TORONTO, CANADA Super Streets: Emerging Collective Forms Within Toronto’s “Suburban Sprawl”

Dispersed urbanization in Toronto is not as shapeless as it seems. As with many cities in North America, the city’s original, colonial property grid structures a seemingly endless and amorphous urban expansion. And while this landscape of low-slung, privately owned, object buildings makes Toronto’s postwar suburbs seem “sprawled,” the urban periphery here is structured by a series of figural roads that defy the logic of its colonial private property system. These shapely roads cross the grid and bring together neighborhood subdivisions that would otherwise seem isolated. Toronto’s Super Streets produce a sense of collectivity within the cultures of private land-ownership that has come to define much of the North American suburban landscapes. Our exhibition includes a very big drawing of the Greater Toronto Area that foregrounds the relationship between its Super Streets and the region’s colonial property grid system. We will also show a series of stuffed figurines that provide caricatures of these figural roads, and a book which includes photographs, diagrams and design proposals about the possibility of collectivity within the private spaces of urban dispersal.