Linda Zhang uses new technologies to re-envision Toronto’s Chinatown. As development continues to threaten the neighbourhood, she urges city planners to take note
Architect Linda Zhang is using technology to bring Toronto nians into the architectural design process for protecting the city’s Chinatown . 'If they actually listened,' she says of the city, 'we can do it.'Growing up in Southwestern Ontario, between Kitchener, Windsor and London, architect Linda Zhang developed an affinity for Toronto ’s Chinatown at a young age.
It was here that she began applying her architecture skill set to her affinity for Toronto’s Chinatown, one of many Chinatowns across Canada that’s faced repeated displacement. Using new technologies such as virtual reality, 3-D printing and drones, Ms. Zhang has spent years creating real and virtual models of Chinatown – work that, amid continuing gentrification, she calls an act of resistance.
Diving into Toronto’s city archives, she learned more about the erasure experienced by an early Chinese settlement near Union Station, which the Great Fire of Toronto destroyed in 1904. Chinese Torontonians then moved west to a neighbourhood called The Ward, only to be displaced again by the construction of city hall to its current location around the intersection of Dundas and Spadina. Ms.
“’s work is so powerful both for reflecting the diversity of a community and for building it and making it stronger,” says Larissa Lai, an author and professor teaching classes in Asian Canadian studies at the University of Toronto, where she assigns“Good art projects help preserve Chinatowns by putting the spotlight on them and showing why they matter,” she says. “Really great art projects offer ideas and methods for the work not just of preservation but of growth and change.
Jessica Chen, city planner and co-founder of the JIA Foundation, an organization that protects and promotes the cultural heritage of Montreal’s Chinatown, commends the idea. “It’s very exciting to look at what Linda is doing,” Ms. Chen explains. She praises the notion of democratizing access to data and the ability to imagine what communities can look like. “Visualization is a very powerful tool,” Ms. Chen says.
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