The neighbourhoods were chosen somewhat randomly for their spatial topographies (market, two towns, garden, village, and park) and as indices of urban regeneration. Neighbourhoods allow insight into the ways a city invents a history that never was or recovers social traumas connected to global movements and political cosmopolitanism. In Toronto, as in all cities, neighbourhoods provide a map through which strangers or tourists will orient themselves, seek out and interpret scenes of everyday life and night life. Most of all though, neighbourhoods are places where people dwell. Researchers on this project began with an empirical kernel - a ghost story, a social ritual, a poem, a building provide the marks of this dwelling. In the history of a place, the practises and traces that make up local identities coalesce into larger threads that are not only global in character but also unique in the comforts and thrills they portend and in the narratives they discharge.

These digital environments, which begin with history and the ethnographic encounter, are inherently dialectical and performative. They originate through creative biographies of place, beginning with the premise that all neighbourhoods come to their identities through a founding narrative of conflict. The research is interdisciplinary and energized by aesthetics in a form that is open and exploratory. The heterogeneous questions occasioned by a neighbourhood converge in the imaginative interpretive practises (of city dwellers, urban researchers and readers) that mirror an experience of locality in the city.

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