What Time is this Place?

What Time is this Place (MIT Press, 1972) is the title of planner and architect Kevin Lynch's lovely, illuminating book on urban change. In it, Lynch observes,

Change and recurrence are the sense of being alive -- things gone by, death to come, and present awareness. The world around us, so much of it our own creation, shifts continually and often bewilders us. We reach out to that world to preserve or to change it and so to make visible our desire. (from the Introduction)

As geographers and dwellers, we stand amid change, are change. Yet, at the same time, so many of the things we create and destroy are monuments to moments we have tried to fix in place, monuments which are perpetually destroyed and recreated, monuments to new and passing moments. A paradox. The poet Mark Strand writes,

They are back, the angry poets. But look! They have come with hammers and little buckets, and they are knocking off pieces of The Monument to study and use in the making of their own small tombs. (from The Monument)

Toronto's Kensington Market may be seen as a monument. But whose monument? To what? And to what moment? In the lexicon of the social sciences, Kensington Market is a 'contested space', strained by competing visions and narratives and histories. Kensington Market has been the subject of numerous studies, research projects, City plans, and social, political, and architectural experiments. Yet the monument, the Market, builds and unbuilds and rebuilds itself, and only the studies remain fixed in place as the visible manifestations of our desire.

In GEOG 3420, students will encounter Kensington Market, in part by asking Kevin Lynch's question, "What time is this place?" In doing so, we will consider the changing desires which have made Kensington Market manifest in its history, culture, buildings, land uses, its appearances in poems and novels and films, its incarnations as an English working-class neighbourhood, a Jewish quarter, a corner of Chinatown, an eclectic hodgepodge of underground cafes and secret bike repair shops, and a gentrifying neighbourhood. Students will devise individual research programs around particular questions that interest them. These questions may be explored using historical, cultural, ethnographic, demographic, environmental, economic, political, sociological, or other approaches.