Week 24 26 January 2011 GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 1 Week 4 The...

Week 2426 January 2011

GEOG 4280 | Imagining TorontoCopyright © Amy Lavender Harris

1

Week 4

The City of Neighbourhoods

GEOG 4280 3.0 | Imagining TorontoDepartment of Geography

Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies

York UniversityWinter Term 2010-2011

Walking the Imagined City

• “Each one of us must negotiate the streets of our city, mean or otherwise, every day. And what is revealed by this is that the hardbitten corners are no more real than the clean and civil ones—but also no less. Toronto, like all cities, exists in more than one way at a time; it is many places at once.” [Mark Kingwell, “All Show.” 2008]

• In Wanderlust: A History of Walking, essayist Rebecca

• Solnit suggests that “the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour”

Week 4 26 January 2011


2

• In “Walking Off the Map,” a 2006 essay describing Toronto’s contemporary culture of urban explorers, John Bentley Mays writes, “They are all walkers, and their tread along the city’s streets is intent and focused. We see them moving at the pace of dowsers looking for streams buried beneath the pavement; and dowsers they are, these seekers for the fugitive urban imaginary in the solid matter of the city.”

• Situationists (Guy Debord), psychogeography, flanerie• In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau

refers to “the long poem of walking” as a series of rhetorical strategies expressed in physical space: at street level the body turns, detours and returns in the same way a phrase manifests, inverts and completes itself on the printed page. In this sense walking is at once lyrical and vividly metaphorical: we leap ahead, retrace our steps, omit passages, take shortcuts, lose ourselves, experience surprise and become open to discovery.



3

• As de Certeau adds, “If it is true that forests of gestures are manifest

in the streets, their movement cannot be captured in a picture, nor can the meaning of their movements be circumscribed in a text. Their rhetorical transplantation carries away and displaces the analytical, coherent proper meanings of urbanism; it constitutes a “wandering of the semantic” produced by masses that make some parts of the city disappear and exaggerate others, distorting it, fragmenting it, and diverting it from its immobile order.”

• Ultimately, the deepest meanings of the city are inscribed not only in individual texts but are inherently interstitial, the outcome of invisible interactions between people and narrative paths that intersect, contradict and complete one another. The city’s stories nearly infinite in their variety.



4

• Performance scholar Mike Pearson and anthropologist Michael Shanks extend Debord’s this metaphor in Theatre/Archaeology, describing walking as “a spatial acting out, a kind of narrative, and the paths and places direct our choreography. This regular moving from one point to another is a kind of mapping, a kind of narrative understanding. Paths link familiar places and bring the possibility for repeated actions. Different paths enact different stories of action. Walking is like a story, a series of events, for which the land acts as a mnemonic. aimless walking represented a radical insubordination to capitalism.”



5

The Psychogeographical City

“I seek a poetry that is vital, alive in responding to the city dynamically and dramatically, and one that urges its readers to move off the page to create meaning in the poem—and constructs a meaning that is activated only when the reader has engaged with the city in a like manner. A poetry that rereads the streets, the signage, the geography and cultural atmosphere of Toronto in its very structure. That is, not a poem about the Humber River, but a poem that attempts to become, in its rhythm, language, sound effect, the Humber. Not a poem describing walking through Kensington Market, but a poem that creates the psychological experience of walking in Kensington through verbal dissonance, register shifting, typography and juxtaposition.” [Stephen Cain, 2006)



6

The Problem of ‘Authenticity’

• “As fauxhemians move in to gentrify an area, generating Starbucks franchises and Pottery Barn outlets, driving property values up and grotty art galleries down, the “real” bohemians, about to lose their studios, lofts, and self-image, arise in protest. Claims of authenticity are made, ever more emphatically and frantically, in an effort to ward off the threat by force of magic.” (Kingwell, 2008: 178)



7

The Challenge of Social Justice

• Kingwell on Rawlsian concepts of justice and the “greater good.”

• Edward Soja on difference• David Harvey on social justice and the city.



8

Whose Neighbourhood? Whose City?

• Kingwell (2008: 182) asks, somewhat rhetorically, “Is a vibrant city even available to all those who live there?”

• He goes on to wonder who benefits from the revitalized ROM, the AGO, the made-over Drake and Gladstone Hotels.



9

The City of NeighbourhoodsToronto is …• “a score of cities joined together by geographical

propinquity.” (Hugh Garner, 1970)• a place where “an antique administration drags on /

Like a bunch of small villages rolled into one.” (The Brothers-In-Law,” 1966)

• a city where “the streets proceed tiresomely through the neighbourhoods in which each house tries to be more ordinary than the next.” (Stephen Marche, 2005)

• A place where “underneath the flourish and ostentation” of the new Toronto is “the old city, street after street of thick red brick houses, with their porch pillars like the off-white stems of toad-stools and their watchful, calculating windows. Malicious, grudging, vindictive, implacable.” (Margaret Atwood, 1988)



10

“Toronto is not a city in the modern sense of a unified whole. […] Toronto is, instead, a linked series of towns held loosely together by the gravitational force of its downtown core and the pinned-in-place effect of the surveillance rod we call the CN Tower. […] There is a physical centre, in the sense of a summoning of vectors like a centre of gravity, but there is no normative or mythic one, no single agora or narrative.”

[Mark Kingwell, “All Show.” In Toronto: A City Becoming, 2008]



11

Neighbourhood Map of Toronto

• In 2009 the Toronto Star created a comprehensive map of Toronto’s neighbourhoods. Although the map is a moving target, given that neighbourhoods change and their boundaries are often contested, the newspaper’s cartographer managed to map 239 neighbourhoods.

• The map is available online here: http://www3.thestar.com/static/googlemaps/starmaps.html?xml=090120_shapetool_neigbourhoods.xml



12

What is a Neighbourhood?

• “There is no one way to draw boundaries that define specific neighbourhoods. Defining a neighbourhood is, in the end, a subjective process. Neighbourhoods encompass each resident’s sense of community life. There is no doubt, however, about the importance of neighbourhoods and their effects on health, educational outcomes, and overall well-being.”

• Neighbourhoods defined by census tract (Statistics Canada)

• By socio-economic factors (StatsCan, studies like “The Three Cities Within Toronto,” etc.)



13

How Do Neighbourhoods Differ?

• Community feeling, social identification, shared history, similar architecture; divided by roads, railways, topography (rivers, ravines, etc.)

• Socio-economic differences, especially those related to race (racialized minorities, immigrants), culture (including faith) and class (income)



14

Three Cities Within Toronto

• David Hulchanski’s 2010 study, “The Three Cities Within Toronto”

• Based on careful examination of socio-economic patterns reflected in census data, 1971-2006.

• The study points out that economic (especially income)disparities have produced three cities within the City.

• Wealthy neighbourhoods (City 1) are concentrated increasingly in the downtown core.

• Middle-class neighbourhoods (City 2) occupy the central city but are in decline)

• Poor and very poor neighbourhoods (City 3) have expanded dramatically



15

Two Neighbourhoods, One Space: the Case of Cabbagetown• Contemporary Cabbagetown: City 1• Regent Park (and the St. Jamestown complex as

well as the Moss Park area): City 3• Cabbagetown’s shifting boundaries• Narratives of Cabbagetown• In Poverty by Postal Code, a 2004 report

prepared by the United Way, a young Regent Park resident tells an interviewer, “When you apply for a job you never say you’re from the Park. One of my friends got a job at a bank but he didn’t put his address. You have to lie so they don’t think you’re a thug.”



16

City 1 and City 3: Narrative Tensions in Lawrence

Heights• The narrator of Graham McNamee’s novel

Acceleration on Lawrence Heights: “Don’t get the wrong idea. It’s not like the projects you see on TV, with drive-by shootings, Chihuahua-sized rats, and kids falling down elevator shafts. The Jungle is just a worn-down kind of place where the kids run wild and herds of cats live out back by the garages. It’s right on the edge of an industrial wasteland—factories, a steel mill and a strip mall a couple blocks down. Some kids at school call the place Welfare Towers, which is a lie. People here work. Most of them. They’re just not rich.”



17

• When Duncan realizes a nearby construction site will soon accommodate middle-class condominiums, he tells a friend who comments, cynically, “Who’s going to buy a condo next to the Jungle? I mean, what a view!” Familiar with the Jungle’s reputation, Duncan responds, “I’m sure they’ll put a barbed-wire fence around the new place to keep us out.”



18

Week 212 January 2011


19

Week 24 26 January 2011 GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 1 Week 4 The...

Documents

Transcript of Week 24 26 January 2011 GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 1 Week 4 The...