Sovereign(key): Unlocking Treaty Territory
To a British audience, Canada is often imagined through wilderness and landscape. This thesis begins by challenging that image. It looks beyond the map to the land itself: to First Nations territories, seasonal movement, trade, and ceremony. In this context, Winnipeg is not simply a city in the middle of Canada, but a place where deep Indigenous histories and colonial infrastructure remain physically entangled.
Sovereign(key): Unlocking Treaty Territory explores this tension through Winnipeg’s inner rail yards, a vast industrial corridor that cuts through the centre of the city. Rather than treating the site as vacant land awaiting development, the project reads it as evidence of a longer rupture: land that has been divided, governed, contaminated, and made inaccessible. The thesis asks what might happen if Treaty One were understood not only as a historical document, but as a spatial principle for reshaping the city.
The proposal imagines a First Nations-led urban development as both a political and architectural act. Before masterplanning begins, the land is repaired. Architecture emerges gradually from this process, culminating in a civic assembly hall for ceremony, governance, and gathering.
The project is therefore not only about redeveloping Winnipeg’s rail yards. It asks how architecture might contribute to a future in which treaty, land, and sovereignty are made visible again.
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Email: samuelpeterdempsey@gmail.com
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