randomosity

There is a great dis­cus­sion at Bri­co­leur­b­an­ism on the absence of people-scaled spaces in Toronto’s urban streets­cape. The dis­cus­sion takes as a start­ing point con­struc­tion hoard­ing on two sides of the street near Bloor that inad­vert­ently cre­ated a humane street scale not unlike that found else­where in the world. This con­trast in city scale is evid­ent even between Toronto and Montreal. The urban core in Montreal, des­pite the pres­ence of mod­ern high-rises, and not entirely due to semi-random occur­rence of build­ings from the past 300 years, has this more human scale. Why? Pro­por­tions. The art­icle at Bri­co­leur­b­an­ism offers a brief look at examples in Toronto that have achieved this scale and ends with a call for atten­tion to the dehu­man­iz­ing scale of our mod­ern city. The infra­struc­ture that allows machines ready access to and from the core also dehu­man­izes the space and cre­ates the need to actu­ally move to and from the core. When spaces are achieved they are like pearls in the streets­cape and there clearly is the inten­tion at times to cre­ate these spaces. I include some pho­tos from New Dun­dee square, the sculp­ture park between King and Adelaide and the pleas­ant walk near the Domin­ion mar­ket­place on Front Street.

This need for human­iz­ing our urban spaces isn’t a new mes­sage, but it cer­tainly does rein­force one of the causes behind the famil­iar scene of streams of work­ers flee­ing the inner city in Toronto on the Go Train every even­ing rather than linger­ing in a con­crete jungle.

By the way, there is also a com­pan­ion set of pho­tos from the new Michael Lee-Chin crys­tal at the ROM, so that those of us unable to attend the pub­lic unveil­ing recently can vicari­ously appre­ci­ate the new space.