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The following is a reprint of my recent Psychogeography<\/a> column in Eye Weekly on the NFB’s Highrise project. This spring, the participants of\u00a0The Thousandth Tower photo workshop will present this work at two major downtown events. TOMORROW, May 12 at 6pm<\/a> the web documentary will launch in the first floor rotunda of City Hall. All are welcome. Next week, on May 26 at 6pm<\/a> images from The Thousandth Tower will be presented at our annual Toronto the Good party, along with talks from Margaret and Phil Goodfellow, authors of A Guidebook to Contemporary Architecture in Toronto<\/a> (and I will talk about my new book Stroll: Psychogeographic tours of Toronto<\/a>).<\/em><\/p>\n Toronto is a vertical city but we don\u2019t see ourselves that way. Our collective imagination tends to see us as the \u201ccity of neighbourhoods\u201d which means, inevitably, houses on a grid of streets anchored by low-rise retail strips. This civic mythology was set in place by the epic struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, when a new breed of city council reformers and citizen activists stopped expressways<\/a> and preserved historic neighbourhoods. Largely safe from major development forces, those neighbourhoods are celebrated today and will continue to be beloved.<\/p>\n Yet in between many of these well-known neighbourhoods are clusters of towers \u2014 vertical neighbourhoods \u2014 that tend not to factor into our image of Toronto. Think of the Yonge Street clusters at St. Clair, Davisville and Eglinton. Along the Danforth there are clusters at Main Street and Victoria Park (Crescent Town). To the west along Bloor, there\u2019s one at Dovercourt and another really big one across from High Park. All the way out to the 905 border, Toronto\u2019s inner suburbs are spotted with towers. Looking at the city when arriving by plane it appears to be a lawn with dandelions sprouting all over it. In fact, between the 1950s and 1980s, over 1,000 towers were built around Toronto, and dozens more have gone up in the contemporary wave of building that has occurred since the end of the early-\u201990s recession. Toronto is second only to New York for the highest number of buildings over 12 storeys in North America.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n So who lives in these buildings? Many of the buildings downtown (save for places like St. James Town) have maintained the middle-class demographic for whom they were intended, albeit with a little less of the Swinging-\u201960s vibe with which many were first advertised (though Yonge and Eglinton might capture it best with the many \u201cYoung and Eligible\u201d types running around there). Lots of people live uptown, Woody Allen\u2013 and George Jefferson\u2013style lives in these towers.<\/p>\n The towers in Toronto\u2019s peripheral areas, however, tend to have different economic demographics; they often aren\u2019t as well-maintained and are a prime destination for newcomers when they first arrive in Canada. The Canada that they very quickly come to know has little to do with the image of Canada we were given via Canadian literature, and certainly isn\u2019t the mythic Toronto of Victorian and Edwardian neighbourhoods.<\/p>\n Though the towers have not been a big part of Toronto\u2019s narrative, some of the stories of their storeys are now being told through an innovative web documentary project by the National Film Board called The Thousandth Tower<\/em><\/a>. Filmmaker Katerina Cizek was recently the NFB\u2019s \u201cFilmmaker in Residence\u201d at St. Michael\u2019s Hospital, and that introduction to urban issues led her to start researching Toronto and other cities for her next project \u2014 one that would expand the doc model they developed out into the city.<\/p>\n \u201cI had about a year to research,\u201d says Cizek. \u201cThroughout that time I started getting to know people working on urban issues. That\u2019s how I learned about Tower Renewal. It\u2019s a huge way of rethinking the city I live in.\u201d<\/p>\n Tower Renewal<\/a> is the City\u2019s plan to retrofit some of Toronto\u2019s aging modernist concrete towers to both make them greener and address some of the social issues that came about with the tower-in-the-park style development. Through the project, the underused and poorly maintained surrounding lawns will become useful (there are even urban-agriculture possibilities) and people places reimagined by infill development and better-kept public spaces. The Thousandth Tower<\/em> explores one of the Tower Renewal pilot sites on Kipling Avenue in Rexdale and is the first project that has come out of the NFB\u2019s \u201cHighrise<\/a>\u201d umbrella, a multi-year, multimedia documentary that looks at buildings not just in Toronto, but around the world.<\/p>\n Cizek and her colleagues Heather Frise and Maria Saroja Ponnambalam started by meeting with the local Action for Neighbourhood Change group that connected her with individual residents. \u201cWe spent a lot of time in the building getting people to go to focus groups and ended up with a group of six residents,\u201d says Cizek. \u201cWe have an adult group with a range in age and perspective and how long they\u2019ve been in the tower.\u201d<\/p>\n The residents were given digital cameras to document their lives in the tower. \u201cSome of the photos are of the beautiful views out of their windows; trips going home from the store; from around the property; and in the [adjacent] ravine,\u201d says Cizek. \u201cLooking at the exhibit now, you can see commonalities. People are happy to be in Canada and are in the process of becoming Canadian citizens but always thinking of home and having feelings of loneliness and alienation. They carry all those memories into the place that they occupy today.\u201d<\/p>\n When viewing the exhibit, the towers start to look not like hunks of concrete, glass and steel but rather giant filing cabinets of human life and memory. It also mixes Toronto with \u201cback home\u201d in beautiful ways. Of a photo she took of the ravine, one participant, Privanti, wrote: \u201cGoing to the ravine behind our building really reminds me of Kashmir, the Heaven of India. There is a wooden bridge on the Humber River which connects this pathway to the park. It\u2019s like the bridge between us and the Supreme Soul. When I feel lonely or depressed, going to the park gives me a lot of energy. It helps me to get away from the materialistic world and takes me into that spiritual place \u2014 divinity, you can say.\u201d<\/p>\n A less romantic take on the same area by another resident, Irene, points out how these buildings aren\u2019t maintained the same way those middle-class buildings are: \u201cBack home there\u2019s a lot of scenery, a lot of green. You step outside and you step into green. You have flowers, you can plant as much as you want. You just journey and walk through your land. You can sit under an orange tree, you can climb on a plum tree, pick fruits, eat, just enjoy it. I don\u2019t have that here, I\u2019m in an apartment, just looking around. There\u2019s nothing that makes you want to walk, and take a stroll, and when you look at the swimming pool, it\u2019s cemented over.\u201d<\/p>\n When these stories are told, Toronto\u2019s \u201cfaceless\u201d towers are filled with personality and a program like Tower Renewal seems even more urgent.<\/p>\n Photo by Danielle Scott<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"![\"\"](\"http:\/\/spacingmedia.com\/uploads\/images\/line-grey-1pixel-600wide.jpg\"){kind=tracking}
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