Shorelines and other imagined spaces

It is easy to get deep in water’s metaphors: porosity, clarity, flow, murkiness, its body, your body, the floodgates, thirst, immersion. It is easy because water tells us so much about the spaces we inhabit. We wade and get absorbed. We make and re-make shores. Coastal scientists call it hardening: the creation of shoreline barriers (bulkheads, seawalls, jetties) ostensibly to armour the shore and protect against erosion. The opposite (shorelines whose “soft” ecosystems remain) are called living shores.

Urban planners often speak of “connectivity”—a desirable network of urban resources, facilities, services, and communities that promotes economic growth, supports existing systems, and ideally, fosters climate resilience. But among planners and geographers, there is also a turn to understand connectivity in a more expanded sense—one that engages multi-species entanglements and relationships to worlds beyond and within city space,11Housten et al., “Make kin, not cities! Multispecies entanglements and ‘becoming world’ in planning theory,” Planning Theory 17, no. 2 (2018): 190–212. and the shore is a perfect place to apprehend this.

So what can the history of our human-made shores tell us about the divides between our imaginative capacities and the anthropocentrism of urban development conversations?

As artist Dylan Miner describes, the lake is a place where “different peoples/ecologies/worlds” meet, and the shore can be a site of sustenance, movement, contact, encounter, tension, trade, occupation, communion, violence, writing, and re-writing.22These complex histories of the water’s edges are explored throughout the Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea project, including in Dylan Miner’s installation Agamiing – Niwaabaandaan miinawaa Nimiwkendaan // At the Lake—I see and remember, in Natasha Naveau’s Shkakamikwe Kido: It Comes Through the Land (SDUK 02, p. 14), and Macarena Gomez-Barris’s “Colonialism at the Sea Edge of Extinction” in The Work of Wind: Land, eds. Christine Shaw and Etienne Turpin (Berlin: K. Verlag, 2018). Outside of this project, also see Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Big Water” in This Accident of Being Lost (Toronto: House of Anansi, 2017). Shores are also spaces of invention, hubris, imagination, and problem-solving. In particular, human-made shores can teach us about the inseparability of human and non-human worlds—their resistance to segmentation and control demonstrates connectivity at its deepest.

For example, the shores of Lake Ontario have seen innumerable coasts reconfigured for the benefit of trade, transportation, recreation, and waste disposal over the last 200 years (a corollary to the colonization and dispossession of Indigenous lands beginning in the 1600s in the region): the creation of the landfill park which eventually became Toronto’s Leslie Street Spit; the infilling of Toronto Harbour to create Lakeshore Boulevard in the 1920s; and a fantastical (and only partially realized) vision for Ontario Place and a huddle of sustainable, utopian, human-made islands proposed by architect Eb Zeidler in the 1970s.33For more on Eb Zeidler’s vision and the influence the Zeidler family on Toronto’s architectural identity, see Nicole Cohen, “The Zeidler Effect: How One Family Transformed Toronto,” in uTOpia: Towards and New Toronto, ed. Alana Wilcox and Jason McBride (Toronto: Coachhouse, 2005).

For nearly a century, the harvesting of shale slabs from the Lake’s rocky shores supported much of the GTHA’s stone infrastructure, with Port Credit dominating the stonehooking industry.44“The Stonehookers of Lake Ontario,” City of Oakville, https://www.oakville.ca/culturerec/bronteharbour-essay5.html. But the removal of these natural waves breakers resulted in floods in Port Credit, drastic erosion at the base of the Scarborough Bluffs, and sudden threats to shoreline nooks and weeds serving as nurseries for fish.

Compare this to the contemporary, global extraction of riverbed sand for the production of concrete, window glass, and other silica-based structures from which our housing developments, bridges, universities, and malls are built. As journalist Vince Beiser has documented, a massive industry has blossomed around riverbed sand, which is used to reshape shoreline borders, shore up new human-made islands, and birth massive concrete infrastructure projects. Despite the crisis-level overconsumption of sand, humans continue to harvest these shallow beds in search of structural aggregate for strong concrete—all in the service of reimagining their urban environments.55Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain (New York: Penguin Random House, 2018).

The shore’s traces mark the connective tissue running through all built environments (beyond the fundamental waters that sustain human life, whether the resources be wave-breaking shales or riverbed-mined sands, or the many fuels, labours, and energies that enable urban development). Acknowledging the necessity of new infrastructure and new configurations of public space is integral to the work of restructuring our urban spaces more equitably, sustainably, and collaboratively.

A more current, localized example of the complexities of imagination, urban planning, and the creation of human-made shores is now emerging just east of the former stonehooking hub of Port Credit: the Lakeview Generating Station, a coal-fired power plant in operation from 1962 to 2005. Led by the Lakeview Ratepayer’s Association, the collective reimagining of this shoreline brownfield space has taken shape in the years since.66Citizen and government action has been key to this process, including significant advocacy by the late Jim Tovey, City Councillor and once head of the Lakeview Ratepayer’s Association. By 2017, Lakeview Community Partners Limited (a partnership of infrastructure contractors, homebuilders, and developers) had taken over the project and purchased the land, building on the existing plans and policy frameworks developed by community members and the City of Mississauga.77The 2018 Development Master Plan put forward by Lakeview Community Partners is available at https://lakeviewcommunitypartners.com/dl/Development_Masterplan.pdf.

This groundwork attests to a profound exercise in collective social and environmental imagination undertaken by citizens: envisioning better, connected public transit; increased walkability and bicycle infrastructure, with shopping, school, work, and cultural experiences not organized around automobility; support for public space and recreation; and a recognition of environmental remediation and conservation needs in the area.

The plan capitalizes on the desirability of lakefront access, offers links to the existing Waterfront Trail, proposes artificial canals and a recreational pond (closed systems not connected to the lake, but intending to create the illusion of being so), and aims to restore and naturalize Serson Creek on the eastern side of the development. Promises including the development of a “Blue and Green Network” and an “Innovation Corridor” alongside the Credit Valley Conservation-supported Jim Tovey Lakeview Conservation Area are geared to solicit a particular brand of optimism—a seductive discourse of order and design promoting a kind of green urban utopia built on concepts of precision and functionality,88This approach to visualizing a segmented, hyper-functional urban utopia is not unique to the Lakeview project—for more on the aesthetic and rhetoric of developer plans, see Molly Sauter, “City Planning Heaven Sent,” e-flux, February 2019, https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/becoming-digital/248075/city-planning-heaven-sent. where nature, culture, business, school, and home each fit in their proper place.

But if connectivity is the goal, and the Lakeview Village Development Master Plan is a map for how humans will relate to the world around them, let’s also re-orient ourselves to consider how the non-human world will bear on us. In a plan based on the hyper-separation of designated “natural” spaces (e.g. conservation areas) and “public” space (e.g. ponds, canals, town squares), how do we recognize other forms of natural entanglement? Weeds, birds, pests, and bacteria, each with their own agency and entanglement within shoreline ecosystems, (those still “living,” and those surviving amidst “hardening”) will be inevitable co-habitators at Lakeview Village. In keeping with the imaginative capacities that have shaped existing visions for public transit, walkability, access, and climate resilience in Lakeview Village, there is also a need to acknowledge that this space attracts, impacts, and encroaches on non-human others—and will thus be affected by non-human logics.

Beyond a vision of the shoreline as a space of human control, if we are to imagine new urban futures, we have to open ourselves up to connectivities beyond the human.