In my back yard

In My Back Yard is a documentary film that explores the changing landscape of the Mount Dennis neighbourhood in Toronto. This change is represented by the 54-acre Kodak site that is being transformed into the second largest transportation hub in the Greater Toronto Area. The film employs a series of visual strategies and retells recent observations related to the impact of this massive infrastructure project on the people, the land and the urban wildlife. Local residents, politicians and community leader were consulted. Their interviews are combined with dioramas, archival photographs and time-lapse photography to express the multi-facetted list of community concerns. This support paper attempts to define and analyse these struggles within the context of Leo Marx’s 1964 work The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. This paper proposes that Marx’s concept of the “middle landscape” helps to define the current struggle in Mount Dennis.