Zones of Feeling is a book of digital collages inspired by my walking-based research along Dundas Street in Toronto, one of the city’s longest, most historic, and controversially named thoroughfares. The book uses digital collages created from personal and archival photographs, news clippings, documents, and designed elements to map the diverse historical, contemporary, and geographic trajectories that coalesce along the modern street. Along the way it tells the story of how this urban highway was constructed in the twentieth century out of older and smaller named streets—Arthur, St. Patrick, Dagmar, Hemlock—and the often deleterious impacts of this project on people and communities along its route.
This work was created as part of my doctoral dissertation. From 2023–2025 I walked along Dundas Street in Toronto with friends and colleagues. We shared stories, intimate personal memories, historical and traditional knowledge, reflections, and experiences we connected to the roadway. One of the recurrent themes of these walks were the different “zones” we encountered along the length of the street—changes in alignment, architectural changes, changes in “vibe,” that you couldn’t quite put your finger on. In almost every case these changes corresponded to places where historical streets were “rationalised,” or combined, to form the modern Dundas Street. These smaller, previously unconnected roads and the attendant “vibe-shifts” they produce in people today, are evidences of Toronto’s early colonial park lot system, a system that saw wealthy landowners independently develop large, narrow strips of property. To become aware of these affective and scenographic changes in the urban landscape is to become attuned to the ways in which colonial systems of power, spatial organisation, legal regimes, and land relations continue to impact the lived experiences of the city on a daily basis.
Zones of Feeling takes its titular inspiration from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of “zones” as articulated in A Thousand Plateaus, particularly the idea of zones of indiscernability, which are interstitial spaces where boundaries are transgressed and relationships, people and worlds are “becoming.” It is also influenced by previous art historical approaches to representing the felt qualities of cities such as the collage practices of the Situationist International.
You can view a printers proof of the book HERE and individual page samples below.
