rural. early 15c., from O.Fr. rural (14c.), from L. ruralis ‘of the countryside’, from rus (gen. ruris ) ‘open land, country’. ‘In early examples, there is usually little or no difference between the meanings of rural and rustic, but in later use the tendency is to employ rural when the idea of locality (country scenes, etc.) is prominent, and rustic when there is a suggestion of the more primitive qualities or manners naturally attaching to country life.‘ —Oxford English Dictionary
this issue editorial thoughts | living in the periphery by stephanie white
The world is more urban than it is rural, migration to cities offers more employment, more opportunity and more social mobility than the small towns and villages in rural hinterlands. However, such towns and villages still hold much of the character and identity associated with national cultures. It is a paradox, but the past, often pre-urban, contains much potent imagery. As well, usually connected with resource extraction, new towns are being designed. Some rely on traditionally centred models, others on network systems, still others on new sustainable distribution of energy and resources. Some, like Kitimat designed in 1965 by Clarence Stein, skipped over both town and city and went straight to suburb. This issue of On Site review began with two things: one was the announcement that there would be a new town built in north-east Alberta to accommodate the thousands of workers and families needed for the oil sands. What was it going to look like? We started a loose project to set out the terms by which one would design a new town in the 21st century, which got bogged down in discussions of whether one should build at all in the oil sands. The other was a visit to the Canadian Centre for Architecture and the George Hunter archives, mostly commissioned aerial photographs of company towns made during the 1950s and 60s. His was an urban eye; his towns sat in a picturesque, rather than an instrumental, relationship with their surroundings. In Hunter’s photographs, raw little settlements ‘nestle’ in their topography, rather than interrupting it. The metropolitan view embedded the peripheral economy and resource-extraction processes into the landscape long before the actual houses and production plants themselves settled into either the landscape or the culture. • If one looks at a small town through a metropolitan lens, it is inevitably found to be crude, or under-developed, or misleadingly nostalgic. The urban gaze tries to recognise its own reality in small towns, which often develop with completely different ambitions. It is possible that rural urbanism is conceived of, enacted and understood in a profoundly different way from metropolitan urbanism. It is not just a smaller version. What would it mean to develop a reflexive lens from the periphery itself, through which we can view settlements in the periphery? This would upset the core-periphery tradition whereby raw resources are extracted in some benighted, but beautiful, hinterland, transported to the core which adds value and then exported back, as consumer products, to the periphery. The past fifty years of decolonisation have been just such an upset, but not, apparently, in the discussion of architecture and urbanism. With the contributors to this issue alone, many of whom grew up in very small places, the core has absorbed them and their energy, much to the benefit of the core, leaving the periphery bereft. Behind the small town/big city discussion of opportunities, there is a darker background. The rural-urban divide is made much of in our political culture, inevitably pitting a powerful conservative rural lobby, against a liberal educated urban critical mass which holds on to most of the media. It is a pathologised
swhite
above: study image from the CCA: George Hunter. Community for Wesfrob Mine,Tasu, Queen Charlotte Islands, BC, 1965 below:Tasu was an iron and copper open pit, an underground mining operation and townsite on the south shore of Tasu Sound in west-central Moresby Island in the Queen Charlotte Islands. This view is of the townsite as seen from the pit, about 1978. The mine was closed in 1985. bottom:Tasu townsite, 2005
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Jody Goffic
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