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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
#1 by Melissa on June 30, 2009 - 11:18 pm
Re: “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.” Really? I see it as quite the opposite. I’m currently (temporarily) living in the suburbs (which is where I grew up; my hiatus has been 3 years living in major cities), and everything here seems much more homogeneous, both in terms of appearance and in terms of lifestyle. Not only is it entirely possible to enter a neighbourhood that appears exactly the same as your neighbhourhood, only it’s not, but the corporate zombie sameness that I see on Bay St. seems to be everywhere here. There’s some variety, but it’s generally a riff on soccer mom zombie sameness, guido zombie sameness, etc. The diversity in entertainment, culture and commerce that you see in the city centre seems to me to reflect an ability to engage with and accomodate the non-mainstream. But I’m also thinking about this as a white Canadian-born woman, which is obviously a very particular perspective.
#2 by Nav on July 1, 2009 - 3:04 pm
Thanks for the comment Melissa! It’s always nice (and, I’ll admit, a little intimidating) to know smart, interesting people are reading. Thanks.
And you’re quite right – I was a bit flippant in how I phrased that part. I guess I was referring to ‘Anglo Canadian’ culture versus minority ones. While I totally agree with the idea that it’s much easier to engage in the ‘non-mainstream’ in city centres – which, after all, is why I live downtown – I think it becomes harder to find the sort of ‘bi-culturalism’ that, occasionally anyway, feels like home to me. As much as the benefit of a place like Toronto is that ‘everyone is different’, the downside is that, sometimes, there aren’t enough people who are ‘the same’.
But it’s quite possible that the split here is also one of pluralism versus ghettoization – that the kind of cultural milieu you find downtown is closer to an ideal of integration than the separated pockets of immigrant culture you get in the suburbs. I suppose that’s the tricky part – at what point does ‘creating a healthy mix’ slip into assimilation? And at what point does ‘respecting difference’ leave us all separated and without the kind of comfort that comes from social cohesion?