What Time is this Place York University Geographers explore Torontos Kensington Market

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What Time is this Place?York University
Geographers explore Torontos Kensington Market

• GEOG 3420B
• Research Design and Field Research
• Department of Geography
• York University
• Fall Term 2005-2006

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• Part 1
• What Time is This Place?
• An Introduction to
• Kensington Market

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• Gradually her heart settles. It's soothing to be
  among strangers, who require from her no efforts,
  no explanations, no reassurances. She likes the
  mix on the streets here, the mixed skins.
  Chinatown has taken over mostly, though there are
  still some Jewish delicatessens, and, further up
  and off to the side, the Portuguese and West
  Indian shops of the Kensington Market. Rome in
  the second century, Constantinople in the tenth,
  Vienna in the nineteenth. A crossroads. Those
  from other countries look as it they're trying
  hard to forget something, those from here as if
  they're trying hard to remember. Or maybe it's
  the other way around. (From Margaret Atwood's
  The Robber Bride (1993, Toronto McClelland
  Stewart)

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Image credit Waldron H. Leard (Creative Commons
License)
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Image credit Laura Shefler (Creative Commons
License)
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• This is my refuge. It is where I can be
  invisible, or if not invisible, at least drunk.
  The smell from the market doesnt bother me. Ive
  been here before, me and the old lady. We know
  the price of things. Which is why I feel safe in
  telling stories here. (Dionne Brand, from At
  the Lisbon Plate)

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Image credit ReadMe1 (Creative Commons license)
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What Time is this Place?

• 1. Chronos
• Ordered, sequential, mechanical time
• Regulated by clocks and calendars
• The obedient cadence of marching feet
• The clinking of a hundred coffee spoons
• Time preserved in bottles, like so many pickled
  (fish) heads
  

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What Time is this Place?

• 2. Kairos
• A liquid aperture
• Organic, rhythmic, spiritual
• Gods time or natures time
• Seasons, the moon, rhythms of birth and death

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What Time is this Place?(Kevin Lynchs version)

• How does time inhabit a place?
• Social time (chronos?) subjective time
  (kairos?)
  
• Layered contrasts of persistence and change
  physical and behavioral evidence of transition
  the rate of change
  
• Cycles of noise and silence day and night
  weekdays and holidays seasons delivery and
  garbage cycles elections (and political
  regimes) cultures moving in and out of
  neighbourhoods economic shifts
  (gentrification?) architectural fashions
  (decades)
• The speed of movement walking, cycling, driving,
  hurrying to a destination or enjoying the
  journey
  

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Kevin Lynchs version contd.

• Patterns of personal activity waking, sleeping,
  venturing out all vary if you are homeless, a
  hooker, a housewife, a child, an orthodox Jew, a
  student, an employee, an entrepreneur
• Every part of the city makes manifest our wishes,
  fears, memories, and desires.
  
• Reciprocal relationship between urban form and
  behaviour
  
• Contested spaces

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A Short History of Kensington Market

• Architecture and street plan in Kensington Market
  dates to 1870s
  
• Originally (in the 1790s) a single tract of land
  owned by the Denison Family (English, Anglican)
  
• The character of Kensington began to change
  around 1900 as Jews and Italians began to occupy
  homes and establish businesses
  
• By the 1920s it was known as the Jewish Market
• After WWII, Kensington became home to broader
  groups of immigrants, especially Hungarians and
  Portuguese

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A Short History (continued)

• Immigrant groups added layers to Kensington
  colourfully painted houses, bright shops,
  livestock and poultry
  
• Market became a community for successive groups
  of new Canadians (e.g., Portuguese radio
  stations, Chinese societies)
  
• 1970s urban renewal efforts (Alexandria Park)
• Late 1970s Courage My Love
• 1982 City Council bans live farm animals
• 1990s counter-culture scenesters

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Kensington Market in the Citys Imagination

• TV series King of Kensington Twitch City
• Festivals (Festival of Lights, Pedestrian
  Sundays)
  
• Icons and iconography (Al Waxman, Tom Mihalik,
  Mel Lastman)
  
• Bricolage simulacrum
• microcosm

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What Time is this Place?
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What Time is this Place?
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What Time is this Place?
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What Time is this Place?
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What Time is this Place?
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What Time is this Place?
Image credit Andrzej Rotek (Creative Commons
license)
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What Time is this Place?
Image credit Dan Iggers (Creative Commons
license)
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Getting Ready to Visit Kensington Market
Image source www.backpackingtheplanet.com
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Source P.S. Kensington www.pskensington.ca
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Field Trip Planning

• See handout
• Date Next Friday September 22, 2006
• Meet in front of 193 August Avenue at 130 pm
  (this should give sufficient time to commute from
  York)
  
• Wear comfortable footwear dress for the
  weather.
  
• Bring paper and writing materials, camera if you
  wish, water
  
• Bring handouts and map!
• Prepare for the field by viewing websites listed
  on the handout.
  
• Following the trip, send your commentaries to Amy

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• Time for a break!

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• Part 2
• Preparing to do
• Field Research

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Expose yourself to
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What is research anyway?

• Research is a process of enquiry and discovery.
• In human geography, research is the process of
  trying to gain a better understanding of the
  relationship between humans, space, place and the
  environment and advance our understanding of our
  interactions with the world.
• Good research occurs at the intersection between
  theory, method, and practice.
  
• Research involves asking one or more questions
  and devising a plan for finding out answers
  (which may be provisional, varied, and even
  contradictory).
• Research should contribute to knowledge and
  understanding about something.
  
• Researchers seek variously to explore, describe,
  explain, and predict.
  
• (source Kitchin and Tate, 2000)

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Some elements of geographical field research

• at least part of what human geography entails
  is the actual practising of human geography
  the practical doing of it in the sense of
  leaving the office, the library and the lecture
  hall for the far less cozy real world beyond
  and, in seeking to encounter this world in all
  its complexity, to find out new things about the
  many peoples and places found there, to make
  sense of what may be going on in the lives of
  these peoples and places and, subsequently, to
  develop ways of representing their findings back
  to other audiences
• The field of geographical research is not only a
  physical location or domain, but also includes
  the social terrain, the encounter of people with
  their environment.
• (more)

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Elements continued

• Being there is a vital dimension of geographic
  research but at the same time raises questions
  of perspective the politics of being there
  issues of naming and claiming
• Geography researchers need to navigate access to
  spaces and cultures and acknowledge our own
  biases, preconceptions, prejudices, and
  limitations. There is no such thing as an
  omniscient, detached, objective researcher.
• Successful field work relies on the senses,
  especially developing our capacity to see and
  listen.
  
• Geographical knowledge is constructed and
  interpreted
  
• The questions you ask influence the answers you
  get
  
• (quoted, adapted, and expanded from Cloke et al,
  2004)

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Marshall and Rossmans Model of the Research
Cycle (1989, 1995)
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But

• In thinking about research, what I came to see
  was the enormous amount of pretentious ritual
  that students are made to wallow through before
  they can undertake imaginative inquiry about
  something they find intriguing. The problem is
  that no-one is allowed to say openly and honestly
  Well, what I really want to do is poke around in
  this area and see what I can find. Before you
  can do what you want to do, you will have to
  posture, pose and distort as you formalize and
  disguise your geographic curiosity in the great
  ritual of the Research Proposal. This document
  may have little to do with what you really want
  to accomplish, or the way you will actually go
  about it when your adviser or committee have been
  lulled into thinking that it is alright to
  unleash you.

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• When I first started to teach, one of the
  Great Figures of the day said, with
  characteristically unquestioned authority, that
  the purpose of writing research proposals, and
  holding doctoral examinations, is to give the
  student a good dose of humility. I cannot think
  of a more inappropriate or humanly disgusting
  attitude for a teacher to have, and I despised
  the man from that day on.
• (Peter Gould, Expose Yourself to Geographic
  Research, in Research in Human Geography
  Introductions and Investigations, ed. John Eyles,
  Basil Blackwell, 1988 11-27)

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What you really want to do is

• what you really want to do is observe
  carefully, closely, openly, and with as little
  prejudice as you can muster, and then describe,
  with insight, skill, and thoughtful imagination,
  the topic you have chosen. In the process, you
  hope that along the way all sorts of interesting
  things turn up that you could not possibly have
  anticipated. something not seen before emerges
  into the open clearing of our thinking. Something
  dawns on us, we say Oh, I see!
• Notice how we constantly use images of light
  whenever we try to express our own sense of
  coming-to-understand-something. We direct our
  thinking, which means we direct ourselves, like
  an illuminating beam to light up something that
  was there all along, only we did not see it
  before. In every science, and in all successful
  research, there are moments of sudden seeing when
  something that was concealed from us becomes
  unconcealed. Which is why aletheia for the Greeks
  was the word for truth, the a negating the Lethe,
  the dark underworld of concealment, to make truth
  un-concealment. (ibid)

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Navigating these murky waters

• Sure, theyre murk. But there are all kinds of
  interesting things swimming in these waters, and
  fascinating terrain at the bottom, and open
  landscapes waiting at the opposite shore.

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If Peter Gould is right, why do I still have to
do a research proposal?

• Gould objects to narrow, inflexible
  formalization. He does not object to planning.
  How can you have a eureka experience unless you
  have some idea about where to look?
• Remember, good research begins with good
  questions, a sense of disturbance or wonderment
  curiosity, a desire to account for or explain
  something.
• If geography field research amounts to a process
  of mapping, then a research proposal is a record
  of the initial exploration (the reconnaissance),
  and an equipment checklist accounting for the
  directions to be traveled in and the gear brought
  to help ensure success (or at least survival).
• This is why we will visit the field site,
  Kensington Market, before you write your
  proposal. And this is also why you will undertake
  some library research before you launch into your
  field work.

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Selected research topics from last year

• Comparing the pace of life in and outside of
  Kensington Market
  
• Portuguese identity represented in KMs cultural
  landscape
  
• Insiders and outsiders in Kensington Market
• An analysis of the meanings of retail signs in
  Kensington Market
  
• Commercial land use competition between store
  owners
  
• place legibility in Kensington Market
• The impacts of a brand name grocery store on
  Kensington Market
  
• East meets west Kensington Market compared to an
  eastern bazaar
  
• How fashion boutiques align with vintage shops to
  transform KMs retail landscape
  
• Comparing the lived experience of work in two
  kinds of fresh markets
  
• Graffiti as maps of identity in Kensington
  Market
  
• Café culture in Kensington Market
• Cultural demographic change in Kensington Market
• Gentrification in Kensington Market

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Image credit bbnttm (Creative Commons license)