Week 11: Suburban Gothic
In The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape, Howard Kunstler denounces the contemporary North American suburban landscape, describing it as
depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading—the jive-plastic commuter tract home wastelands, the Potemkin village shopping plazas with their vast parking lagoons, the Lego-block hotel complexes, the "gourmet mansardic" junk-food joints, the Orwellian office "parks" featuring buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass as the sunglasses worn by chain-gang guards, the particleboard garden apartments rising up in every meadow and cornfield, the freeway loops around every big and little city with their clusters of discount merchandise marts, the whole destructive, wasteful, toxic, agoraphobia-inducing spectacle that politicians proudly call "growth."
Kunstler's views echo those of influential urban theorist Henri Lefebvre, who in The Production of Space wrote succinctly of contemporary cities that "everything here resembles everything else," adding that "repetition has everywhere defeated uniqueness, [and] the artificial and contrived have driven all spontaneity and naturalness from the field."
Although banality, boredom, violence and murder figure prominently in a surprisingly large number of novels set in greater Toronto area suburbs, other literary representations — particularly recent ones — also engage with the complexity of social change and cultural identity, indicating that a new version of suburbia is rapidly being written into the city's literature.
Today in the Imagining Toronto course we will explore literary representations of suburbia in the greater Toronto area. Literary works we'll discuss include Phyllis Brett Young's The Torontonians, Hugh Garner's Death in Don Mills, Linwood Barclay's suburban thriller Bad Move, Michelle Berry's Blind Crescent, M.G. Vassanji's No New Land (a novel about a family of South Asian Africans living in a Thorncliffe Park highrise), Rabindranath Maharaj's Homer in Flight and Dionne Brand's What We All Long For.
In contrast with Kunstler's view that suburbs are banal, degraded places, we'll consider how immigration and cultural shifts have changed the face of suburbs and how Toronto's "inner suburbs" (Don Mills, Malvern, Rexdale) require a new understanding of what it means to live in and imagine suburbia.
Despite Kunstler's perspective — and in contrast with views held by literary scholars Catherine Jurca (see White Diaspora) and Paul Milton (who wrote that "[n]othing […] of any consequence ever really happens on a crescent") — the continuous exodus of city-dwellers to the urban periphery, alongside the influx of recent immigrants and second generation suburbanites who bypass downtown dwelling entirely, indicates that something more meaningful pulls people to the suburbs than the prospect of a multi-vehicle garage and a verdant lawn. Indeed, an emerging body of Toronto literature indicates that the city's suburbs are continually being inhabited and imagined in new ways, suggesting that if there is redemption to be found in suburbia, it will rise out of a rapidly changing cultural landscape.
Slides for today's class are available here:
2010-2011 Week 11 slides Geog 4280 City Limits
For members of the public following along, today's discussion will engage with Chapter 7, City Limits, in the Imagining Toronto book.
As a bonus, here are links to a variety of films, interviews and music videos set in suburbs:
"Welcome to the Suburbs" (1950s film; Youtube)
"Sin in the Suburbs" (film, 1964; via Youtube)
"Subdivisions" by Rush (via Youtube)
"Suburbia" by the Pet Shop Boys (via Youtube)
"Jesus of Suburbia" by Green Day (via Youtube)
"Rockin' the Suburbs" by Ben Folds (via Youtube)
"The Suburbs" by Arcade Fire (via Youtube)
"Shaikhing Up the Hood: Suburban Placemaking in Scarborough" (Aslam Shaikh, via Youtube)
"The Microcosm of Markham" (The Agenda with Steve Paikin, via Youtube)
