Matt Neville
Canadians seem to insist on the “city’s subordination to the natural world” 4 and preference for the non-urban, yet in the daily lives of nearly all Canadians, non-urbanism is little more than a myth. But is this sense of identity based on the notion of wild and wilderness – and of nordicity – fading? While immigration to Canada was traditionally dominated by Europeans, today the vast majority are coming from cities in countries that have long experienced a ferocious pace of urbanisation (China, India, Philippines). New Canadians are coming from large cities and settling in a the largest of Canadian cities. Will this change in demographics bring about a new respect for the urban in Canada? Or are they looking for reprieve and will only reinforce the myth? There is a critical need to “assert the centrality of the city and the urban within the Canadian spatial and cultural imaginaries, to help us see the city as a place of Canadian
1 Valadares, Desiree, ‘Dispossessing the Wilderness’ On Site review 33: on land . 2015 2 Pache, Walter. ‘Urban Writing’. The Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada , edited by W.H. New, . Toronto: University of Toronto Pres, 2002. pp1148-1156 3 Stevenson, Lionel. 1926. Appraisals of Canadian Literature. Toronto: Macmillan, 1926. 4 Edwards, Justin and Douglas Ivison. Downtown Canada: Writing Ca- nadian Cities . Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. p199 5 Edwards p4 society and culture”. 5 The need for an understanding of the urban as space of possibility, of personal freedom, of opportunity is critical to the overall health of the country. The future of the country is visible in its cities today – our shared physical landscape. This fixation, however, on the non-urban myth may ultimately degrade the overall high-quality of life that Canadian cities are known for today.
SW: When I think of the mythic Canadian wilderness component of our national
towns - W O Mitchell landscapes of Who Has Seen The Wind, and the seemingly irreversible urbanisation of Canada. I’m not sure when it happened (although rural violence is certainly outlined in Who Has Seen the Wind) but Canada’s rural hinterland is seen today as quite dangerous, even murderous. Meyerthorpe – four Mounties shot in the middle of nowhere, the hundreds of missing or murdered aboriginal women, the Highway of Tears, the murder of the elderly McCanns on their holidays in their RV. My perception of the rural hinterland is that it operates by rules I don’t understand. Perhaps it was delusional to think that urban Canadians ever understood rural rules, but in general most of my generation had rural
I also love stephanie’s comments on safety in the rural environment. My friends from small towns in central Ontario always joke with the Torontonians that “its not safe in the city”. And we do the same to them: “who could hear you scream out here?” When I moved to Beijing I was warned about being safe by people in North America, only to find that the Chinese were very fearful for my safety in the US. “Everyone gets shot there.” I think the xenophobia that polarises urban from rural is a really
roots somewhere in their background, and we’d all read Survival. I’ve missed the window where I could drive to Prince Rupert along the now infamous highway 16. It is beautiful, but evil lurks. Is this what it actually means to be urban? to live with this fear not of grizzlies, but of the militia mentality very much alive and well in, for example, BC’s interior valleys. Inner cities seem safer to me these days. M T: This makes me think of Toronto as Megacity and Rob Ford’s suburban following helping to dismantle the city one subway line at a time. I’ve always liked to think of Vancouver as progressive urbanism, but perhaps that is because it prioritises the park, nature, etc.
identity, I think of Northrop Frye, Earle
Birney, Margaret Atwood, all writing poetry and literary criticism about the simultaneous fear and fascination Canada has with wilderness. Birney’s poem ‘Bushed’, Atwood’s Survival, based on Frye’s literary reading of the Laurentian thesis: this was the tenor of 1960s and early 1970s identity debates where anglo- Canada defined itself as not American, and not Quebécois, but something that could make love in a canoe (Pierre Berton’s definition). Strangely, or not so strangely, all these people were deeply urban in culture and geography. It was the beginning of the loss of the family farm, the emptying of prairie small
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quirky, interesting conversation. If you
have ever experienced it firsthand, it proves Matt’s point that a unifying idea of Canada is not an easy thing to achieve. There is definitely a camp for the urban.
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