GEOG 3420C
Research Design and Field Research
York University, Department of Geography
Fall Term 2005-06
Course Director: Amy Lavender Harris (alharris@yorku.ca)
What Time is this Place?
York
University Geographers Exploring Toronto's Kensington Market
 (Oxford
Fruit, Augusta Ave. at Baldwin)
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What Time Is This Place? (MIT Press, 1972) is the title of planner and architect Kevin Lynch's illuminating book on urban change. In it, Lynch observes,
Change and
recurrence are
the sense of being alive -- things gone by, death to come, and present
awareness. The world around us, so much of it our own creation, shifts
continually and often bewilders us. We reach out to that world to
preserve or to change it and so to make visible our desire. (from the
Introduction)
As people who dwell -- and as geographers -- we stand amid change, are change. We live, think, work, play, create, and destroy. We leave our marks upon the landscape: monuments to moments we have tried to fix in place, monuments which are perpetually destroyed and recreated, monuments to new and passing moments. A paradox. The poet Mark Strand writes,
They are back,
the angry
poets. But look! They have come with hammers and little buckets, and
they are knocking off pieces of The Monument to study and use in the
making of their own small tombs. (from "The Monument")
Toronto's Kensington Market may be seen as a monument. But whose monument? To what? And to what moment? In the lexicon of the social sciences, Kensington Market is a 'contested space', strained by competing visions, narratives, and histories. Kensington Market has been the subject of numerous studies, research projects, City plans, and social, political, and architectural experiments. Yet the monument itself -- the Market -- builds and unbuilds and rebuilds itself, and only the studies remain fixed in place as the visible manifestations of our desire.
In GEOG 3420C, students will encounter Kensington Market, in part by asking Kevin Lynch's question, "What time is this place?" 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. Students will devise individual research programs around particular questions that interest them. These questions may be explored using historical, cultural, ethnographic, demographic, environmental, economic, political, sociological, or other approaches suitable to geography research.
Research Involving Human Participants
(painted billboards on Kensington Ave.)