medical Unconscious”; “Natural Gas Leak” — is almost euphemistic considering the dramas they likely represent. It also gives an indication of how big this city is, as every refresh (every 5 minutes) usually lists more incidents.

From my Eye piece:

Just after dusk one day last fall, I was passing by Church and Bloor when a Toronto Police cruiser stopped in the middle of the intersection. The officer got out, stood up straight, and saluted just in time for another police car to go by followed by three black hearses and a number of limousines. Activity on the sidewalk stopped and everybody watched, our attention caught by the sudden silence, by that cop doing something we rarely see them do, and by the appearance of a speeding motorcade. Two teenagers asked nobody in particular what was going on and a man answered, “Don’t you watch the news? These three died in Afghanistan.” The teens said “Oh,” and went quiet like everybody else, watching and listening to the unusual sound of so many eight-cylinder engines on their way to the Ontario Coroners building.

I don’t believe in ghosts, but I do believe there is something peculiarly powerful about the places where people died. The location where anything happened is special — On this site: a great birth; a great speech; a great invention — because it’s as close as we can ever get to that event, but sites of death are perhaps as close as we can get to the last few moments of the people we have lost, and it’s almost as if a bit of them still lingers there.

Please read the rest on the Eye site.

Photo by Bitpicture taken in Allen Gardens.

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8 comments

  1. Great piece, Shawn, but you got the location of the Just Desserts wrong. Dupont and Avenue, not Davenport and Bedford.

  2. Thanks.

    I was right on the location though, it was at 306 Davenport (at Bedford), where the Subway is now. Check this map.

    Dupont and Avenue, nearby, has a park on one corner, and an Anglican church on the other.

  3. this is such a rich topic to discuss. Very nice read.

  4. I was waiting for someone to chime in about that being the most inspired title to ever make it into either Eye or Spacing…

  5. i enjoyed the piece too. i get that feeling when i walk by the site of the murders of dylan ellis and oliver martin on richmond street. i walked by one night when there was a candlelit ceremony and the next day there were pools of wax on the sidewalk.

    i also get a similar feeling from missing posters and memorial parks such as the holly jones park on sorauren. but i’m sure every inch of the city has known death at one time or another…

  6. The Toronto crime map you link here is an interesting mash-up using Google Maps. To anyone unfamiliar with the city (personally, I’ve only visited once… for a few days), it might break apart an assumption that Canadian cities are ‘nicer’ or ‘safer’ than ours on the U.S. side.

    Increasingly, any geographic content – especially in urban areas – can simply be mixed with the existing Google interface. This easily achieves interactivity, but isn’t very visually interesting, or stimulating. To tell a story, or to go so far as solving a problem, more is needed.

    In comparison to Toronto, take the example of Oakland, CA (USA). Oakland is a city substantially smaller than Toronto, with a population of just under 400k, compared to some 2.5 million. Nonetheless, we are a core, urbanized piece of a larger metropolitan area, the San Francisco Bay Area.

    Oakland has suffered a higher homicide rate than most cities in our country – both by raw numbers and by the rate per our population. Frightening years included the early ’90s and the past few. In 2007 and 2008, the number of murders spiked, with a spate every few weeks each summer and fall. Even worse, the police department has fallen behind on solving these crimes. At the end of 2008, the unsolved homicide rate stood at over 60% for the past two years; this is significantly higher than other cities, which typically keep the unsolved rate beneath 50%.

    You point out the subtle morbidity of the Toronto map as it includes, of course, homicides and other lethal crimes. Doubtless, there is a violent crime problem in the city of Toronto, though it may not be so obvious. On the other hand, the average citizen in Oakland is sharply aware of our homicide problem, and the city’s reputation and livability is at stake.

    A recent innovation by local design firm Stamen Design puts our problem on the map. The site http://oakland.crimespotting.org/ was created as a purported resource for said average person to stay aware of crime at all levels, and perhaps to act upon it.

    “We believe that civic data should be exposed to the public in a more open way. With these maps, we hope to inspire local governments to use this data visualization model for the public release of many different kinds of data: tree plantings, new schools, applications for liquor licenses, and any other information that matters to people who live in neighborhoods.”

    Whatever the outcome, the map is an example of fine cartographic design. Psychogeography at its most indelicate, it also lays bare invisible spatial divisions that those of in the city know to exist. Furthermore, it changes the way such data is used – a user may use it not as a reference, but could keep coming back to his or her neighborhood, to reference specific types of crimes.