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Abstract
Toronto’s Chinatown was born out of a form of resistance which paired infidelity to official definitions of Canadian citizenship (who was allowed to belong) with fidelity to its community members (who belonged). Historical representations have often been unfaithful to the Chinatown community, and architectural imagery has often tended to erase it from view entirely. In this essay, the authors explore Linda Zhang’s appropriation of architectural technologies (such as photogrammetry and pointcloud scanning) as a form of antidisplacement resistance to the ongoing and centuries-old erasure(s) of Toronto’s Chinatown. Her project, Chinatown 2050, uses speculative futurist 3D reconstructions and community storytelling to reimagine what Toronto’s Chinatowns might be like in the year 2050. Unfaithful to the present and past “official” demarcations of the neighborhood, it is a form of social organizing and imagination towards a more generative future. In countering technological acts of erasure, Zhang’s work illuminates the broader sociopolitical implications of technological choices and critiques the ways in which history often silences marginalized communities.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank Chiyi Tam and Ozayr Saloojee for their careful edits, insightful suggestions, and many generous conversations which helped to shape the final version of this text. We also wish to thank the Friends of Chinatown Toronto, the Toronto Chinatown Land Trust, and other Chinatown organizers across Turtle Island for their ongoing anti-displacement research and activism.
Reimagining Chinatown is indebted to countless dialogues within the Chinatown community in Toronto, across Canada, and abroad. The anthology first began as a speculative fiction writing workshop in partnership with Myseum of Toronto which took place virtually on April 25, 2020 with workshop facilitators Linda Zhang, Maxim Gertler-Jaffe, Tyler Fox, Biko Mandela Gray, Erica Allen-Kim, Morris Lum, Philip Poon, Howard Tam, Lexi Tsien, and Shellie Zhang. Many thanks to the incredible community authors who have engaged in the writing of these stories: Eva Chu, Helen Ngo, Amelia Gan, Michael Chong, Tiffany Lam, Razan Samara, Amy Yan, Eveline Lam, and Robert Tin. They have bought joy and generosity in a time when it was much needed.
The short documentary film entitled Chinatown 2050 was codirected and coproduced by Linda Zhang and Maxim Gertler-Jaffe. Raw 3D material was gathered through drone 3D scanning Toronto’s Chinatown East and West in 2020 by Linda Zhang, Jimmy Tran, and Amy Yan with post-processing by Reese Young, Amy Yan, and Georgia Barrington. Virtual worlds were created in Unreal Engine by Linda Zhang, Reese Young, Margarita Yushina, and Meimei Yang in collaboration with Maxim Gertler-Jaffe and Peter Sealy. A soundscape was composed for each story by respectfulchild.
Notes
1 Statement by Mr. Manthorpe to a meeting between representatives of the Chinese Community and City officials held at Kwong Chow, 126 Elizabeth Street on October 4, 1962. City of Toronto Archives Reference No: 02.15.04.
2 Conditions of Competition: City Hall and Square: Toronto, Canada (1957), Part II.1.
3 William J. Collins and Katharine L. Shester, “Slum Clearance and Urban Renewal in the United States,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 5:1 (2013): 239–73.
4 Valerie Hauch, “Once Upon a City: The First Chinatown Offered a Home in a Hostile Time,” Toronto Star, April 27, 2017, https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/once-upon-a-city-the-first-chinatown-offered-a-home-in-a-hostile-time/article_0ca6dfaf-31f3-5ce2-9a3d-0e5ed11f77fb.html.
5 The 1947 repeal only allowed for family reunification; at that time, only 2055 Chinese in Canada held Canadian citizenship and were eligible to sponsor their families. Thus immigration reform was slow and was truly merit- (as opposed to race-) based with the Immigration Act of 1967. See Arlene Chan, The Chinese in Toronto from 1878: From Outside to Inside the Circle (Toronto, Dundurn National Heritage Toronto, 2011), 97–126, and Kathryn Mannie, “The Rise and Fall of Chinatown: The Hidden History of Displacement You Were Never Told,” Global News, May 26, 2022, https://globalnews.ca/news/8793341/chinatown-history-toronto-vancouver-montreal-canada/.
6 The popular success of Chinatown’s restaurants, which served a mixed clientele of Chinese and Western patrons, testifies to the community’s resourcefulness and economic viability. For example, the Lichee Garden Restaurant and Club (1948–83) was built by Harry Lem on a vacant lot he purchased on Elizabeth St. It served up to 3000 customers until 5 a.m. daily. See “Toronto’s Old Chinatown: Restaurants/Lichee Garden,” Counter Culture Network: Exploring the Chinese Shopkeeping Diaspora, accessed November 10, 2023, http://countercultures.net/design/portfolio-item/torontos-old-chinatown-restaurants-lichee-garden/#toggle-id-7.
7 Alderman Horace Brown, chairman of Toronto’s Buildings and Development Committee, believed that Chinatown encouraged the development of a ghetto. See David Chuenyan Lai, Chinatowns: Towns within Cities in Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1988), 147.
8 Margaret Daly, “Why Toronto’s Chinese Insist We Must Retain a Chinatown: Our Colorful but Rundown Chinatown is Now Threatened by Downtown Redevelopment. The Chinese Community Is Ready to Tear It Down and Create ‘A Little Hong Kong,” Toronto Star, March 8, 1969, 11.
9 On the erasure of Canadian Chinatowns as a form of wish fulfilment, see Karen Cho, Big Fight in Little Chinatown (Montréal, eyesteelfilm, 2022), film.
10 Lai, Chinatowns, 147.
11 Lai, Chinatowns, 146. By 1969, H. Keith Limited realty company alone had assembled a portfolio of properties valued at over a million dollars, comprising 70 percent of Chinatown’s business section. See Hartley Steward, “Farewell to Chinatown: Quietly, as They Always Work, the Gnomes of Zurich Bought It Up. Progress,” Toronto Life (1969): 42–78.
12 The Toronto Chinatown Land Trust’s preliminary research findings for their study entitled “Who Owns Chinatown?” has uncovered—through property ownership mapping, field studies, and tenant surveys—that an alarming number of corporate land assemblies already exist, with the largest holding being nine properties (all held by different shell corporations, but traceable to the same matching operating address).
13 On the demolition of Bronzeville to make way for the expanded IIT campus, see Daniel Bluestone, “Chicago’s Mecca Flat Blues,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 57:4 (1998): 382–403, and Hannah Steinkopf-Frank, “Rediscovering Mecca Flats, a Legendary Chicago Apartment Building,” Atlas Obscura, November 8, 2018, https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/history-of-mecca-flats-in-chicago.
14 On Baldus’s manipulation of images to produce dégagement, see Barry Bergdoll, “A Matter of Time: Architects and Photographers in Second Empire France,” in Malcolm Daniel, ed., The Photographs of Édouard Baldus (Montréal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1994), 111.
15 Le Corbusier, Aircraft (Paris, Adam Biro, 1987), 12.
16 Lucia Allais has critiqued the WWII Allied military claims to have spared historic monuments in their bombing raids over Germany. Not only did such claims rest upon a theoretical degree of bombing accuracy not found in practice, but the whole concept was a form of dégagement on a horrific scale; whole neighbourhoods were to be annihilated, leaving only a scattering of cathedrals and other monuments. See Lucia Allais, Designs of Destruction: The Making of Monuments in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).
A recent essay by Dalal Musaed Alsayer explores the use of three representation techniques (aerial photography, mapping, photography) to construct an idea of the Saudi Arabian desert as “empty” in the service of mineral exploitation. See Dalal Musaed Alsayer, “Visualizing the Desert: Karl S. Twitchell and the Environmental Imaginaries of the Saudi Arabian Desert, 1936–48,” Journal of Architectural Education 77:2 (2023), 226–36.
17 Anthony Vidler, “Photourbanism: Planning the City from Above and from Below,” in The Scenes of the Street and Other Essays (New York: Monacelli, 2011), 317.
18 Friends of Chinatown Toronto, Community Power for Anti-Displacement: An Inclusive Future for Downtown Chinatown (Toronto, 2020), 28.
19 Similar associations commonly exist in many other marginalized communities as Rotational Savings and Credit Associations (ROSCAs or Susu in Afro-Caribbean communities). Originally intended for small-scale community financing, in Chinatown these associations funded mortgage down payments and provided business startup funds until they were made illegal in Ontario.
20 Zhang is a certified Drone Pilot–Advanced Operations by Transport Canada. Transport Canada and drone law in Canada use “drone” as an umbrella term to encapsulate unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), flying mini robots, and remotely piloted aerial systems (RPAS). The Federal Aviation Administration of the United State also uses the term “drone.” However, the United States Air Force uses the terms Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) or UAV when referring to aircraft that are part of a UAS (Unmanned Aerial System).
21 Zhang spent three months at the Toronto City Archives, digitizing all Chinatown related documents that could be found. They were placed in a now defunct open-access VR platform and organized by neighborhood.
22 Aerial photography can be traced to mid-nineteenth century hot air balloons. Since the 1960s and ‘70s, GIS and LiDAR remote sensing have been conducted primarily from satellites and even airplanes without physical direct contact. Only since around the year 2000 have civilian UAVs allowed for high resolution aerial photographs on demand. These were originally created with high-resolution cameras and sensors for military intelligence gathering and surveillance. Pix4D was founded in 2011 as a spinoff from the EPFL Computer Vision Lab. It was initially created for land surveying, urban planning, and agriculture with output data as orthomosaics, digital surface models (DSMs), and 3D point clouds.
23 For example, a digital scan of Notre-Dame de Paris by Andrew Tallon, an art historian, and Paul Blaer, a computer scientist, has proved useful for the burnt cathedral’s restoration. Likewise, a 3D scan of the arch of Septimius Severus in Palmyra, Syria documented this monument from classical antiquity prior to its destruction by ISIS in 2015.
24 When removing and erasing data points, Pix 4D uses the neutral language of “disabling” or “recycling,” masking the violent potential these acts contain. Pix 4D Documentation, “Manual—Support—PIX4D,” accessed July 31, 2023, https://support.pix4d.com/hc/en-us/sections/360003718992-Manual.
25 Laura Harjo, Spiral to the Stars: Mvskoke Tools of Futurity (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2019).
26 The architecture that defines Chinatowns across Canada and the United States today remains a distinctly North American interpretation of Chinese architectural motifs through which Chinese-Americans and Chinese-Canadians strategically self-orientalized. Facing displacement in post-earthquake San Francisco in 1906, Chinese communities deliberately promoted Chinatown as a “tourist mecca, in hopes that its improved image would help ameliorate the relationship with the community at large.” Philip Choy, San Francisco Chinatown: A Guide to Its History and Architecture (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2012).
See also Mae N. Ngai, “Transnationalism and the Transformation of the ‘Other’: Responses to the Presidential Address,” American Quarterly 57, n. 1 (2005): 63.
27 Following the 1906 earthquake, San Francisco’s Chinatown was rebuilt following the caricatural example of the “Chinese Village and Theatre” at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which had been funded by Chinese Americans. See Nick Kolakowski, “Earth Dragon Trembled: San Francisco’s Chinatown and the Great Earthquake of 1906,” Medium, February 6, 2019, https://medium.com/@nkolakowski/earth-dragon-trembled-san-franciscos-chinatown-and-the-great-earthquake-of-1906-2f452c1088c2, and Yuki Ooi, “‘China’ on Display at the Chicago’s World’s Fair of 1893: Faces of Modernization in the Contact Zone,” in Friederike Assandri and Dora Martins, From Early Tang Court Debates to China’s Peaceful Rise (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 58.
28 Harjo, Spiral to the Stars.
29 Chinatown 2050 Speculative Fiction workshops drew inspiration from Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown’s edited anthology Octavia’s Brood. Imarisha and brown consider “all organizing is science fiction” and that acts of futurity, or the imagination of more generative worlds we have not yet experienced, are a form of organizing. In this sense, brown considers science fiction as an “exploring ground,” providing “the opportunity to play with different outcomes and strategies before we have to deal with the real-world costs.” Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown, eds., Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2015), 279.
30 Photogrammetry cannot accurately compute images taken in low light.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Peter Sealy
Peter Sealy is a historian who studies the ways in which architects constructively engage with reality through indexical media such as photography. Current projects include a history of photography’s remediations and a study of the Berlin Wall as it appears in films. He is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto.
Linda Zhang
Linda Zhang is an architect, drone pilot, and educator whose scholarly and artistic practice studies memory, cultural heritage, and community identity as they are indexically embodied in matter, emergent technologies (including VR, AR, and AI), and material processes. She is an assistant professor at the University of Waterloo.