14-15 October 2006 Think Tank at OCAD Designing the Imagined City Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 1 Designing the Imagined City Amy Lavender Harris Imagining

14-15 October 2006Think Tank at OCAD

Designing the Imagined CityCopyright © Amy Lavender Harris

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Designing the Imagined City

Amy Lavender HarrisImagining Toronto (www.imaginingtoronto.com)Department of Geography, York University



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1.Toward a

Phenomenology of Design



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The origin of design lies not in the designer but in the designer’s

being. Design involves the bringing forth of the true into the beautiful.

Putting your name on something doesn’t make you a designer or a

teller of truth. It makes you mortal.

Two facets of a phenomenology of design – design as building and design as telling – reveal that design isn’t very much about

designers at all.



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Design as BuildingTo build means to construct or

cultivate.

To build also means to cherish, to protect, to preserve and care for, to gather, to spare, to set

something free into its own essence, to keep, to let things

appear, to learn to dwell.

(Martin Heidegger, Building Dwelling Thinking)



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Design as Telling

The origin of design as telling is in an attuned listening, an openness to the being of

others and the world around us.

Design as telling is not an assertion but a channeling. In

this sense a designer is a conduit, one who bears witness to something outside the self.



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The imagined city is as real, perhaps more real,

than the hard city we can locate on maps.

(Jonathan Raban, Soft City)



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Nothing in a city is discrete.

A city is all interpolation.

(Dionne Brand, Thirsty)



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2. The Tallest

Tale



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Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way

rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.

(Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion)



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(Image credit: rsambrook via Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.)

… the cold steel felt strange against my skin and I sensed long tremors in the giant skeleton of the bank, and it was as if the building was alive, shivering, with bones and sinews and tendons, with a life of its own.

(Gwendolyn MacEwen, The House of the Whale)



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Was this city somebody’s rough diagram of reality, or was it pure mirage? He gazed at the Tower – tallest freestanding structure in the world – and it shimmered in the gray air, a monument to nothing, a space-ship that would never have lift-off, a rocket without a launching pad.

They didn’t know who they were, so they came and built these big cities in the wilderness. They still found it empty so they stuck up this tower in the emptiness. They were so lonely they didn’t even know it, maybe even lonelier than me.

(Gwendolyn MacEwen, The Loneliest Country in the World)

Image credit: Adrian Scottow via Flickr. Used under the aegis Of a Creative Commons License.



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As the structure formerly known as the world’s tallest freestanding lies in the lake waiting for news of a better day, there’s heated talk among the other buildings, a debate that rages around whether the tower can’t get up or won’t get up. The smaller, older buildings all seem to agree that it can but won’t, while some of the bigger bank buildings claim that won’t is the same as can’t, that a loss of will is a loss of will and once the juice is gone the juice is gone, you might as well use the thing as the first leg in a walkway connecting to America.

(Darren O’Donnell, Your Secrets Sleep With Me)



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3.Viaducts and

Valleys: The City’s Literary

Cartographies



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Image credit: Amy Lavender Harris, 2006



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17Image credit: Amy Lavender Harris, 2006



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Image credit: Lone Primate, via Flickr. Used under the aegis of a Creative Commons license.



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Image credit: Brendan Hughes, via Flickr. Used under the aegis of a Creative Commons license.



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Image credit: Chris McConnell, via Flickr. Used under the aegis of a Creative Commons license.



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Image credit: Rick Innis, via Flickr. Used under the aegis of a Creative Commons license.



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4.Ordered Disorder:

Textures of Kensington Market



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Image credit: David Pritchard, via Flickr. Used under the aegis of a Creative Commons license.

The Market this night is deserted, after three, feral catsComb for fishheads; diablerieMists rising from sewer gratings, the moon through scaffolding,Crescented. (Lynn Crosbie, Alphabet City)



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This is my refuge. It is where I can be invisible or, if not invisible, at least drunk. … The smell from the market doesn’t bother me. I’ve been here before, me and the old lady. We know the price of things. Which is why I feel safe in telling stories here.

(Dionne Brand, At the Lisbon Plate)




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It’s soothing to be among strangers, who require from her no efforts, no explanations, no reassurances. She likes the mix on the streets here, the mixed skins. Chinatown has taken over mostly, although there are still some Jewish delicatessens, and, further up and off to the side, the Portuguese and West Indian shops of the Kensington Market. Rome in the second century, Constantinople in the tenth, Vienna in the nineteenth. A crossroads. Those from other countries look as if they’re trying hard to forget something, those from here as though they’re trying hard to remember. Or maybe it’s the other way around.(Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride)



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Image credit: Keepon, via Flickr. Used under the aegis of a Creative Commons license.



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Image credit: Dan Iggers, via Flickr. Used under the aegis of a Creative Commons license.

Her Kensington Market had been ordered in an efficient separation of products, and she labelled the main roads, for simplified reference, as Fish Street, Clothes and Vegetable Avenues. How much easier life could be if all streets had such utilitarian names; a person would always know what to expect from an address.(Sarah Dearing, Courage My Love)



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Underneath, like all markets, it possessed an ancient rhythmic hum created from trade, community, basic needs met, marriages – or at least couplings – made. This same music turns to white noise at a modern mall, some special secret element removed by its enclosure or the attempts at convenience.

(Sarah Dearing, Courage My Love)

Image credit: David Pritchard, via Flickr. Used under the aegis of a Creative Commons license.



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Documents

14-15 October 2006 Think Tank at OCAD Designing the Imagined City Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 1 Designing the Imagined City Amy Lavender Harris Imagining