dialectical relationship, a war which extends into the centre of government, each side stereotyped and stigmatised. Rather than thinking of the small prairie town, say, as an iconic Who Has Seen the Wind sort of place, increasingly it is seen as somewhere like Meyerthorp: violent and lethal. For any young architect who has gone home, tried to make a go of it in their own small town and came up against boosterish town councils who, when pressed will always seek an architect from the largest city they can afford, rather than anyone local, this is the periphery in action. For those who are sticking to it and making a place for architecture in rural Canada, they deserve our attention. • It has been 50 years since Andre Gunder Frank wrote about dependency and underdevelopment, and Immanuel Wallerstein wrote about world systems theory, in response to the complexity of decolonisation of what was then known as the third world, a peripheral condition certainly, to the first world. The outline of core-periphery relations revealed that the ‘core’, which felt it was the only source of knowledge and power, knew very little about the rest of the world, which knew other things . The sense that there can be any sort of arbitration by any sort of core authority to convey legitimacy, the basic tenet of colonialism, was demolished by Wallerstein and a generation of Latin American theorists of the 1960s. Historically, yes, it happened, but it is not necessary to continue in this relationship. I feel I have to explain this because of the debate over the title to this issue of On Site review – whether to use the word rural , or peripheral . The relationship between town and country is not new; even I’ve been writing about it since the 1980s, however always writing from an architectural periphery: Canada, then western Canada, then outside academia. Nonetheless, in architecture, the periphery is often considered to be dominated by some sort of risible rural vernacular, outside contemporary architectural discourse. The core-periphery relationship, including the semi-periphery, and peripheries within the core, and cores outside both world cities and core economies, the rise of the BRIC (the old semi-periphery), the faltering of the Eurozone (the old core) – the basic relationship of core to periphery is often critiqued today without understanding that at root, it itself is a critique of assumptions of power and hegemony. • Canada has a curious relationship with its hinterlands. Rural is not a word to apply to northern Ontario, that is the bush. Rural Nova Scotia refers to the valley and some of the ocean edges, the rest is the barrens. Rural Quebec is thought of as the Townships, not the Shield. Rural British Columbia consists of small towns in the valleys between mountain ranges, the rest is either the coast or the mountains. Clearly ruralness is habitable land, preferably something to do with agriculture, rather than logging or mining. And despite official city status, living in the rural City of Red Deer is quantitatively and qualitatively different from living in the City of Vancouver, and it is not just the weather. –
‘Andean silletero carrying a European across the Cordillera. from Le Tour du Monde, Paris 1879.’ Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes:Travel Writing and Transculturation . Routledge, 1992
We were once supposed to identify with the effete, bored, idle tourist who couldn’t climb a mountain; the poor sod lugging him was without character, resigned to his task. A basic understanding of civil rights must kick in here: now we consider the silletero, his culture, where he lives, how he lives. To do otherwise is inconceivable. Qualities of the core, our wealthy, literate tourist: controlled, known, exploitative. Qualities of the periphery, our silletero: exotic, wild, lawless, potentially dangerous, exploitable. So, considering the rural as a territory full of history, alliances, geological rhythms, considerable wealth and a powerful sense of independent development misinterpreted by more developed urban cultures, what do we find?
Above and below: the top figure is carried, enabled, allowed and protected by the bottom one.
Calgary, top, and Fort McMurray, below
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My thanks to Jason Price, Kenneth Hayes and Thomas-Bernard Kenniff with whom I discussed this rural/peripheral dilemma.
Brant Ward
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