Interzone

2010-Ongoing. The Interzone is the ex-urban, but no longer rural, landscape on the periphery of large cities that is being transformed. This body of work uses Toronto as a case study and surrogate for studying the process of peripheral urbanization, globally. The distinction between urban and rural becomes blurred in a development pattern characterized by low density residential neighbourhoods, a well-developed highway network for trucking and commuters, and retail activity relegated to auto-accessible malls: a kind of rolling frontier.  A highly visible recent phenomenon is an infrastructure of warehouses and trucking services that serve global supply chains, ultimately to facilitate the delivery of e-commerce goods. These urban-peripheral forms are expanding across precious farmland. Interzone examines the six contiguous municipalities that make up the Greater Toronto Area, roughly 110 kilometres from west to east. Research is in collaboration with Professor Maria Cecília Loschiavo dos Santos.