Week 11 24 March 2010 GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 1 Week 11...

Week 1124 March 2010

GEOG 4280 | Imagining TorontoCopyright © Amy Lavender Harris

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Week 11

Fantastic Toronto

GEOG 4280 3.0 | Imagining TorontoDepartment of Geography

Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies

York UniversityWinter Term 2009-2010

“It has been a traditional axiom of classical writing about the city that urban structures are the domain of reason; that they are emancipated from the primitive, magical life of rural society. … It was a question of finding the right transportation system, the logical pattern of urban housing, the right balance between work and play areas, the correct proportion of green space, and so forth. … The city was to be saved by reason.”

Jonathan Raban, 1974. Soft City. London: Hamish Hamilton, 157-159.



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[at the same time, however ...]

“Living in a city, one finds oneself unconsciously slipping into magical habits of mind.”

Jonathan Raban, 1974. Soft City. London: Hamish Hamilton, 165.



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“[t]he city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps, in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.”

Jonathan Raban, 1974. Soft City. London: Hamish Hamilton, 10.



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“The idea that the city is in essence a rational structure, and that evidence of irrationality is a sign of decadent deviation from its intrinsic [i.e., rational] cityness is entirely comprehensible: it is even perhaps administratively and psychologically necessary. But it seems intuitvely wrong. … The city I live in is one where hobos and loners are thoroughly representative of the place, where superstition thrives, and where people often have to live by reading the signs and surfaces of their environment and interpreting them in terms of near-magical codes.” (Raban, 1974: 160).



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“Cities … belong to culture not nature. […] Yet, to live in a city is to live in just as indomitable an environment as any valley full of rocks and stones and trees. Streets, shops, cafes, houses, underground railways, office blocks are not, for most of us, matters of choice and reason merely because someone built them out of bricks and mortar and decided they would be useful there. The city dweller is constantly coming up against the absolute mysterioiusness of other people’s reasons.” (ibid.: 161-162)



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“And cities, by their nature, as nature, grow out of just such processes of separation of ends from means. The industrial megapolis is a direct product of the division of labour; its politics and economics dictate that each of us must find the purposes and directions most of our fellow citizens increasingly incomprehensible, and often apparently hostile.” (ibis.: 162)

… In other words, the very rationality that planners and politicians claim makes cities functional also makes cities incomprehensible, mysterious and even frightening.



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“As it is, we live in a world which is patently not of our own devising, in which we are perpetually baffled and inconvenienced by people we don’t know and whom we suspect we wouldn’t like.” (ibid.: 163)

“…we map the city by private benchmarks which are meaningful only to us. … the constrictedness of this private city-within-a-city has the character of a self-fulfilling prophesy. Its boundaries, originally arrived at by chance and usage, grow more not less real. … Inside one’s private city, one builds a grid of reference points, each enshrining a personal attribution of meaning.” (ibid.: 167)



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“These are small, perhaps trivial, rituals, but they do suggest that there is rather more than a merely vestigial magicality in the way we deal with the cities we live in. It is precisely because the city is too large and formless to be held in the mind as an imaginative whole that we make recourse to irrational short-cuts and simplifications.” (ibid.: 168)

“Magic may be a major alternative to rejection of the city as a bad unmanageable place; it offers a real way of surviving in an environment whose rationale has, like a dead language, become so obscure that only a handful of specialists (alas, they are all too frequently sociologists, urban economists and town planners) can remember of understand it. The rest of us make do with an improvised day-to-day magic which, like shamanism, works because we conspire that it shall work.” (ibid.: 169)



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“Within the city at large there are multitudes of contracted, superstitious cities, sequestered places with clear boundaries, rituals and customs, whose outlines often correspond with those of tribal castes and styles.” (ibid.: 169)



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The Inner Inner City

“Sometime past midnight I stepped out onto the balcony for a breath of air. We had lived in this apartment for ten years, Michelle and I. Central, but a little north, seventeen stories up, southern exposure. The city scrolled away from us like a vast and intricate diagram, as indecipherable as the language of the Hittites. Lights dim as stars cut into the vast blackness of Lake Ontario, all quivering in the rising remains of the heat of the day. Here was a religion, I thought. My religion. My secret book, my Talmud.” (Wilson, 2000: 71)



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“I had known this about myself for a long time, my addiction to the obscure beauty of the city. For most of my life I had consoled myself in its contradictions, its austerities and its baroque recomplications. Here was the short answer to Carver’s challenge. I would make a city religion. An urban occultism. Divination by cartography. Call it paracartography.” (ibid.: 71)

“It’s no secret that my fascination with the Romantic poets was equally a fascination with their opiated gnosticism, their sense of an aeternitas haunting every crag and glen. What is perhaps strange is that the city gave me the same sensation. We contrast the urban and the natural, but that’s a contemporary myth. We’re animals, after all; our cities are organic products, fully as “natural” (whatever that word really means) as a termite hill or a rabbit warren. But how much more interesting; how much more complex, dressed in the intricacies and exfoliations of human culture, simple patterns iterated into infinite variation. And full of secrets, secrets beyond counting.” (ibid.: 74)



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“So my religion of the city would have to unite the two domains, the gnostic and the urban. Paracartography implied the making of maps, city maps, a map of this city, but not an ordinary map; a map of the city’s secret terrains, the city as perceived by a divine madman, streets rendered as ecstasies or purgatories; a map legible only at night, in the dark.” (ibid.: 74)

“What I rediscovered that autumn was my ability to get lost. Toronto is a forgiving city, essentially a gridwork of streets as formal and uninspiring as its banks. Walk in any direction long enough, you’ll find a landmark or a familiar bus route. As a rule. But the invention of paracartography exercised such trancelike power that I was liable to walk without any sense of time or direction and find myself, hours later, in a wholly new neighbourhood, as if my feet had followed a map of their own.” (ibid.: 75)



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“Single-mindedly, I began to assemble my map. I won’t tell you how I did it. In any case there was no single method, only materials and intuition. I will say that I obtained the largest and most comprehensive survey map of the city I could find and then began to distort and overlay it according to my own perceptions, certain that each new deposit of ink and color, each Mylar transparency, was not obscuring the city but revealing it—the occult, the hidden city.” (79)

‘A round of drinks, then the crowd gathered. I stumbled through an explanation of paracartography that sounded incoherent even to me, and then I displayed the map, by this time a thickly layered palimpsest of acetate and rainbow-colored acrylic paints and cryptic keys legible only to myself. Nobody reacted visibly to it ... Maybe no one else sensed its power, but I did. I felt the promise of its unfollowed and hidden avenues, the scrolls of spiritual code concealed in its deeps.” (ibid.: 82)



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“Eventually Chuck Byrnie averted his eyes from it. “Enterprising,” he said. “More art than map. Still, it’s quite wonderful, Jeremy. You should be proud. But why is it empty at the center? ... I mean to say, why is it blank in the middle? I can see how it bears a certain relationship to the city, and those arteries or veins, there, might be streets ... But it seems odd, to have left such a hole in the middle.” ... I stared at the map. Squinted at the map. But try as I might, I couldn’t see “a hole in the middle.” The map was continuous, a single seamless thing. ... “Terra incognita,” I said breathlessly. “Here there be tygers, Chuck.” (ibid.: 82)



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“There’s a city inside the city—the city at the center of the map. I couldn’t see the hole in the map because for me there was no hole; the gap closed when I looked at it, or else the most important part of the map was invisible to anyone but myself. And that made sense. What I had failed to understand was that paracartography must necessarily be a private matter. My map isn’t your map. The ideal paracartographic map charts not a territory but a mind, or at least it merges the two: the inner inner city.” (ibid.: 84)

“Most of the universe is invisible—invisible in the sense of unseen, unexperienced. The deserts of Mars, the barrens of Mercury, the surfaces of a million unnamed planets, places where time passes, where a rock might tumble from a cliffside or a glacier calve into a lifeless sea, invisibly. Did you walk to work today, or take a walk after dinner? Everyday things are rendered or remain invisible: the mailbox you passed (where is it exactly?), the crack in the sidewalk, the sign in the window, this morning’s breakfast. (ibid.: 86-87)



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“Time passes differently in the secret city. Day follows night, sunlight sweeps the sundial streets, seasons pass, but the past eats itself and the future is the present, only less so. We pace the sidewalks, we few citizens of this underpopulated city, empty of appetite, wordless, but how many others are keeping secret diaries? Or keeping the same diary endlessly rewritten, stories worn smooth with the telling/” (ibid.: 90)



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Week 1114 November 2007


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Week 11 24 March 2010 GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 1 Week 11...

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