2024-11-22T14:00:10-05:00 https://archinect.com/news/article/141077446/the-struggle-for-the-centre-one-city-s-adventure-with-modernity Gary Garvin 2015-11-14T19:48:00-05:00 >2015-11-18T00:43:47-05:00 <img src="https://archinect.gumlet.io/uploads/l3/l37y5rcv19vmaof3.jpg?fit=crop&auto=compress%2Cformat&enlarge=true&w=1200" border="0" /><em><p>Throughout its history, Kitchener has often imagined big plans for its urban development, but since the 1960s most of these grand plans for downtown Kitchener only ever found form in the Market Square Shopping Centre. Market Square is the most complete and concrete repository of Kitchener&rsquo;s attempts at re-imagining itself in the postwar period.</p></em><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.nathanstorring.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Nathan Storring</a>, a writer, artist, designer, and assistant curator of the Urbanspace Gallery in Toronto, writes a thorough critique of the redevelopment, destruction, and rebirth of the downtown core in Kitchener, Ontario. The issues and concerns, raised in his essay in microcosm, can be applied to urban development around the world the last several decades.</p><p>For example:</p><p><em>The placement of a shopping centre in such a prominent place in the downtown also foreshadowed a broad shift in North American economic thinking &ndash; the transition from a social market to a free market economy.&nbsp;The architectural theorist Sanford Kwinter defines the social market as a society wherein economic activities are embedded in all social activities and directed by cultural organizations that occupy a specific time and place in the world.&nbsp;During the first half of the century, Kitchener followed this economic/cultural model. Its downtown was the region&rsquo;s centre of economic and cultural life, and there the economy ...</em></p>