Photo: Duck Duck Goose

A game of "Duck Duck Goose" on University Blvd.

Toronto City Council Channels Harry Potter, Graffiti Blitz, Tree House Cities, and Facebookville

In a long, torturous special meeting of council scheduled to decide whether to fire the rest of the Toronto Community Housing Corporations board members, it was ruled that speaking of the auditor general's report that had caused this whole snafu was out of order. This led to what can only be described as the Harry Potterfication of council as The-Document-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named became the preferred way of alluding to the forbidden report. Not allowing council to reference a report that was being used to fire board members is almost as ridiculous as not allowing them to talk about 2012 impacts of the 2011 budget at the 2011 budget meeting. If this keeps up, by the end of the year council will only be able to communicate in a combination of increasingly vague hand gestures and blinking.

Steve Kupferman over at OpenFileTO has done some investimagating and found out the incredible numbers of graffiti violations that have been issued under Rob Ford's reign. In fact, in a little over three months there have been almost the same number of violations issued as in the previous twenty months under David Miller, leading some to wonder about the clean-up costs associated with this for small businesses. But Shawn Micallef, over at Spacing, has found some graffiti that even Rob Ford may not want to scrub off.

Have you ever found yourself wandering the streets with a pen and notebook and way too much time on your hands? At least two people in New York City have, and they've decided to do something about it dammit. One is drawing every building in NYC while the other is drawing every person in NYC. Too bad by the time they finish, pen and paper will be a thing of the past and they'll have to complete their project by digitally downloading their drawings into their iPad 58 through Apple's new-fangled mind-reading app.

A Vancouver architecture firm is experimenting with the idea of wooden skyscrapers as the way to a sustainable future, sparking a furious debate over the gender equality of a future city possibly overtaken by No Girls Allowed boy's clubs.

Facebook as Urban Planning? A bunch of architecture students are rounded up to try to make Facebook's new digs feel more like a neighbourhood, with one student saying that they wanted to make the "edge of the campus more permeable and remove the line between public and private land". No word yet on how much control Facebook employees would have over these privacy settings.

And, the non-sequitur: a Chilean man who has 82 tattoos of Julia Roberts on his body, proving that, yes, you can have too much of a good thing.

Dance Like Everyone is Watching

If you're like most people, when you're in a public place you'll do almost anything not to stand out too much. You certainly wouldn't dance around crazily to music only you could hear while someone filmed you and then post that video on the internet. So I guess that makes Phil Villeneuve not like most people.

I was first exposed to the antics of Villeneuve when a friend showed me the video of him whirling and twirling to the Scissor Sisters in a No Frills grocery store. I was slightly horrified as I watched the video, the same kind of stomach-cringe I get when I watch people on American Idol or when a certain beauty pageant contestant stumbled through an answer. I'm embarrassed for them. I literally sweat watching.

But I feel there is something important about dancing and being silly and spontaneous in public. There can be a tedium to the day-in day-out rhythm of urban life that causes us to switch to autopilot. We've all seen that glazed over look as people push their shopping carts down an aisle or stare straight ahead on the subway. You feel as though you could bounce a tennis ball off their forehead and they wouldn't blink.

The reason things like flash mobs and crazy dancing people are so compelling is because of the way they play with the tedium of that urban routine. They force people to snap back into reality, because suddenly reality has become, well, surreality. This is shown best in the New York Grand Central Station freeze, where a group of people all froze at a predetermined time to the amazement of everyone else. It's hilarious to watch everyone's reaction as their boring commute is suddenly hi-jacked and turned into a Twilight Zone episode. It turned a completely forgettable act into something impossible to forget, which I'm sure is the goal of Improv Everywhere, the group that organized it.

Flash mobs, however, have become almost tedious in themselves. They all seem to have official websites and predetermined dates and times. There's the No Pants Subway Ride and the Zombie Walk, and the Pillow Fight and on and on it goes in countless cities around the world. I feel like, by reducing it to virtually one person, Villeneuve sheds all the weight built up by these mass events and gets back at the core of what it's all about--the delight of the unusual.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the Villeneuve video is that everyone around him is trying so hard not to care. But it's clearly impossible to deny a grown man swinging around the pole of your subway car like a stripper. There's a few turned heads, some smirks, but mostly people are just attempting to ignore him like you would ignore that crazy man who corners you on the bus and won't stop ranting about U.S. foreign policy. He knows this too, which is why he grabs people's hats or puts his arm around them.

This is a total adaptation of city space for something other than what we've all decided is appropriate for that space. Subway cars are for commuting. Grocery stores are for buying food. Dancing is something you do when you've had that third drink and your favourite song comes on and the dance floor is just crowded enough that no one will see you jerk about. But it's good to challenge what we can do in different areas of the city and push people's comfort zones, if just for the simple fact that it keeps things interesting.

I often think about what I would do if I encountered Villeneuve dancing in my subway car or grocery store or bank. Maybe I would laugh, engage with him, and give him a twirl. But most likely I would avert my eyes and pray he picked on someone else.

Oh well. I can always watch him on YouTube.

Mess is in the Eye of the Beholder

[This article was originally posted on the Torontoist, February 24, 2011]

On February 22, 2011, the Annex Gleaner reported that the Bloor Annex Business Improvement Area intended to end the prolific postering of the stretch between Bathurst Street and Spadina Avenue with specially made light pole covers that are supposed to repel both tape and staples.

Just like digital locks on CDs could never stop determined pirates, it’s almost certain that some street hacker will figure out a way to affix a poster to these supposedly poster-proof sheathes. It’s almost as if the BIA is challenging them to find a way.

Still, coming on the heels of the ongoing debate surrounding Rob Ford’s plans to expunge all traces of spray paint and sharpie marker from Toronto, the announcement by the Bloor Annex BIA raises concerns over the sterilization of the city’s surfaces. Not only is a certain amount of messiness and visual clutter to be expected in any city of a certain size, but it should be welcomed as a sign of vibrancy—to a point, of course.

Dylan Reid, in a piece from the Summer 2010 issue of Spacing titled “Bless this Mess,” wrote about Toronto’s messy urbanism, noting that it is the city’s hodge-podge of architectural styles and general visual disorderliness that makes it so appealing. Posters and flyers contribute to this messy urbanism by cluttering our visual landscape. As Reid says, “The instinct for order and beauty has its place; the problem comes when it is dominant. It needs to be constantly challenged and questioned by the push for vibrant messiness.”

Consider this ideal against a city like Vancouver, where posters are corralled into specially designed poles and removed every Tuesday afternoon. Vancouver’s manicured streetscapes lose some of that explosive spontaneity that can be found in Toronto.

Designated postering spots are coming to Toronto too, albeit slowly. The City drafted a bylaw restricting posters and flyers in 2006, but enforcement has been lax and will continue to be so until enough official posters boards and columns, provided by Astral Media, are installed around the city. A June 2010 report by the City [PDF], requested by Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong (Ward 34, Don Valley East) noted that 261 posters boards and thirty-four columns have been rolled out, but they are insufficient for the bylaw to be fairly enacted. Eventually, Astral Media will roll-out two thousand posters boards and five hundred columns across the city.

Postering and flyering have long been used not just by businesses, but also by citizens to advertise services, support political causes, or simply make announcements to their community. Today, when much of the community message board's function has moved online to sites like Craigslist and Kijiji, it’s refreshing to walk down the street and see someone advertising their ugly, thirty-year-old couch, or their services as a piano teacher. If these anti-poster sheathes are put up all over the Annex—and if they spread elsewhere in the city— how will certain notorious gay porn websites, without the lure of those hot pink posters, entice men aged nineteen to twenty-six to audition? Won’t someone think of the porn?

No, not all posters are works of art. In fact, many are poorly designed, grammatically incorrect, written in Comic Sans bold, and rife with incorrectly used quotation marks and italics—but they are part of the neighbourhood. Posters are not just a form of community expression, but a sign of a lively, exciting place to live, of a city that has stuff going on and things to do and people with opinions to share. This city’s posters are like weeds: you can keep removing them one at a time, but they will sprout back if you don’t get at the root. And if the root is a community’s desire to express itself, do we really want to destroy that?

Posters and flyers can be found at varying degrees all across the city, but perhaps the best case is on St. George Street on the University of Toronto campus, where the posters cause light poles to bulge out in the middle, giving them the appearance of snakes who have only half-digested their meals. When was the last time these poles were stripped of their wheat-pasted second skins? One has to wonder at the layers of cultural history plastered to them. Peeling them back, one by one, would be an archeological dig uncovering concerts, roommates needed, and political rallies of days-gone-by. Imagine those same poles sans posters, empty and exposed and naked in their slimness.

There are worse things than a little mess.

Photo: This Wall Looked Better With Graffiti

Pretty self explanatory, actually. See: In Defence of Graffiti.

In Defence of Graffiti

[photo taken in alley behind Bloor St]

When I was in St. Petersburg, Russia just before the G8 in the summer of 2007, I stalked the streets of that ancient city snapping pictures left and right. I have pictures of beautiful churches, canals, and monuments. I have soviet-era apartment blocks and crammed, twisted streets. I have pictures of ornate castles, with so much gold that it's almost hard to look at them in the sun. But those aren't the pictures that I love the most. The pictures that I love the most are of the graffiti.

Every so often a politician vows to clean up a city's graffiti. Rob Ford has made it his personal task to see all the graffiti eliminated in Toronto within six months of taking office--a truly ridiculous proposition on par with other never-ending, amorphous battles like America's "war on drugs". He argues that a graffiti-free city is 'clean' and business-friendly (if I was to engage Ford on the business-friendly front, I could invoke Richard Florida and claim that graffiti is a sign of a vibrant creative class--but that's another story).

A city should not simply be a vehicle for business. It's built environment should not be seen only as a conduit for making money, but as the arena in which citizens interact with each other, with their society, with the world. Part of this interaction is expression through forms of art.

[photo taken in Los Angeles]

I will not even dive into the vandalism vs. art debate that surrounds graffiti like an eternal haze (I could call huge, sprawling advertisements clinging like some second skin to the side of a building as simply state-sanctioned vandalism). That conversation is a dead end. We shouldn't be asking ourselves: is it art? is it vandalism? We should be asking ourselves: what would our city be without it?

Erasing Toronto's graffiti is akin to erasing part of its cultural history, part of its democratic expression, its conversation with its residents. A city is not static, but an ever-changing, morphing entity and attempts to rein this in run the risk of stifling what makes cities alluring in the first place. Imagine the alley behind Queen St scrubbed clean. Is it better off? What do we lose?

[photo taken in graffiti alley behind Queen St.]

Graffiti is what gives a city part of its character, its history, its contradictions. What was particularly intoxicating about the graffiti in St. Petersburg was the juxtaposition of the newness of the colourful sprayed paint with the intense oldness of the rest of the city. It was a mash of history, of time lines, of layers of society. Some of it was ugly, true. Some of it, given the impending G8, was political. But all of it added to the complexity of my experience to the city. Here was a city that was ancient, but throbbing and alive as well, evolving and living on the walls in dashes of colour.

Now the City has issued a notice to the Evergreen Brick Works site to clean up the graffiti on the walls there, some of which has been there for 30 years. Attending a walking tour of the site a few months ago, one of the architects on the project remarked that keeping the graffiti was an important part of the preservation of the history of the site. He rightly saw it not as an act of vandalism (which legally, it is), but as a crucial moment in the site's rich history. Erasing the graffiti, would be like knocking down one of the site's walls. There, as in St. Petersburg, the contrast between the old, industrial buildings and vibrant, fluid colour is striking. Without it, the site would lose that contrast.

Not all graffiti is great. Tagging--which is like running around and writing your name in everyone else's underwear--can be crude and decidedly unartistic. But even tagging, layered over time as it is on many buildings on Spadina, creates a kind of depth, a collage.

OK, so I said I wasn't going to get into the vandalism vs. art debate, but I do have to say after all this that I understand the frustration of businesses and residents who have found their property 'defaced' by graffiti. I'm not arguing that we should never clean up graffiti, or that all of it merits protection. I am arguing that despite whether you view it as art or not, graffiti has a purpose in the city that needs to be recognized. It contributes to the contrast between old and new, often blending them together. Part of the allure is how it seems situated in time, but also completely unbound by it. How old is some of that graffiti anyway? Do we really know? Graffiti is at once a documentation and an ongoing conversation.

A graffiti-free city is a silent city.

[photo taken at the Evergreen Brick Works]

Street Art is for the Birds

I came across some cute street art in the alley just off Borden south of Bloor Street of what appears to be a city of yellow birds hanging out their laundry. I could be mistaken, but it looks pretty new. The alley is filled with all kinds of graffiti, particularly on the side of the Tranzac, but this stuff stood out. It's amazing how much some well thought out painting can turn what is usually an unpleasant space into something cool that you want to explore.

A Walk in Nordheimer Ravine Reveals, Among Other Things, a Giant Spider Web

A few days ago, after being holed up in the apartment all day, my Exploring Partner and I decided to check out Nordheimer Ravine, which lies just just south of St. Clair between Avenue Road and Bathurst Street. I have now lived in Toronto for nearly six months and what is great is that I'm still discovering things about this city--things that lie just beyond the boundaries of my apartment within a short walking distance.

Nordheimer Ravine is one of those places where, if I may indulge in a cliche, the city just disappears around you. We entered the ravine off Bolton Drive and immediately were swallowed up by the fiery Autumn colours. For those that lament Toronto flatness, the ravine is a welcome change in topography. It is also the site of one of Toronto's numerous "lost rivers". Castlefrank Brook lies buried beneath.

The path we chose let us out at Sir Winston Churchill Park, which actually sits on top of one of Toronto's water reservoirs. The park seems to be the kind of place that is good for two activities: 1) allowing your dog to romp around with other dogs in the fenced-in off leash area, and 2) running around in circles on its top perimeter. Maybe it's the inevitable onset of winter, or the fact that I haven't lived in a place that gets enough snow to actually do this, but I find myself constantly on the look-out for good places to go sledding once the white stuff drops. The sides of Sir Winston Churchill Park, which slope drastically down into Nordheimer Ravine, look to be the perfect spot to pick up some good speed and not worry about slamming into anything hard at the bottom.

There are a few architecturally grand buildings around, which were done in 1930. I particularly liked the one on the south side. If this had been built today it would be a functional, yet non de-script box, but back then they did things with a bit more flair.

We followed Nordheimer Ravine, where we came upon what appeared to be a subway entrance, but turned out to be an emergency exit. This exit was put to good use in 1995 when a train rear-ended another in the tunnel, trapping people for hours as the temperature rose to over 40 degrees (you can read more here).

Further on, there is another piece of subway infrastructure, this time in the form of a worker entrance/exit. A few bags of garbage labelled TTC were piled at the front and some graffiti was sprayed across its concrete surface. It's unclear whether they are reclaiming this particular area, of if it's a general message to be applied across the city. The shape is kind of interesting, almost like it is welcoming you in with its concrete flippers.

We also, surprise surprise, ran into some yarn-bombing--one of my new favourite forms of street art. This time no nails were put through the tree to hold the yarn (although it appears to be just a dead log). We didn't stick around to find out if there was a similarly sized yarn spider around.

Then the ravine ends, and we were spat back out into Toronto at the site of the St. Clair West subway station. In a city where a lot of natural topographical elements were either shaved off or filled in, it's nice to come across a place like Nordheimer Ravine.

Minor Street Art On Major Street

Today I was walking home from Kensington and came across these cute decals pasted onto the sides of utility poles between College and Ulster on Major. My favourite has got to be the tiger because she just looks so damn majestic.

Walking Through Toronto's Laneways with Graeme Parry

This past Sunday I had the pleasure of attending a free walking tour of Toronto's laneways led by Graeme Parry. We met at the corner of Queen and Bathurst and soon the group had amassed to more than 60 people; the largest group for a tour yet, Parry said. The tour took us on a winding route through the graffiti-filled alley just south of Queen West and then north-west up to Dundas and Ossington.

I have always had a bit of a love affair with alleys, jump-started, I think, by an interest in the street art found in Vancouver, a city I explored as a suburban teenager and eventually moved to in 2003. Alleys were always my best bet to get a glimpse of colourful murals and quickly-drawn tags that were too often scrubbed clean from any wall facing a more public area.

Soon, however, I began to appreciate more than just the thriving graffiti in the alleys. There was something else intoxicating about wandering the back-streets of a city. A feeling of being off-the-grid, even though you are very much still on the grid. It's a private space that is still public, quieter and, as this Spacing article points out, less commercial than walking along the street. Alleys can be dirty, filled with garbage, and not well lit, but they also challenge your view of your city, force you to acknowledge the existence of a different part that may not always be displayed or sanctioned.

Vancouver always had a bit of a scrubbed-clean feeling to me -- a toy recently removed from its shrink-wrapped packaging -- and the alleys showed me a different, grittier side to the city. A side much different than the world-class clad-in-glass image Vancouver attempts to portray. Vancouver's alleys, especially in the Downtown Eastside, can be home to sleeping bodies, needles, and drug deals. Once, photographing the graffiti in an alley running parallel to Granville Street I encountered a man smoking crack who identified himself as "Bent Brent" because his arm had been partially severed and reattached at a strange angle. He lifted his t-shirt to show me the scar, then told me to be careful with my camera.

Walking with the tour through Toronto's laneways, we were shown examples of laneway housing, a type of residence being built inside laneways. In cities looking to increase density, it seems a good idea. Vancouver passed a motion allowing laneway housing in 2009 and saw the first opened in 2010. Objections to privacy, access to city utilities, and fire and garbage truck access have become issues and barriers to laneway housing; however, we came across several successful laneway housing projects, including a townhouse complex built on a former parking lot. One, more sleek example of a laneway house, is even featured on page 74 of the Guidebook to Contemporary Architecture in Toronto and can be found pictured here. Laneway architecture needs to be more inventive, using a smaller space ingeniously. There were some strange buildings, but the one pictured below, with its folded-over peak like a flopped Orca fin, caught my eye.

Parry led a casual, but informative tour and managed the large group well. The laneways we travelled through were mostly empty of people, except for a few curious residents who came to check out the strange mass of people taking pictures of their houses. However, there was one traffic jam created at a laneway intersection where we had to negotiate space with several large cars.

At the end of the tour, Parry explained that one of the things he loves about laneways is how you can get lost inside them in your own city. He asked us how many of us had felt disoriented in the laneways only to dump out at an intersection or street we knew. It was this exact experience that I find so compelling about laneways and one of the reasons why I walked them so much in Vancouver. It seemed a way to renew my vision of the city, wipe away the fog that builds up when you live in a place too long and allow yourself to be surprised again.

all photos taken by me on September 5, 2010 on walking tour route.

Solar Homes, Iceberg Homes, Animal-shaped Cities, Bike Corrals, and Hacked Billboards & Websites

Architect Ralph Disch builds Heliotrope: the world's first energy positive solar home. It rotates to follow the sun where ever it goes. Except at night.

Daniel Andersson imagines the Iceberg house in Finland: a floating house that shows only its tip above water. Soon to follow: the first cruise ship sunk by striking a house.

Southern Sudan unveils plans to build animal shaped cities. It's like animal crackers, except instead of eating them you live inside them.

Vancouver grocery store owner credits the city's "hippy mayor" for on street bicycle corral that fits 18 bikes outside his store on Commercial Drive.

A group of Toronto artist's take it upon themselves to hack illegal billboards and replace the advertisements with their own art. In a twist of irony, the Toronto website illegalsigns.ca has also been hacked, but of a different less artistic nature.

Parkour and the City as a Playground

Years ago when I was in one the earlier years of my undergrad degree at UBC, I took a film course with a guy who seemed to be highly caffeinated at all times and would constantly be bouncing off the walls. And I mean, literally bouncing off the walls. We would be out on campus and he would take a running leap toward an inverted corner of a building and, using one side as leverage against another, run halfway up the building.

At the time, I had never heard of Parkour -- my friend called it something like "freerunning", which to me didn't entirely encapsulate the craziness of what he did -- but in the time since it has become far more popular. A Toronto chapter even offers lessons. The definition (on the American Parkour website) says that "Parkour is the physical discipline of training to overcome any obstacle within one's path by adapting one's movement to the environment."

Translation: They're like monkeys released into the built environment.

They swing off bars, run up walls, jump across the chasms of buildings only to land perfectly on a narrow ledge, flip off roofs, and engage in any other number of gravity- and fear-defying acts.

Basically, Parkour is -- like street art -- a re-imagining of the urban landscape. Where graffiti and street artists use the city as a canvass or a giant installation project, the practitioners of Parkour (traceurs) use the city as one sprawling, integrated jungle gym. The movements can be so fluid that they seem connect buildings, almost knitting the city together and making it seem like a cohesive whole instead of solitary structures sitting near each other and separated by alleyways, guard rails and walls. Where I see a barrier I have to walk around, they see something that can be leaped over.

So, I guess I disagree with the last little bit of the American Parkour definition. Although it is definitely about adapting your movements to the environment, it is also about adapting the environment to your movements and that's where the real creativity of it comes in. You have to have the ability to look at architecture and see something other than a building or wall or a railing; you have to look and see the possibility of movement, which ultimately makes Parkour a pretty artistic practice as well as a physical one. Afterall, one of other names for it is l'art du déplacement, which translate as the art of movement.

Often I think we get caught up in seeing the city and our environment in a routine way, and so it's jarring and kind of exhilarating to watch someone take your assumption about what the city can be used for and shatter it. Also, it's just damn cool to watch.

First image source.

Second image source.

City as Conversational Hardware

Yesterday, when in the alley taking out the trash at work, I noticed that our dumpster had been spray-painted with the words: I love u. I wondered who this was for. Was it for a certain person who the painter was hoping would see? Was it a general message to anyone who walked by? Was it written ironically on the side of a dumpster as a form of protest against garbage? Perhaps a declaration of undying love for Smithrite?



Further down from my work, on a sign advertising a public garden, there is a Jim Pattison sticker and someone has used Sharpie to scribble out his name and then write "sucks". What was the purpose of the Jim Pattison sticker in the first place? Was it put there, again ironically, because Jim Pattison owns so much space in Vancouver, but doesn't own the public garden? And who scribbled it out and wrote sucks? Was it the same person, or someone different that came along and decided to join in on the conversation.


It's these kind of questions that make graffiti, tagging, bombing, stickers, or the inside of bathroom stall doors so interesting. These are pieces of city hardware--walls, doors, alleys, dumpsters--that are being used to open a kind of public discourse, a conversation which anyone with a Sharpie marker can join in with. City's treat graffiti as visual garbage to be painted over and swept away. But really it's the most democratic form of conversation there is, combining the anonymity of the internet with the wide audience of a public podium.


Imagine our city like a metaphorical message board where you can leave messages for strangers who can then respond back to you. We have a digital version of this on the web, but it's impersonal compared to stumbling upon "Good Bye" painted on the side of a discarded mattress in an alleyway. This mattress has a story to tell. Was the writer saying goodbye to the mattress? To the person that used to sleep on the mattress? Or is the mattress saying goodbye to me?

Street artists, like Banksy, have been using, abusing, and reassigning public property as message boards for quite some time, making political and social statements. But what if we opened this up to everyone? What if we did away with the metaphorical message board of alleyway writing and quickly scrawled fuck yous on bus shelters, and set up--somewhere in the city--an actual message board.

No doubt such a message board would garner crude and offensive material, but it would also, as the dumpster with I Love U scrawled on it shows, collect other kinds of conversation. But maybe taking these messages out of alleys and billboards and bus shelters and collecting them all on a sanctioned wall would miss the whole idea behind them, kill the conversation before it even starts. There is something strangely engrossing about reading an intricate web of arrowed sentences on the back of a public washroom stall that you might lose exposing it on a public wall. Perhaps, oddly, these conversations are meant to be private in public, reaching out to other city dwellers from the safe anonymity of a dark alley or locked stall door.

Meanwhile, somewhere in a dump, that mattress still lies, shouting its mournful Goodbye to any passing birds that happen to fly over.