The urban system we live in is very interesting: you feel the city is a whole and at the same it feels like shattered glass, mosaic combined out of million and one pieces. All the cities I lived in and went through, lacked one thing they are supposed to boast about: unity and wholeness.
The city is like a person: it has its own character (others admire him/her for this or despise), it has different traits (habitual patterns of behaviour, thought and emotion). It attracts certain types of people. The city can be in a really bad mood, it can stay depressed for decades– and it takes long time to heal city’s scars and memories.
Once I was working on “Urban Health in Toronto” photography project, for non profit organization– as element of promotion for them. I loved doing it: I had only vague title and I could put as much imagination and creativity of my own to interpret it. Multiculturalism, hipsters, social& economical gaps, architecture, landscape and design, people as they are: everything fits under term “urban health”.
Toronto is incredible city in the sense of multiculture: it is diverse, but every single culture is living within itself, isolated and separated.
I would never consider that they represent Toronto or vice versa, if you visit most of those ethnic neighborhoods, you’ll see: there is no even slightest hint that it is part of the city. Each lives its own life. It’s not bad, it’s not good: it just IS.
The instant I stumbled on that poster, I was bewildered. For me it represented my whole idea of city’s character, my vision of the city I live (or at least trying to): the way how vandalism shattered the glass along the image and the point where of reflections of Coca-Cola, TD Bank and image of Hindu Temple blended together (trust me, not even touched by photoshop).
It became sort of symbol of my own interpretation of urbanism: how multiculturalism, globalisation and urbanism blended together, reflected in each other and at the same time are separated.