Toronto architect and urban researcher Paige Wen says that people often rely on landmarks to find their way around metropolises. In a recent article in the Toronto Spark, Wen notes that this is one of five elements identified by U.S. urban planner Kevin A. Lynch for reading a city and gaining a sense of belonging. In his 1981 book, A Theory of Good City Form, Lynch also linked this to paths, boundaries between areas, districts, and nodes.
However, Wen maintains that Toronto landmarks—such as the CN Tower or the Gooderham Building—often don’t work as location aids because of where they are situated.
“When you often ask somebody about how you would navigate your north-south or east-west location within the city, everybody subconsciously will say Yonge and Bloor,” Wen tells the Toronto Spark over Zoom. “It’s just two streets and of course, there is a subway line along it. And that’s probably why people use it as navigation.”
In fact, Wen refers to the bustling intersection of Yonge and Bloor streets as “The Invisible Cross of Toronto”. Wen elaborates on this in her four-part Toronto Spark series exploring the spatial history of these two major Toronto corridors.
“This cross is just like a mental, invisible structure that’s embedded in everybody’s mind,” Wen states.
This weekend at Harbourfront Centre, Toronto TAIWANfest will provide a large-scale visual representation of this in a free exhibition called Decoding Toronto: The Invisible Cross of Toronto. A corridor of panels featuring Bloor Street will intersect with another featuring Yonge Street in the West Corridor Garage Bays. It starts at noon on Saturday (August 29) and Sunday (August 30).
Exhibition reveals spatial history of Toronto
With this exhibition, Wen will turn that cross into something you can see.
“That shape is older than the subway, older than the streets, older than the city’s name,” the Toronto TAIWANfest website states. “It was never designed. It accreted, line by line, over two centuries, from an Indigenous trail, a colonial survey, a boundary that dissolved, and a subway that made the whole thing invisible. We have been living inside it ever since.”
Along each street display, Wen includes little stories explaining historical nodes. This includes information about where a waterway might have been and other elements about the landscape from bygone eras.
“Once you understand the story, the cross will have another meaning to it,” Wen says.
Her Toronto Spark series and the exhibition are part of Decoding Toronto. This Toronto-based cultural walking tour and storytelling project helps people understand their city through architecture, heritage, public space, migration, and local memory.
“Decoding Toronto is like finding a doorway that everybody experiences, like why is this street called Bay Street or why is this street called Simcoe,” Wen explains. “It’s like an element or a clue that everybody experiences all the time but you don’t really understand it. But once you understand it, you can’t unsee it.”
This, in turn, helps people feel more connected to the city. In its second year, Decoding Toronto began offering tours in Mandarin.
“Once you understand how to read the city, you kind of feel this sense of belonging,” Wen says. “And only then, you could start being less of a newcomer.”
From Tainan to Belgium to Toronto
Wen was raised inside the historic walls of the southern Taiwanese city of Tainan. After earning bachelor and master degrees in architecture at National Cheung Kung University in her hometown, she moved to Europe. There, she earned a masters in urbanism at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and a PhD in landscape and urban design at KU Leuven in Belgium.
She is the founder of Unfolding Works, which helps designers, institutions, and communities understand place—and build within it.
“I was always very fascinated about doing site analyzing,” Wen acknowledges. “That always contained understanding the historical layers or landscape layers or infrastructure layers.”
How these layers come together creates a spatial history. Wen adds that this is often strongly related to political history.
When Wen immigrated in 2015, she didn’t know a great deal about Canadian political and cultural history. And she feels that many newcomers to Toronto are in a similar situation. There are all sorts of place names, sometimes tied to historical or cultural figures, which are meaningless for those who didn’t grow up and attend school in southern Ontario.
“Decoding Toronto is like my personal journey about how I, as a newcomer, understand the city without this cultural context behind me,” she states.
Wen recognizes that history is difficult for people unless they’re really interested in the subject. But she feels that space is something that everybody shares and is more commonly understood.
“I’m not trying to make people a historian or an architect,” Wen emphasizes. “But once you see that space, you kind of understand the logic behind it.”
Exhibition details
Toronto TAIWANfest will present Decoding Toronto: The Invisible Cross of Toronto at Harbourfront Centre. This exhibition will be in the West Corridor Garage Bays from noon to 7 p.m. on Saturday (August 29) and noon to 6 p.m. on Sunday (August 30). Toronto TAIWANfest runs from August 28 to 30 at Harbourfront Centre.
The Toronto Spark is on Bluesky @torontospark.bsky.social.
