ARC3105HS
Instructor: Michael Piper
Meeting Section: L0101
Fridays 9:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.

A leasing company in Etobicoke subdivides and rents single family homes to upwards of 18 residents. Hindus gather in a Scarborough industrial park in a former mechanics shop to worship on weekends. Scattered across the Toronto region, often far from transit, tower in the park apartment buildings are home to a majority of the city’s low-income residents and racialized minorities. These three examples of urban occupation defy conventional ideals that designers and planners have about benefits and values of density and suggest that current mainstream discourse is somehow behind the times.

Since the latter twentieth century, a particular culture of density emerged within design and planning thought. Reacting to the dispersed nature of modern-era, post-World War II suburbanization, professionals and scholars promote compact, high density forms of city building most often associated with city centers in Europe and North America. Such dense areas are well served by transit, retail, and open space; are walkable and offer opportunities for impromptu social interaction for its residents. These qualities have been ingrained into the design culture of schools across North America, and are written into policies and zoning code that govern city building. They are, however, available to a progressively small and wealthy portion of residents in North America today.  

Behind the façade of single-family homes, in the varied shops of ethnic strip malls, or the unexpected activities of 7-11 parking lots – often without access to transit— immigrant populations and low-income residents of North America’s urban periphery are producing new cultures of density. The goal of the course is not to fetishize, or emulate these cultures, but rather, to attempt to withhold judgement, and to present them as positive examples social life.  

This class will explore alternative cultures of density, public space, the commons, and spatial appropriation through methods of urban analysis, visualization, and representation. The course will focus on three kinds of space as examples of these cultures in Toronto. Students will be assigned a series of readings that focus on ethnographic analysis of these three spaces and will be asked to visualize the physical spaces identified in the readings through a series of polemical sketches. The final project builds on these sketches and asks students to choose one example from this series, or propose their own example for approval, and will then be asked to produce a refined drawing(s) that describe the space they have chosen. The final deliverable will be a presentation that compile’s the sketches and research made throughout the semester.