Urban Marginality: A Quest for Sunlight
What if marginalized spaces could speak for their users? The photographs represent a possible imagined scenario of the life of an underrepresented/marginalized person living in Toronto. From taking the TTC bus at 4:30 AM to get to the night shift to living in a basement unit with minimum to no sunlight exposure. Each of the four photographs of an egress basement window shows the importance of sunlight access and the troublesome consequences of living in a unit with a windowless/egress window in terms of community belonging and mental health. The final photograph “Look up!” symbolically depicts pathways to hope represented in the pole, cables, and lightbulb. This project attempts to evoke a discourse around the need for ACTitecture which is a concept that stresses the social agency of architecture in positioning marginalized people at the center with the rest of the community rather than the periphery of the designed space.
Captions in the images were quoted from “How Basement Living Can Affect Mental Health" published by Broadview Magazine. References:
Bell, Brianna. “How Basement Living Can Affect Mental Health.” Broadview Magazine, January 17, 2020. https://broadview.org/basement-apartments-mental-health/
