Moving through Toronto’s PATH: Assembling private urban governance

Abstract

This paper explores Toronto’s urban PATH, a 30 km network of underground pedestrian tunnels and elevated walkways that connect shopping areas, residential towers, mass transit and downtown destinations. Both as a case and heuristic, this paper situates Toronto’s PATH as an assemblage of private urban governance forms, exploring emergent and evolving constellations of power and responsibility for governing city space that defy easy distinctions of ‘public’ or ‘private’. As an urban assemblage, the PATH comprises potential and actual entities and associations, and is an accumulation of encounters. Never a stable or static entity, the PATH and its governance, we argue, is provisional, revealing constantly evolving connections, alignments and political-economic potentialities. We contend the PATH serves as a palimpsest of mutating governing relations; a multiplicity of meanings, visions and encounters etched into the built environment. By focusing on public and private vestiges, wayfinding, and visibility, and private verticalising ventures, we highlight how practices, logics, processes, urban actors and their histories collide to form fragile, provisional urban alignments and visions.

摘要

本文探讨了多伦多市中心的 PATH 地下城系统，这是一个由连接购物区、住宅楼、公共交通和市中心目的地的地下人行隧道和高架走道组成的 30 公里网络。本文针对多伦多的 PATH 进行了案例启发式研究，将其视为私人城市治理形式的集合，探讨了管理城市空间的新兴的和不断演变的权力和责任组合，这些权力和责任组合对“公共”和“私人”的简单区分提出了挑战。作为一个城市集合体， PATH 由潜在的和实际的实体和团体组成，是遭遇的累积。PATH 及其治理从来不是一个稳定或静态的实体，而是临时的，揭示了不断变化的联系、联盟和政治经济潜力。我们认为 PATH 是变异治理关系的体现；大量意义、愿景和遭遇铭刻于建筑环境中。通过关注公共和私人遗迹、寻路和可见性以及私人垂直化冒险，我们强调实践、逻辑、流程、城市参与者及其历史如何相互碰撞，形成脆弱的、临时的城市联盟和愿景。