Department of Geography
Faculty of Arts
York University

GEOG 3420 3.0 Section B
Research Design and Field Studies:
Exploring Toronto's Kensington Market

Course Director: Amy Lavender Harris (email)

Fall Term 2007

Exploring Toronto's Kensington Market

(Last updated 30 November 2007)

News:
2007 Course syllabus is available here.

(Oxford Fruit, August Avenue at Baldwin)

Located just west of downtown Toronto and bordered by Dundas, College, Spadina and Bathurst Streets, Kensington Market is an eclectic, diverse neighbourhood of vintage shops, Victorian rowhouses, synagogues, grocers, cheese shops and multicultural restaurants. Since the nineteenth century the district has been home to successive waves of British, Jewish, Portuguese, West Indian, Asian and other immigrant groups. It has been called a slum, a spectacle, and a cultural microcosm of Toronto. In 2006 the federal government named Kensington Market a National Historic site.

The Market has inspired at least two television series (King of Kensington and Twitch City) and is referenced frequently in Toronto literature. A character in Sarah Dearing’s Kensington Market novel Courage My Love (Stoddart, 2001) observes,

[u]nderneath, like all markets, it possessed an ancient rhythmic hum created from trade, community, basic needs met, marriages -- or at least couplings -- made. This same music turns into white noise at a modern mall, some special secret element removed by its enclosure or the attempts at convenience.

In her Kensington Market short story, “At the Lisbon Plate”, Dionne Brand writes,

This is my refuge. It is where I can be invisible or, if not invisible, at least drunk. .... The smell from the market doesn't bother me. I've been here before, me and the old lady. We know the price of things. Which is why I feel safe in telling stories here. (from Sans Souci and Other Stories, 1989)

In Emerald City: Toronto Visited (Viking, 1994) John Bentley Mays describes how Kensington Market exemplifies architectural historian Spiro Kostof's portrayal of city streets as improvised spectacles where encounters are unscheduled and excitement always unrehearsed, places where memory meets desire, where it is possible to be at once invisible and archetypal. In The Robber Bride, Margaret Atwood describes Kensington Market's "music from elsewhere":

It's soothing to be among strangers, who require from her no efforts, no explanations, no reassurances. She likes the mix on the streets here, the mixed skins. Chinatown has taken over mostly, though there are still some Jewish delicatessens, and, further up and off to the side, the Portuguese and West Indian shops of the Kensington Market. Rome in the second century, Constantinople in the tenth, Vienna in the nineteenth. A crossroads. Those from other countries look as if they're trying hard to forget something, those from here as if they're trying hard to remember. Or maybe it's the other way around. (McClelland & Stewart, 1993)

But there is, too, a tension here, between legacy and aspiration. If Kensington Market has long been a portal for those seeking to arrive, it is also a doorway they are relieved to exit. Mays writes,

To my knowledge, the residents of the Market today are almost all recent immigrants too poor to do otherwise, university students playing poor, and a handful of sophisticated urbanists who, for some reason, want to live among the Market's racket and odours."

And even these "sophisticated urbanists" who come slumming to Kensington Market seek to put their mark on it. Tourists of the Market’s counterculture, they leave lattes and lofts in their wake. Indeed, there is evidence that Kensington’s character is changing. In the late 1990s a satellite campus of George Brown College was converted into condominium lofts, and there has been controversy over corporate franchises (such as Nike and Loblaws) seeking to expand into the Market. At the same time, there have been media reports of increased drug trafficking and gang activity in the Market, and the underside to the Market’s vintage couture and condo conversions is a high poverty rate and visible challenges of homelessness.

In GEOG 3420, students will encounter Kensington Market as a field research site. In doing so, we will consider the changing desires which have made Kensington Market manifest in its history, culture, architecture, 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. You will have the opportunity to will devise an individual research program around particular questions that interest you. These questions may be explored using historical, cultural, ethnographic, demographic, environmental, economic, political, sociological, or other approaches suitable to geography research.

Course Materials and Information:

"Her Kensington Market had been ordered in an efficient separation of products, and she labelled the main roads, for simplified reference, as Fish Street, Clothes and Vegetable Avenues. How much easier life could be if all streets had such utilitarian names; a person would always know precisely what to expect from an address." (Sarah Dearing, Courage My Love; Stoddary, 2001)