Decoding Toronto is a Toronto-based cultural walking-tour and urban storytelling initiative that reads the city through architecture, heritage, public space, migration, and local memory. Rather than treating the city as a fixed map, it asks how streets, buildings, names, infrastructures, and everyday routes carry traces of past decisions and communities. Through walks, talks, exhibitions, and public programs, Decoding Toronto invites audiences to observe the city slowly and to connect visible urban forms with the histories behind them.

For this exhibition, architect and urban researcher Paige Wen, founder of Unfolding Works, brings her own research practice into dialogue with Decoding Toronto’s approach to reading the city. A licensed architect in Ontario (OAA) with a PhD in Architecture and Urbanism from KU Leuven, Paige works across architecture, urban history, cultural landscape, and local narrative. Her contribution is grounded in historical mapping, interpretive writing, and spatial storytelling, using these methods to make familiar urban places newly readable and to notice the historical systems that quietly shape everyday life.

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 public-facing work, including her collaboration with Decoding Toronto, extends this way of seeing into walks, talks, exhibitions, and other cultural programs. It creates opportunities for residents and visitors to read Toronto not only as a place of buildings and streets, but as a layered text of settlement, movement, conflict, and belonging. It is also an invitation to look again.