That, apparently, is what’s going on in Amsterdam. Its Slotervaart neighbourhood  has been plagued by poverty, crime and ghettoisation for years now. But, as my fave columnist Doug Saunders explains, part of the problem is precisely the open design of the suburbs, that has made the area “a lonely expanse of bleak concrete buildings separated by big, frightening, empty spaces, and no connection to the wider world.” To fix it, they’re making the suburb more like downtown: getting rid of the open spaces, building high-density high-rises and giving tax breaks to young entrepreneurs to come set up businesses there. It’s an interesting re-think of the problem of the suburbs, one that reverses the trend of having big-box stores and other chains move into downtown cores and, instead, exports the indie spirit from downtown to the burbs.

And while my primary focus on this blog has always been technology and the web, over the past year or so it’s become increasingly apparent to me how important sub/urban spaces are to creativity, productivity and one’s quality of life. It’s easy sometimes to forget that, for all our rhetoric about the ethereal, diaphanous virtual, physical spaces still significantly impact our lives. And after moving back into downtown Toronto after a rather unpleasant 2 year stint in the suburbs, the things that quickly struck me about downtown living again were:

1. Higher population density means it’s far easier to find niche interests that are more difficult to sustain in the suburbs, whether vegan restaurants, poetry readings or organic coffee shops.
2. The proximity and frequent overlap of residential and business/entertainment areas means that people can engage in cultural activities far more easily. Put more plainly, when you just have to walk for five minutes to see a show or grab a pint, you do it more often.
3. Multi-income neighbourhoods, where broke students, young immigrant families and wealthier, established individuals all live near to each other, facilitate mixing much more readily than large, more homogeneous neighbourhoods in the suburbs.

Yet, beyond all these obvious, optimistic statements, the thing that has always troubled me about the sub/urban split is the manner in which moving from the fringes of a city to its centre has always carried some rather uncomfortable cultural metaphors. The closer you get to downtown, the more difficult it is to engage in things that don’t fit into a ‘mainstream lifestyle’, and often, ‘to move downtown’ is also to move into the cultural mainstream, a mentality that fits far too closely with a politics of assimilation. In one sense, assimilation is both necessary and good. But when it is underpinned by a hierarchy of cultures that assert the superiority of a host country’s values, that’s when it starts to get messy and rough on people who ‘don’t fit’. It’s that kind of exclusionary discourse that encourages people to say where there are more people like them.

What I’d like to see is an emphasis on not only making the suburbs more ‘downtown-y’ but also to preserve some of their cultural difference in the transition – i.e. that temples, outdoor markets and dance clubs (random examples) be included alongside plans for retails centres and generic arts facilities. We shouldn’t only strive to make the suburbs like downtown; we also need to export the delightful cultural hybrids we produce in the suburbs to all those hipsters living downtown.