[URBAN NOTE] Yorkdale
Oct. 30th, 2005 02:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldI and two other party attendants were kindly driven back by two friends from Queen's and dropped off at Yorkdale. Yorkdale, for those of you who aren't familiar with Toronto's geography, is a vast shopping mall legendary for the sheer density of consumer attractions. Not only does it have kilometres of corridor lined by the expected selection of clothing stores, entertainment outlets, food shoppes and other mall accoutrements, but it provides its visitors with access to most anything they can imagine wanting: an Adult Learning Centre, an Apple Store, a SilverCity movie theatre, a Ford-Lincoln dealership, even a Holiday Inn.
Yorkdale's advertisements line the stations of the TTC, and I'd always wanted to visit. So, today I did. It was a short perambulation, a circuit of a single floor of the mall lasting barely half an hour, but interesting. From the outside, the Yorkdale Shopping Centre is a vast sprawling connection of prebuilt-box structures. From the inside, Yorkdale is bright and attractive, with skylights letting sunlight reach the wider white stone floors as all manner of people contentedly stroll about. Yorkdale might be a concentrated nexus for consumerist evils, true, but if it is it is a decidedly attractive one.
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.
Yorkdale's advertisements line the stations of the TTC, and I'd always wanted to visit. So, today I did. It was a short perambulation, a circuit of a single floor of the mall lasting barely half an hour, but interesting. From the outside, the Yorkdale Shopping Centre is a vast sprawling connection of prebuilt-box structures. From the inside, Yorkdale is bright and attractive, with skylights letting sunlight reach the wider white stone floors as all manner of people contentedly stroll about. Yorkdale might be a concentrated nexus for consumerist evils, true, but if it is it is a decidedly attractive one.
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.
