Open Collections

Ackerley, Jon

The suburbs are made possible by sprawling systems of resource extraction, infrastructure, and shipping. The outputs of these systems are accumulated and assembled into recognizable symbols of suburban culture. But the industrial roots of suburbia are obscured by the separation between industry and other suburban typologies. Landscapes of production and landscapes of consumption are kept culturally and physically distant. Land-use mechanisms isolate industrial buildings to minimize their negative effects on surrounding communities. Changing economies distance traditional images of large-scale industry from the Canadian cultural consciousness. The result is a growing invisibility of industry and its role in suburban systems. This invisibility poses an existential threat; not only does it obscure the reality of suburban structures, but it also conceals the systematic devastation of the environment perpetrated by large-scale industrial activity. This thesis proposes a new typology - a community that merges industry and domesticity, melding their iconography together and making industrial systems visible. Here, we can learn what it means to live with industry, and how flattening landscapes of consumption and landscapes of productions can present new opportunities for suburbia. The result is Subindustria, a bio-mechanical community coming soon to a strip of land between a cement plant and a major highway.

Bowmanville (Clarington, Ont.)

Text

University of British Columbia. ARCH 549

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0413572

Applied Science, Faculty of; Architecture and Landscape Architecture (SALA), School of

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/