Sympathetic Landscapes: An Aesthetics for the Leslie Street Spit

ABSTRACT by Alexander Chan

The Leslie Street Spit is a five kilometer rubble breakwater built along the eastern waterfront of Toronto during the mid-twentieth-century as an infrastructural add-on to the existing Port Lands Industrial District. Officially designated as the Outer Harbour Eastern Headland, the artificial peninsula was a lakefilling project made to realize the city’s ambitious desire for economic prosperity and world-class prestige by expanding its existing harbour facilities. Decades after the decline of Toronto’s shipping industry, the Leslie Spit is now recognized as an important local and international ecological resource within a region that has lost the majority of its natural wetland ecosystems to industrialization during the twentieth century. Unfortunately, the remarkable ecological revival of the Leslie Spit has led to the establishment of a pastoral wilderness whose aesthetic experience neutralizes headland’s inherent wildness. This treatment of the site distracts visitors from the origins of the headland as a lakefilled landscape while also obscuring the extensive managerial efforts currently required to preserve its emergent ecologies.

The thesis is a survey of the technical and ecological development of the Leslie Street Spit. Using this information, the thesis develops an aesthetic dimension that mediates the site’s socio-ecological conflict. The goal of the thesis is to form sympathetic relations with the mundane aspects of rubble waste, contamination and unwanted ecology even if these elements are potentially dangerous or unpleasant.

Supervisor:
Tracey Eve Winton

Committee Members:
Lola Sheppard, University of Waterloo
Anne Bordeleau, University of Waterloo

External Reader:
Jennifer Foster, York University

The Defence Examination will take place: Tuesday, May 28, 2013 2:00 PM ARC 2026