An aerial view of one of the temporary shafts used to excavate Enwave's chilled water distribution tunnels.
For most of the second half of the last decade, the view from many of the condos and offices near Bay and College Streets in Toronto included the tantalizing hole depicted above. Approximately 15 m in diameter, this access shaft was nearly invisible at ground level, hidden as it was behind shrouded construction fencing and safety/reinforcing structures around the hole itself. A few photographs taken from the surrounding buildings eventually showed up online, but the fact that this large-scale, multi-leveled excavation project (and its three other construction shafts) went almost entirely unremarked on for five or six years is surprising. Read More
A colleague stands knee-deep in the (new) Garrison Creek Sewer, where it passes beneath the curve of College Street and snakes southwest towards Fred Hamilton Park. This section of sewer was likely installed c. 1912, and shows the progression towards concrete construction.
It was a great privilege to find our way into Garrison Creek, Toronto's most legendary lost river, which lives on today as one of its most awe-inspiring sewer systems. Draining a wide swath of the city's old west end, the network of sewers that has been constructed since 1884 largely mirrors the surface watershed obliterated as development marched west and north and the creek became a hindrance, nuisance and health threat to urban living. Beneath the streets and parks, the creek still lives in glorious tunnels of brick and concrete, forgotten yes, but never removed entirely. Read More
An incident during the G20 Summit in Toronto was universally reported in the media as involving the city's sewer system, when it actually appears to have involved the little-known distribution tunnels for Enwave's Deep Lake Water Cooling system. While media reports trumpeted this story as another instance of "infrastructure vulnerability" and relished the spectre of "anarchists in the sewers," I question the idea that this infrastructure presents a physical vulnerability, and more importantly I argue that the incident highlights the failure of physical service providers' reliance on secrecy and obscurity to maintain the security of their infrastructure. Instead, in this piece I want to begin to advance an argument that openness about our urban infrastructure is a key prerequisite for its security. Read More
As the result of a collaboration with Alphabet City, limited editions of three photographs are now available as 16.5x11" prints from Circuit Gallery, a gallery and printer based in Toronto. Read More
Welcome to the new Vanishing Point. Renovating this website has been months in the making, and it is great to have it finally accomplished. I hope that this new platform will now serve to facilitate much more frequent publishing on my part, and a better experience for readers. There are obviously some things missing at the moment, which I discuss in more detail elsewhere; for now my priority (apart from completing an unrelated thesis) is to get into the habit of publishing new feature articles and commentaries on a regular basis. Read More
