Hope Talk
希望講堂
The Invisible Cross of Toronto: Why We Navigate a City We Cannot Read
多倫多的隱形十字架：我們如何在一座讀不懂的城市裡找到方向
Aug 30
8月30日
4:30 PM - 5:30 PM
About the Program
We all navigate Toronto by the same crossing: Yonge and Bloor. It is the first thing a newcomer learns, usually in their first week, and the one thing they will never photograph. We have used it for decades without ever picturing its shape.
In this lecture, architect and urban researcher Paige Wen argues that this is not carelessness. Toronto is not a city without structure; it is a city whose structure is invisible. Yonge and Bloor is the visible tip of something far older: a trail the land drew first, a grid of private estates from 1793, a boundary that quietly dissolved, and a subway that buried the whole shape underground.
Having trained and practised across Taiwan, the Netherlands, China, and Belgium before settling in Toronto, Paige reads the city from the position of a foreigner, someone who asks the questions locals no longer think to ask. Over sixty minutes, in English and Mandarin, she traces this hidden cross layer by layer, from a twelve-thousand-year-old route to the transit map in your pocket.
It is an architect's reading of one ordinary intersection, and an argument about what reading a city gives us. Because a city you can read is a city you can belong to. Next time you cross Yonge and Bloor, you may finally see the shape you have been standing inside all along.
Paige Wen is a Toronto-based architect, urban researcher, and founder of Unfolding Works. A licensed architect in Ontario (OAA), she holds a PhD in Architecture and Urbanism from KU Leuven, Belgium, with prior master’s degrees from TU Delft in the Netherlands and IUAV Venezia in Italy. She also has practice experience in urban design in Rotterdam, and has taught and conducted research at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan, Peking University’s College of Architecture and Landscape, and KU Leuven.
Her work spans Asia, Europe, and North America, focusing on the relationships between architecture, urban form, waterfront space, public realm, cultural landscape, and local narrative. Her projects have been shown at the 2011 Chengdu Biennale, and she was a member of the creative team for the 2011 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture in Shenzhen.
Paige writes the Substack publication Unfolding Toronto and contributes a column on urban space, culture, and history to Toronto Spark. Her current research asks how Toronto can be read through its inherited spatial structures: old survey lines, former boundaries, street grids, transit routes, and the everyday places where historical systems remain visible without being recognized.
Having lived in Toronto for roughly a decade, Paige reads the city from the position of an outsider: someone who sees its structures precisely because she did not inherit them. Her lecture work brings together architectural training, urban research, and public storytelling to ask how a city becomes legible, how memory attaches to ordinary places, and how identity can take hold through the act of reading the city.
From the Curating Team
Contact Us
Performance / Vendor / Sponsorship Opportunities
TAIWANfest Toronto is grateful to be held on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of many nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples, that is now home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples. We acknowledge our privilege to be gathered here, and commit to work with and be respectful to the Indigenous peoples of this land while we engage in meaningful conversations of culture and reconciliation.