Jennifer Johnson believes waste disposal is important—spiritually speaking.
Raising her voice above the good-natured laughter of the crowd gathered at the North York Central Library last week, Johnson explained, “Because it has to do with stewardship, waste disposal has a profound, spiritual aspect.”
Johnson was one of 20-odd people at the third in a series of community consultations called Upper Toronto: Envisioning a New City—an art project described by its creator, Jacob Zimmer, as “a science-fiction civic-design proposal” that involves building a new city (Upper Toronto) on top of the current one (Lower Toronto.)
“It’s a terrible idea,” said Zimmer, director of the Junction-based Small Wooden Shoe theatre company. “But it’s a way of asking, ‘What if we could start over?’”
Discussing topics like policing and park space, the group, from teenagers to fiftysomethings, scribbled notes and sketched pictures of Upper Toronto. Zimmer plans to hold more consultations and, starting next year, the resulting notes will be taken to various experts—geographers, urban planners,and engineers—to figure out how Upper Toronto could work. But more pragmatically, Zimmer says, it’s about getting people to think about where they live.
“There are all those mysterious discussions that happen in back rooms,” he said of city planning in Toronto. “This is a way of publicly staging that process, which really affects everyone.”
