Key Phrases Expanded (WIP)

Zone Gate

Sharing its typology with historic city gates, Zone Gates are mediators between an inside and an outside. They are a waypoint in which goods and/or people are speculated coming both in and out. These gates follow regional lines that may be physically suggested or defined by zoning regulation.The gate consists of a gateway but also a small tower, these queues are lifted from Canada’s Ramparts of Quebec City. The Zone gate must not only account for the transferring of solid goods but also that of data based commodities entering the country and zone through these choke points.

Edge Friction

The meeting places of multiple conditions, particularly those that carry existing controversy. This controversy or drama can be manifested in physical, regulatory, political, or non secular ways. These meeting points sometimes organically form new conditions with unique framing, opportunities for novel relationships and new systems/nodes. Compounding locations of edge friction with exponential adjacencies can call to question ownership and adjacency, conception of the thing, and forecasted trajectories.

Customs House

An agency or office established to monitor and regulate importing and exporting, usually at the international level. Usually appearing as singular buildings these points amassed great power and influence. Often located near major entry ways including ports and train depots goods and traders often passed through or by the house en route to local delivery. Today these manifest themselves through security checkpoints for international goods and are controlled by border agencies with no little regard for downstream effects of the goods that come through.

Measured Growth

The Toronto metropolitan area and the Great Lakes Megaregion are projected to expand massively over the next 20 years. Land scaricity is already a looming reality in Mississauga, Ontario with housing costs balooning in recent years. Established as recently as 1974 the city has become a hub for Toronto’s transnational business dealings and underregulated trade. As its business prospects grow, the industrialized trade zone is consuming land at alarming rates. If these trends of population and trade growth continue will the outcome destroy all locality of Southern Ontario? 

Communal Statecraft

Statecraft is defined by Keller Easterling as the work of the state to build infrastructures and systems in order to benefit itself. These works include built interventions and regulations, both of which have few avenues of input from communities and are mandated at national levels. Questioning how these outcomes might differ under this input is the heart of local voices and regional interest. Using these inputs to reconnect international systems of finance and resource allocation is the organizational framework for a new state(less)craft.