Jesse Jackson talk at Harvard

April 22, 2015. EAD professor Jesse Colin Jackson gave a talk entitled “Radiant city, twice removed: Toronto’s tower neighborhoods, aesthetically considered” at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Professor Jackson  has been generating representations of Toronto’s tower neighborhoods since 2006. Jackson’s images evoke the designed and lived intensities of Toronto’s tower apartments, and their ubiquity and significance to the city. Frequently employed by policy makers and design professionals, Jackson’s images are integral to ongoing efforts to revitalize these buildings. Close examination of Jackson’s work, however, reveals ambivalence towards this progressive project in the face of the complexities these structures embody: arrival destinations for incoming immigrant populations, essential housing for one quarter of the city’s population, the decaying location of much of Toronto’s urban poverty, products of modern ideologies gone awry, and locations of past glory, current dynamism, and future potential. In this talk, Jackson will invite us to consider these conflicted sites and how their evolving presence in Toronto’s collective consciousness has been impacted by his image-making practice.