Bridging the divide in a highrise world
NFB documentary examines how technology is improving lives in vertical communities
Architects see the residential highrise as built form.
In Toronto’s downtown core, the gilt pretence of the sky-piercing Trump Tower is topped by an articulated spire and features home-style luxury that can extend to 11,000 square feet.
On Kipling Ave. in Rexdale, the neighbourhood offers decades-old 20-storey complexes, brown brick and unadorned, not uncommonly inhabited by a global diaspora of rich and stunning complexity.
The obvious surface comparison presents an economic disequilibrium.
But what are the networks that reside inside the spaces of the less advantaged — not just in the umbra of highrises that arc above the downtown of this city, but in Mumbai and Kampala and South Brooklyn and Guangzhou? And what role do those networks play in diminishing or reinforcing the social disparity between the wealthy and the financially impaired?
In an enterprising collaboration between two University of Toronto researchers and a team of documentarians, Universe Within: Digital Lives in the Global Highrise brings the answer closer to hand.
The documentary is the final chapter in the multi-year Highrise project led by director Katerina Cizek under the aegis of the National Film Board of Canada. Universe Within took the uncommon approach of tackling fresh social research led by Deborah Cowen, an associate professor of ge- ography at the University of Toronto, and Emily Paradis, a senior U of T research associate noted for her work on economic disparity.
“We started this project in late 2011,” says Cowen. “If you think about that moment, it was a time of many social revolts.” The Arab Spring. The Occupy movement. “We were curious about what was happening in moments and spaces that were less extraordinary or spectacular.”
The result is an interactive work that immerses the viewer in the worlds of a global constellation of highrise dwellers, including an ALS sufferer in Tokyo, a just-released prisoner in Harlem, a Saudi female comic and a UN-sponsored refugee in Toronto whose highrise life consists of three chairs, a table and a laptop connecting her to loved ones in Iraq and Syria.
The potential to ameliorate isolation through digital engagement is one takeaway. But as Cowen says, the documentary presents no easy, universal conclusions.
In the neighbourhood of Worli, in south central Mumbai, residents rose up to fight against the expropriation of their homes in the Campa Cola Compound.
“What caught our interest was the massive, very thoughtful and creative, but also very deliberate and co-ordinated, social-media strategy,” says Cowen.
A Facebook page, a Twitter campaign and a digital diary helped draw the media spotlight not just to the plight of the compound alone, but to the broader social, economic and political disruption in Mumbai caused by the demolition and reconstruction of residential buildings. With more than half the buildings in Mumbai now designated as illegal, developers have moved on from razing shanties to targeting highrise residents. It is a social phenomenon.
Campa Cola is but one example of the documentary’s exploration of “digital citizens,” with technology opening the door to citizen engagement, from fighting homophobia in Uganda to advancing communal se- curity in Venezuela.
All this has sprung from what started as a door-to-door survey through two buildings on Kipling Ave. asking residents about their uses of, and access to, digital technology.
Researchers quickly learned that their preconceptions about the socalled digital divide were outdated. Fully 80 per cent of the Kipling households had Internet access, in line with the national average.
“We came to realize that low-income diaspora communities are not necessarily excluded from access by the cost of those technologies,” says Paradis.
But that has come at an enormous cost. People are sacrificing essentials in order to have access to a service that Paradis says is “as basic to our everyday lives as electricity and running water.” The new buzz phrase: digital debt.
Interestingly and disturbingly, the pattern of digital use by Kipling respondents showed that communication was either with those far away — as in a home country — or those nearby. Not one respondent reported digital engagement with someone in the core of the city.
Elaborating on this point by email, Cowen says the research reveals not only deepening inequalities in material resources but “the fracturing of social relations and networks.
“That none of the residents we’ve worked with have any significant (digital) social networks that extend to the downtown, despite extraordinarily active online lives, raises profound questions about the nature and depth of divides and the future of the city.”
That work is concerning and ongoing — a book that explores this and related issues is due to be published next spring.