In the often clean, clinical world of industrial design, decay is suddenly trendy. But can the production of brand new decay withstand the weight of contradiction? Is this decay -- or something else? Droog Design, a loose organization of designers and design philosophers based in Holland, create mass-produced products with intentional imperfections: lamps from milk bottles, chairs with holes drilled in them. In 1998, Hella Jongerius created Slightly-Damaged Dinner Service. By firing porcelain at too high a temperature, she uniquely deformed each plate. It created, according to her bio, "a wobbly pile of serially-produced one-offs: plates with a soul."

This search for soul is an expression of desire for authenticity in a culture that is often anything but. Old buildings, old signage, old neighbourhoods aren't created but instead evolve or are accrued creations. So what happens when this process is leapfrogged?

Cultural critics have prepared for such an eventuality. Daniel Harris argues in Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic that these "scarification rituals" are a method of "registering a complaint against the tyranny of the new." Unfortunately, the artificial irregularities of Slightly-Damaged Dinner Service have lead to interior decorators who "'distress' exposed beams with motor oil and drill bits to counterfeit smudges of soot and the ravages of woodworm." For Harris, quaintness is most often concerned with the illusion of imperfection that scratches, chips, and cracks provide.

Most faux decay is merely a reaction against overly perfect products, its purpose undercut by its need to define itself against the dominant cultural aesthetic, rather than to define itself outside the circle of consumption. Droog is an interesting design philosophy if only because it forces one to reconsider what is beautiful. Unfortunately, Droog's influence seems limited. Meanwhile Restoration Hardware has emerged to satiate the need to reference the past, to buy "brand new" rusty hinges and drawer knobs. It is a protected life enjoyed inside a weathered Sears-Roebuck catalogue.

This is not the decay of indie culture -- a longing for a (mythical) past and an attempt to convey a seemingly perpetually decaying future. It is more like the decadent decay of Baudelaire, whose poems leave one craving the corrupt beauty of disintegration, wishing the gravitas reserved for the dying and dead could be attained through a simple shopping list. Faux decay acknowledges that a culture that cheats death through botox injections, plastic surgery and anti-aging salves does not wish to be reminded of their own creeping physical decline.

Faux decay also speaks to the fact that the opportunities to experience decay are becoming rarer. Building materials such as wood and brick and paint -- now nearly invincible thanks to pressure-treating and chemicals -- once experienced discrete phases in their lifecycles. Modern objects are either new, or necessitate replacement. Plastic doesn't decompose or disintegrate, while bricks, wood and paint often grow old gracefully and harmonize with their environments.

Scattered throughout Toronto are fading painted advertisements for companies and products now considered irrelevant. Often the paint has chipped to the point where the brick pokes through. The effect is completely different from its original intent as advertisement. Homage to its own transience, the transgression of these consumer inducements makes them even more fascinating. Today, shiny, impermanent logos are replaced as soon as they show signs of wear. It is rare to be allowed to contemplate a decaying advertisement.

The Eternally Yours Foundation, based in the Netherlands, is a group of designers that are investigating and attempting to reverse the planned obsolescence of consumer goods. Ed Van Hinte, the Foundation spokesman, asks, "Why is it that affluence is expressed in discarding behaviour?" Van Hinte wants to elongate the cultural lifespan of consumer durables (what Eternally Yours calls product endurance) and break the cycle of product renewal. Most pertinently, they investigate how people perceive and value wear in surfaces and materials by studying the aging properties of plastics and the feasibility of reusing and recycling old machinery and consumer durables. Droog, in a less overt manner, confronts these issues. Instead of creating perfect products whose shiny skeins are ruined by a lone scratch, the malformed plates and pottery of Droog are better able to absorb the frictions of daily use.

Eternally Yours acknowledges that consumption patterns can't be reversed, but there is no reason they can't be radically slowed and reconsidered. While not everyone yearns to return to the industrial vestiges of the past, many would enjoy a society where decay isn't yet another pre-packaged, purchasable experience.

Gentrification and Political Geography
Life in the city means thinking about city life. In Hollow City: Gentrification and the Eviction of Urban Culture, co-author Rebecca Solnit argues, "In times of tyranny, the citizens talk of democracy and justice; in our time we talk of public space, architecture, housing, urban design, cultural geography, community and landscape -- which suggests that the current crises are located in location itself."

Working from the Solnit assumption, art about decay is an examination of personal geography. So it's reasonable to assume that the aesthetic of contemporary decay finds inspiration in location. The city is inextricably linked with decay, given its mix of old and new, industrial and new economy. To understand urban geography is to understand urban decay, which means gentrification with its implied ruin and rehabilitation motif, is about how place is erased.

The standard definition of gentrification can be found in Neil Smith's book The New Urban Frontier: "The process through which poor and working-class neighbourhoods in the inner city are refurbished via an influx of private capital and middle-class homebuyers and renters -- neighbourhoods that had previously experienced disinvestment and a middle-class exodus." Not surprisingly, gentrification is most often analyzed in economic and social costs, rather than the aesthetic depletion that occurs. The beauty of a pre-gentrified decayed neighbourhood is rarely championed, nor are the loss of unexploited spaces (where residents can hear themselves think) bemoaned. Visitors can't see these near intangibles, and residents rarely bother to memorialize their difficult surroundings. Thus, over the years, it has fallen upon artists -- living half lives between poverty and privilege -- to memorialize the lost diners and warehouses about to be torn down. They evoke concern for neighborhoods at the beginning of a gentrification process the artists themselves often help precipitate.

Thus, Toronto-based artist Adrian Blackwell lives in a well-known artist loft (9 Hanna) for many years, and then documents the loft before it is converted into office space in the Fall of 1999. His shelter becomes art, and its conversion into high-tech pasture generates an article and byline in the art magazine Lola. Later, his photos appear in a Power Plant gallery show entitled Substitute City. As the city is re-built, it becomes less of an incubator for artists and more of an inspirational topic. Battling the gentrification pathogen is disruptive, but the process has acted as a catalyst in the re-politicization of artists.

However, the most frightening suggestion of Solnit's Hollow City is that the return to the city is not driven by some sudden suburban backlash inspired by cul-de-sac critiques such as The Geography of Nowhere by James Howard Kunstler or Suburban Nation by Andres Duany. Instead, the city is again in vogue precisely because it is becoming suburban in character. As Solnit puts it, "Cities were born free but are everywhere in chains, and these chains erase the particulars by which we know a city and the noncommodity goods we get from the places we frequent..." Chains like Starbucks have become the UN peacekeepers in the gentrification battles of the 1990s. They raise property values, provide safe haven for tentative newcomers, and eventually attract suburban migration.

In a lively Plastic.com debate on the gentrification of Williamsburg, Brooklyn from January of 2001, K. Thor Jensen noted, "The general argument against gentrification is essentially one of nostalgia, of rejecting anybody else's views on your personal memory of space. You imprint on a neighborhood, and then when reality no longer echoes your memories, you become upset." Even if gentrification is merely about memory, the central dilemma of cities revolve around place, meaning gentrification erases nothing less than autobiography, and by extension, oneself.

Solnit admits that all cities sit atop erased landscapes. What she passionately decries is speed of this removal and the results of tinkering with this natural rhythm. In San Francisco, the dot-com boom compressed 15 years of gentrification into 24 months, removing wholesale chunks of memory and decay.

The problem is that pre-gentrification neighbourhoods are inherently unstable. Worse, preservation creates some problems. Michael S. Roth, writing in Irresistible Decay notes that, "Ruins are often activated in a culture to perform certain social, political, or aesthetic functions, but they can never belong fully to the present without losing their status as ruins." Decay is fragile, less needy, easy to ignore. Buildings lose their authority over time. But after seeing the effects of gentrification, it is clear that untrammeled decay, for all its problems, represents possibility. Gentrification has become so formulaic it now represents corporate rigidity -- a recent urban narrative that creates a happy ending for only a fortunate few.

Gentrification, like decay, asks (often silently) How much of the past is worth preserving? At what speed should the past be erased? How old does something have to be to be considered worth saving? How can the future be built upon the bones of the past. Most importantly, who decides this? Most often, private capital is the driving force, which is blind to the processes of community.

* * *

It is by now clear that decay is the antithesis of lifestyle consumption. Lifestyle is perfect and integrated. Decay is imperfect and recycled. Lifestyle is purchased, decay is accrued or earned. Despite titling his book Life Style, designer Bruce Mau acknowledges that something is amiss in his profession. Toward the conclusion of Mau's self-aggrandizing, five-kilogram tome, he notes, "Immersed in the logic of growth, we have, for the most part, denied the liberating potential of death. (For us, there is only addition, never subtraction; accumulation, never decay). In our shortsightedness, we have banished death both from nature and from our approach to design practice."

Appropriating the seemingly uncommodifiable aspects of the past might seem a unique affliction of our modern age, but Fascination of Decay by Paul Zucker contains a revealing historical antecedent proving otherwise. "In the eighteenth century, the ruin motif was so popular that it invaded almost all of the decorative arts... Polite society, accustomed to seeing artificial ruins in its parks and gardens, also wanted to enjoy them in the porcelain objects which enlivened the interiors of their houses as ornaments." Ruin imagery appeared on fabrics, chintz, chinaware, porcelain, wallpaper and creche.

Zucker notes, "It is a triumphant manifestation of the rococo spirit, which could transform subjects like ruins -- generally associated with the macabre -- into gay bric-a-brac." A slight rearrangement of that last sentence results in: It is a triumphant manifestation of the spirit of late capitalism, which can transform industrial buildings -- generally associated with the economic livelihood of the working-class -- into luxury lofts.

What is the appeal of a loft for the artistically disinclined? Can a thin veneer of the past be so easily tacked onto the present? Can a yearning for authenticity be assuaged by the exposed beams and concrete floors of faux decay? Unfortunately, the answer may be yes. Hermenaut editor Joshua Glenn calls this "fake authenticity." Witness stone-washed jeans or "faktory" lofts, or Flophousechic (a Toronto-based developer specializing in converting dive bars into drinking establishments). The irony of live/work spaces that are unaffordable to the artists that popularized the format to begin with is wearing thin. Lofts are now the ultimate lifestyle accessory for the cool and wealthy decay aficionado -- the hipeoisie.

* * *

Sprawled across the South-East portion of Toronto is the Port Lands. The main artery, Cherry Street is filled with old diners, dying memories and dead factories that rattle as container truck after container truck transport goods to and fro. The Port Lands are one of the few remaining fallow areas of significant size in Toronto, with numerous patches of cracked asphalt that have surrendered to grass and weeds -- the urban prairie. This was to be the site of the Olympics. Because of the industrial waste and poison, much of the area is considered "brownlands." Making it safe for residential applications will be expensive, and three levels of government involvement isn't helping matters.

Seth's words have a powerful resonance in this landscape: "I wonder, just what is it about these sort of industrial areas that makes me feel so comfortable? It's true that they're very beautiful and humble in their decay... but it's not only that. Maybe it's the loneliness or the silence ..." Seth was referring to small town Ontario (Strathroy to be exact), but the sentiment applies equally well here.

Cherry Street and the surrounding area will eventually be subjected to a multi-billion dollar waterfront renovation. (Already, a terrible theme-park for adults called the Docks has been built here.) It's a space trapped between the rusted, discarded waste of its former purpose, and the unceasing search for new areas to develop. Will Toronto gain more than it will lose here? Is there any other way out?

Appropriately, there is a Knob Hill Farms outlet on Cherry Street. Unlike the now barricaded store used for Eroded Margin, the Pier 35 Coffee Shop nestled within the Knob Hill Farms building is still open. Past the walls of the cafe can be seen the remaining blue food shelves, like skeletons. Stretching down the left-hand side of the store is a long meat counter and a deep breath earns a less-than-faint but undisguishable odour.

Is it noble or stupid to care about the fate of this now vacant warehouse? The cafe hobbles along on $1 coffee and the patronage of a few regulars. It can't remain here for much longer. Decay is about both decline and resurrection, of new forms of growth emerging from the old. At some point, the old must be abandoned, however painful.

Despite the gloomy subject matter, hope and rebirth lurks beneath disintegration. An interval seems required before an incentive for restoration can appear. The old order must die before redemption can occur. The interim period of rejection has recently ended, bookended between the economic booms of the 90s and 80s, and the white flight from the cities after World War II.

The new can only emerge after the old crumbles. Or, at least, until the old releases its grip over us. Perhaps few are listening to what decay has to offer, because its charms are muted; murmurs easily ignored. Decay is a ninth-generation photocopy or a faded, yellowed newspaper clipping, not a glossy magazine. For too many, decay is more about nuisance than hidden splendor.

There is a Latin term "Sic Transit Gloria Mundi" which translates into Thus Passes The Glory Of The World. During the coronation of a new Pope, flax is burnt and the phrase Sic Transit Gloria Mundi is recited. It's meant to represent the temporary nature of earthly glory, and thus keep the new Pope appropriately humble.

Once a crucial part of the development of Toronto, the Port Lands is no longer glorious. Perhaps it never was. Corrugated tin and creosote aren't as romantic or evocative as Jeff Otaku's Montreal or Seth's Toronto, or Dan Kennedy's paintings or even wabi-sabi. The Port Lands is the effluent of progress and its renovation and restoration will reinforce a trend of scrubbing the working-class history of cities clean.

The manner in which decay is preserved and renovated is imbedded with values about the past. The tangible pollution of decay is being replaced with sterile, disposable facsimiles. As Karl Marx put it, "All that is solid melts into air..." Some city dwellers have successfully recognized and struggled with the aesthetic and philosophical challenges that decay represents. The rest prefer avoidance. But each erasure of genuine decay represents another severed cable on our bridge to the past, leaving us to clutch wispy threads of faux decay as we navigate the present.

Thanks to Andy, Julie, Patricio, Craig, and Greg. Those interested in contributing material for a Decay anthology should visit biggeworld.com and/or email biggeink@yahoo.com