Matt Neville
Less than 20 percent of Canadians live in non-urban environments, yet political discourse, policy and patterns of urban development are often rural-centric, and, in some cases, blatantly anti-urban. Over the past three decades, the trend of municipal amalgamation of towns and villages with large areas of non-urban land, suggests “a denigration of the urban, reflective of the disdain and indifference with which the city and the urban continue to be treated in the Canadian political system and cultural imaginary” 3 . In Halifax for example, the City of Halifax is part of a municipal unit of nearly 5,500 square kilometres in size. 75% of people within it, however, live within an urbanised area of less than 300 square kilometres. As we are in a federal election year, it is worth noting that a rural vote in Canada continues to count for more than an urban vote. Canada is a nation of urban dwellers who refuse to accept their urban condition, instead we appear to have a national preoccupation with open green space.
Paradoxically, with a mere 3.3 persons per square kilometre, Canada has one of the lowest population densities on the planet – suggesting that it is very much a non-urban nation. With more than 75 percent of Canadian clustered within 150 kilometres of the US border, there is a very real great expanse above – the true Great White North – which only a small percentage of citizens have ever actually experienced. And despite being so far removed from the North, its impact on Canadians and their image of the country cannot be overstated. Perhaps it is this overarching notion of nordicity and of a large empty hinterland beyond the city skyline that makes the truism of urbanity more difficult for most Canadians to accept.
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