GEOG 4280 Week 2: The City as Text

The Imagining Toronto course begins with the premise that literary texts — novels, stories, poems, memoirs and plays — tell us as much about place (and in particular urban space) as other tools more conventionally used in geographical research, such as mapping and demographic analyses and policy tools. It argues, further, that literary texts tell us things about places that we are unable to discover or unwilling to acknowledge in the normal course of our lives and work.

In the iconic Toronto novel In the Skin of a Lion (McClelland & Stewart, 1987) Michael Ondaatje writes,

Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales are a kind of charting.

Similarly, essayist Jonathan Raban remarks in his remarkable book Soft City (1974; 1988) that

The 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.

Ondaatje remind us that the cities we live in are made not merely of brick and mortar — or bureaucracy and money — but are equally the invention of our memories and imaginations. We realize that our cities unfold not only in the building but  in the telling of them.

Slides for today's class are accessible here: 2011-2012 Week 2 slides GEOG 4280 The City as Text