Darning the community fabric: an architectural language of healing and repair

Abstract

This thesis investigates a language of development in rural Ontario communities using a process of architectural darning. Through the analysis of metaphor as a human process, landscape is understood through a method of weaving and understanding the embodiment of place through process. Colonial understandings of land and cadastral mapping practices reduce place to a unit of economic power, severing the connection between it and the person. This thesis argues that place is the process of living memory and the creation of agency through shared experience. Applying the darning process to the region Grey County, Ontario, tears in the fabric can be observed as a consequence of colonial extraction and a landscape of violence applied to Indigenous peoples. Manifesting place in learning begins the journey to reconciliation, utilizing the approaches in two-eyed seeing and the agency in continuous local learning. The journey of the healing process takes place within the people who engage in site and add to the body of knowledge.