Tag: Sign

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City Life

History of Violence

Tow-Away Zone sign on a bent metal pole with tall buildings in the background.

One of the things the Black Lives Matter #BLM movement has tried to do is expand the meaning of racism. In the past, white people like me tried to exempt ourselves from responsibility by saying: “What, me racist? I haven’t got a racist bone in my body.” And, in a way, we were right if, by racist, you mean we don’t run around engaging in overt acts of racism.

The #BLM movement struggles to communicate the idea that racism is more than overt acts. It invites people who look like me to see beyond the obvious: to acknowledge that many institutions were designed from their outset to discriminate (and to commit racist acts on our behalf); to identify passive aggressive behaviours and microaggressions that neatly evade allegations of racism but commit such acts all the same; to own our failures to intervene when others do engage in overt acts of racism. People find it difficult to accept that simple omissions can be acts of racism too.

We can understand racism as a category of violence. If we look to violence generally, we find the same dynamic at play. It’s easy for most of us to avoid allegations of violent behaviour because we aren’t prone to engage in overt acts. I don’t physically abuse my wife. I don’t lose my temper and hit people when I don’t get my way. I don’t cut people off on the highway then get out of my car and threaten them with a baseball bat. So, no, I am not a violent person.

As with the #BLM movement, I get to avoid charges of violent behaviour only if I hold to a narrow definition of violence. But violence is more than overt acts. I can abuse my wife without laying a finger on her; it’s possible to engage in all sorts of manipulations that subtly wear her down. And I can do injury without ever striking a person; I can engage in implied threats or utter indirections that are nevertheless demeaning.

Further expanding my definition of violence, I see violence embedded in urban planning. For example, when infrastructure fails to accommodate increases in pedestrian and vehicular traffic, everyone grows frustrated and that frustration leaks out as anger. The people on the receiving end of that anger didn’t cause the frustration. They just happen to be convenient targets.

And when public services fail to meet the needs of the most vulnerable, not only does that do violence to those vulnerable people—the mentally ill, the homeless, the different—, it heightens the anxiety of everyone else and produces conditions ripe for moral panic: let’s round them up and warehouse them out of sight. This, too, is a form of violence and it implicates us all.

Then there is the violence implicit in our built environment. When we build in ways that fail to account for the human scale, we say in effect that people—all people—are incidental to the late modernist project. Concepts trump people. Ideologies transcend humans. Putin is not extraordinary. This kind of violence has been at work on us for decades.

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City Life

Psychic Readings: What Does Your Future Hold?

Man walking along sidewalk gazes back at sign advertising psychic readings.
What Does Your Future Hold? Sign on Yonge Street south of Bloor, Toronto

NASA has released a photograph of the black hole known as Sagittarius A* which spins at the centre of our galaxy. With a mass of only 4.3 million suns, it is relatively small for a supermassive black hole, especially when you consider that the black hole at the centre of the galaxy M87 has a mass of 6 billion suns. Strictly speaking, the photograph doesn’t show us the black hole since a black hole captures all information and releases nothing back to observers outside it; more properly, it’s a photograph of illuminated gas surrounding the black hole.

Whenever I read news stories like this, it sends my mind reeling, partly speculation, partly existential musing. Thankfully, neither of these tendencies need be limited by the fact that I know absolutely nothing about theoretical physics. In fact, my general ignorance probably makes the speculation more fun and free-wheeling.

What I do know is that the technical term for a black hole is singularity. Extreme gravity pulls matter to a single point in spacetime. Because we’re talking about spacetime and not just space, the extreme gravity also affects the flow of time. Observed from outside, as something approaches the singularity’s event horizon, time appears to slow. Beyond the event horizon (the boundary beyond which no information returns to outside observers), it’s impossible to say how time flows within the singularity. This is where speculation comes into play. Maybe time stops. Maybe time flows backwards. Maybe time flows randomly. Maybe we get time soup.

Another speculation that occurs to me: maybe we already know what happens inside a black hole because, in effect, that’s what our universe is. Like a black hole, the universe has a limit beyond which no information can escape. It’s limits appear to us dark and empty, not because there’s nothing there, but because whatever is there is unknowable. And if our universe is like a black hole, then maybe the flow of time in our universe is likewise fluid.

In his book, A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking wonders why time appears to move in only one direction. There doesn’t appear to be a reason why time can’t move backwards. An incidental consequence of Hawking’s observation is that the physical laws of our universe offer no reason why psychics shouldn’t be able to do what they claim they can do. This suggests a different kind of singularity: a convergence between theoretical physics and theoretical psychics.

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City Life

Pandemic Skating in Nathan Phillips Square

Skating in Toronto's Nathan Phillips Square

It’s interesting to compare public skating pre- and post-vaccine. Last year, people were skating before we had secured any vaccines. That meant that protocols were overly cautious. The city allowed only 25 people on the ice at a time while others waited in line behind a fence. When those 25 people had finished their skate, marshals directed them to a separate area where they could take off their skates. Only after the ice had been cleared did the marshals allow the next batch of 25 onto the ice. After the people in the changing area had left that space, the marshals went over and disinfected the benches. It was a slow process, and even though the city got to say that skating was open to the public, in practical terms, almost nobody got to skate.

This year, it’s different. We know that transmission happens almost exclusively by aerosols, so disinfecting benches is a waste of time. We also know that the risk of infection outdoors is low, so going maskless in wide open spaces isn’t such a big deal. As a result, people are moving more freely through Nathan Phillips Square this year. Even so, there are obvious signs that we are still in pandemic times. The band-aid in the final “O” of the Toronto sign reminds people to get vaccinated. A sign of the times?

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Street Photography

Signs of the Extinction Rebellion

Woman walks past a sign advertising retail space for a flagship store.

By the intersection of Buchanan & Sauchiehall, a large poster advertises a retail opportunity for a flagship store. Two women walk past, apparently unconcerned, one wearing headphones, the other staring at her smart phone. As a photographer, my primary interest lies in the fact that the pavement is wet and offers a nice reflection of the colours in the poster. It isn’t until later, much later, two and half years later to be precise, that I notice the Extinction Rebellion logo spray painted onto the poster.

Personally, I don’t like aggressive activism. I avoid confrontation and prefer reasoned debate. That may have more to do with my personality that with my view of the Extinction Rebellion’s tactics. However, I do feel a change within myself and wonder how long before I see aggressive activism as the only path forward. When debate turns to the livability of the planet and the future of my children well, then, it ceases to be a debate, doesn’t it?

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City Life

Think Before You Step Out

Sign on pole: "Think Before You Step Out."

I captured this image on Sauchiehall Street at its intersection with Renfield Street. Although Sauchiehall is pedestrian friendly, it still requires people to deal with vehicular traffic at intersections. Here, a visually challenged person waits to cross Renfield Street while a sign on the adjacent post states: “Think Before You Step Out.”

This is reminiscent of signage in my hometown, Toronto, where a spate of cycling deaths prompted the ironically named Vision Zero program. The city developed an advertising campaign directed at cyclists to take more care on busy urban streets. It has a lot in common with “blame the victim” rhetoric. It tries to persuade the most vulnerable people on the street that it’s their responsibility to take precautions for their own safety. Meanwhile, infrastructure continues to favour the least vulnerable people on the street i.e. the people driving vehicles.

But when a sign asks a blind person who cannot see the sign to think before they step off the curb, as if thinking has anything to do with it, we note the absurdity of the rhetoric. Drivers have responsibilities too, and maybe those responsibilities should be in proportion to the harm they can do.

Cop26 gives us an opportunity to rethink the role of vehicular traffic, especially in densely populated areas. Maybe we can rethink the rhetoric, too.

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City Life

Changed Priorities Ahead

"Changed Priorities Ahead" sign in front of St. Mary's Cathedral, Edinburgh

Strictly speaking, this photograph shouldn’t be included in my Cop26 Glasgow series because it’s a shot of a sign in Edinburgh with St. Mary’s Cathedral in the background. However, I think the sign’s message is fitting to the occasion.

As a Canuck, I had never seen such a sign before. Fortunately, Transport Scotland, in cooperation with the UK’s three other regional governments, has kindly posted its Traffic Signs Manual on Scribd. We find an explanation in Chapter 8 – Traffic Safety Measures and Signs for Road Works and Temporary Situations. Although Chapter 8 runs to 229 pages, if we dig into the document, we find an explanation on page 43. Basically, in the case of a street that can accommodate only one lane of traffic, traffic from one direction gets priority and traffic from the other direction has to yield. Unless, of course, a temporary sign advises that the priorities have been changed.

When I first made this shot, I thought maybe I could use it as a commentary on the way the spiritual life forces us to change our priorities. But now, as we come to recognize that certain of our habits have brought not just us, but all life, to the brink of an existential cliff, the image suggests to me that we need to rethink those habits. Now, this image speaks to me less of the spiritual life than of the practical matter of sustaining biological life. To the extent it invokes the spiritual life, it does so by calling on religious institutions to support us in our efforts to rework how we live in relation to one another, to all living creatures, and to the planet at large. This is a matter of justice and, as I view it, religion that doesn’t serve the ends of justice has no place in our future.