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rfmcdonaldActs of Minor Treason's Andrew Barton recently took a telling photo of the Yorkdale Mall, easily one of Toronto's largest malls and the only one--apart from the Scarborough Town Centre--with its own subway/rapid transit stop.
When I first saw Yorkdale in 2005, my impression was that it was an arcology, as I wrote.
Thinking back, the Yorkdale Mall strikes me retrofuturistic, somewhat like the Scarborough Rapid Transit line that was supposed to be a great technological leap forward but turned out to be an orphan technology physically separated from the main subway lines and facing inevitable decline. That's how it struck me in 2006, at least. Yorkdale bleak north-end surroundings show that it hasn't managed to boost a surrounding community and itself has only a ephemeral existence as a human community, as Andrew's photo shows; the Scarborough Rapid Transit is more often a joke than anything else.
Isn't it funny how our futures never work out?
When it's open, Yorkdale Shopping Centre up in North York likely does more business than almost any other mall in Metro Toronto. Negotiating the crowd becomes as much of an art as a science, dodging this way and that around window browsers and slow ramblers, and it only gets more complicated when you're walking against the flow.
Things are different in the mornings. This photo was taken at 9:06 AM on a Saturday morning, about half an hour or so before the majority of the stores were to open for business. That early in the morning, Yorkdale's shopping promenades are as empty as sidewalks in Mississauga. A quiet mall is a strange thing, an almost unnatural thing, an echoing temple of capitalism with no one bowed to pray.
When I first saw Yorkdale in 2005, my impression was that it was an arcology, as I wrote.
This vast complex is an integral destination and point of origin in the Greater Toronto Area's transit network. Not only is the mall physically connected to the Yorkdale TTC station, but it is one of the main nodes of the GO Transit network inside Toronto and is directly accessible from Highway 401. Yorkdale was built in 1964 near the height of Canada's post-Second World War economic boom, that miraculous event girded by free trade and high technology. It reflects those times and that ethos well, its gleaming body integrated with Toronto and self-contained in a way almost consistent with the arcologies of Paolo Soleri's arcologies. Technology--things that we had, or would have--would soon suffice to detach humanity from nature, whether in Arcosanti in the Arizona desert, or under the surface of the Earth's oceans soon, or in an imaginably realizable future embedded on the basalt of Oceanus Procellarum above our heads or Mars' low-lying desert of Utopia Planitia. Technology's triumph was inevitable.
It turned out that technology wasn't good enough for that, or at least that our technology wasn't up to the task: Biosphere 2 failed. More to the point, on a much smaller scale complexes like the Charlotettown Mall have contributed to the sterilization of my hometown's downtown. Future generations of engineers will likely work on these problems, and on many others that we've not yet begun to imagine. Perhaps the technological project of Yorkdale will come to a full satisfying conclusion one of these days. In the time being, there's still something that has to be said about the experiencing of strolling down a quiet side street lined with small shops and homes, the yellow maple leaves of fall crunching under your feet.
Thinking back, the Yorkdale Mall strikes me retrofuturistic, somewhat like the Scarborough Rapid Transit line that was supposed to be a great technological leap forward but turned out to be an orphan technology physically separated from the main subway lines and facing inevitable decline. That's how it struck me in 2006, at least. Yorkdale bleak north-end surroundings show that it hasn't managed to boost a surrounding community and itself has only a ephemeral existence as a human community, as Andrew's photo shows; the Scarborough Rapid Transit is more often a joke than anything else.
Isn't it funny how our futures never work out?
