A better perspective on a changing city

Observatory offers chance to contemplate Toronto’s past, its geography and understand it better

A city like Toronto is all about speed and anxiety.

The pace of change in the entire GTA is staggering. Few metropolises change as quickly as this one: go on vacation and come back to a new skyline, a changed streetscape, or new neighbours.

This change produces unease. Even among people who understand the city has to build more housing and grow in order to affordably accommodate new people, change can still be anxious-making. Is it good change? Is the city going in the right direction?

Couple that with the fact that our planning process is Byzantine and hard to follow, even by those tasked with paying attention to it. Huge alternations are often buried in long reports filled with jargon. It’s all opaque, perhaps intentionally, and feels out of our control, as if we’re just going for a ride.

Then there’s existential threats like flooding. Basement and infrastructure floods are on the increase and these, too, produce a feeling of helplessness, as if we foolishly built a fragile and precarious city.

What if there was a place to slow down, think and observe the city in order to understand it better? Enter the Toronto Landscape Observatory at 72 Perth Ave., along the West Toronto Rail Path.

“This project is really about helping people to understand their own place in their ecosystem,” says Jane Wolff, co-creator of the observatory. “Being a careful observer is the first step toward understanding the web of relationships that we belong to, the first step towards being an effective thinker and advocate.”

The observatory is full of tools and reference material to help locals understand the urban landscape around them, and invites people to handle and touch things. Wolff teaches at University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, and has worked on other projects that have tried to make landscape “legible” to a wider range of people.

The Toronto observatory focus is both citywide and a deep dive into the 72 Perth environs. A particular evocative series of illustrations by artist Aaron Hernandez looks at the city’s watersheds, follows the contours of the topography and traces buried creeks through the city’s west side. Looking at these, as well as the large-scale maps and aerial photos on a large work table, some clues as to why those basements flood become apparent.

The industrial-looking former location of a Pentecostal church, the observatory’s building will soon be razed and turned into a residential complex. As I made my way to the observatory last week along Sterling Road, passing by the Nestlé chocolate factory, I was once again surprised at new developments in this wedge of a neighbourhood between two railway corridors. Ground has been broken on a few projects and a massive, new woodframe office building is going up behind the new Museum of Contemporary Art location in the Tower Automotive building.

The immersive maps I saw at the observatory (some historic, some showing trees or sewer lines) made it clear there’s been a few centuries of radical change in this part of town, and there’s layers of things at work. It’s a perspective that’s easy to forget.

“Though there’s scholarship and philosophy behind this, it’s really meant for a public audience and we’re always learning how to make these ideas more tangible,” says Susan Schwatzenberg, co-creator of the Toronto Observatory and director of the Fisher Bay Observatory, a similar project in San Francisco. “Every development and planning meeting should have a little observatory to help people understand that place and the larger issues.”

The observatory, then, is kind of like a library, but for urban civics, and less antagonistic than public meetings often are. And a fun one, too. There are tools to look at clouds, trees, a sound archive, artifacts collected around the neighbourhood, and even a mobile observatory cart that is taken out along the rail path on group walks to poke around with and essentially be nosy. “I would characterize this whole enterprise as an invitation to wonder,” says Wolff.

In some ways the observatory is akin to the City of Mississauga’s smart city initiative. “Smart City” is a term that has come to mean everything and nothing at the same time, a catch-all for technological innovation, but the focus in Mississauga is on giving residents the information they need to better know their city through open data portals, Wi-Fi points and even some whimsy in a “Centre for Civic Curiosity.” Some of it is lofty, but teaching civics always is.

The observatory is part of the Toronto Biennale of Art, a series of free exhibitions at nice locations in Toronto and Mississauga running until June 5. The Perth Avenue site includes a number of other installations that engage with our landscape and ecosystem too.

If you need a reason to explore your city, use the Biennale and the journey in between locations to look at it more closely.

This project is really about helping people to understand their own place in their ecosystem.

JANE WOLFF CO-CREATOR OF TORONTO LANDSCAPE OBSERVATORY