Under the paving stones at the Bloordale Beach: Sub-terra urbs nullius and volumetric colonialism in Toronto

Abstract

This article explores a public art project in Toronto, Canada which imagines an in-land beach in an empty lot slated for development to investigate how capitalist urban redevelopment reproduces settler-colonial futurity. News and social media discourse on the project locates a sense of possibility in the site by characterising its sandy infill as inert, empty volume ripe for reinvention. I use this discourse as a lever into the volumetric dimensions of settler-colonial capitalist urban redevelopment: the project, the development in which it attempts to intervene and the discourse of dense, mixed-use planning within which it is caught up collectively imagine the production of space as contingent on the existence of empty subterranean matter. I task geographies of dispossession with moving beyond planar conceptions of spatial difference to attend to how settler-colonial capitalism necessitates the reproduction of empty space conceived in terms of height and depth.