Bridges in the Cultural Landscape: Crossing Nature in Exurbia (original) (raw)
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The city’s edge is a cultural landscape of conflicting and competing meanings. The visible, physical edge of rapidly urbanizing cities is emotionally charged, representing prosperity to some, and sprawl and environmental destruction to others. My dissertation is a cultural landscape study of city expansion at the edge of the Toronto-centred region, where urban growth pressures are as intense as anywhere in North America or Europe. My research reveals that ideas about the countryside are produced against the city, and these ideas are discussed in terms of ecology and natural heritage. This is a study of the cultural politics of landscape meaning in a contemporary planning process where local area planning comes face-to-face with the global environmental imagination. In the Town of Oakville, a wealthy suburb in the Toronto metropolitan area, a planning process to urbanize the last remaining countryside of the town has been underway for the past two decades. In the end, the decision to urbanize has been in lock-step with the decision to conserve: through the creation of a large natural heritage system (almost 900 hectares or more than 2,000 acres), fully one-third of the planning area, development of the remainder of the lands can take place. While pastoral ideas of the romantic countryside underlie the valuation of this landscape, representations of ecological sensitivity by environmental science were politically the most successful. Local area politics have undergone a revolution resulting from the negotiation over the future of this countryside. Using discourse analysis (text analysis of public planning process documents and popular media), participant observation of public meetings, and interviews with informants, my research reveals that cultural attitudes toward growth and conservation are informed by symbolic landscapes of country and city and these are implicated in the production of real landscapes and places. As planning practitioners and academics involved in the political process of shaping landscape change at the city’s edge, it is difficult to represent those opinions of the public and other participants in the planning process that are not supported by scientific, empirical study. The lens of cultural landscape provides tools to understand and recognize cultural value, meaning and symbolism in edge landscapes and to engage with them in areas which are being planned for change.
Landscape and the Ideology of Nature in Exurbia: Green Sprawl
The sprawl debate will never be the same again! This collection explores the significance of the ideology of nature in producing the culture and form of cities and suburbs—particularly the exurbs, where the urban extends into rural areas. Understanding society’s desire for a connection to nature may help build capacity for addressing the contemporary crisis of sprawl. This book is about the contradiction between the idea that nature should be protected from settlement for its own sake and the way that privileging nature motivates people to seek natural residential settings. This search for natural settings is an important part of the production of sprawl, as the essays in this collection discuss. Within human geography and political ecology, a vibrant discussion has been sustained in recent years about the dualism of culture and nature in modern life. We argue that the role of the desire for nature in the experience and production of landscape needs to be part of our thinking about sprawl. This collection demonstrates how ideology permeates green sprawl—from its roots in reaction to modernity to the shaping of contemporary urban, suburban, and exurban landscapes through individual choice-making, normative planning theory, and public decision-making. New insight into urban dispersion is possible through the authors’ wide range of perspectives from social sciences, humanities, planning and design disciplines concerned with addressing social and environmental problems of sprawl.
Landscapes in Transit: The Displacement of the Western Landscape Tradition in English Canada
The transmutation of land into landscape acquires specific values in a postcolonial context where displacement upsets the authority of the Western aesthetic canon which, as a result, will need forms of justification to ensure its validity. To this effect, colonial power has quite systematically diverted the shaping force of landscape the better to assert its hold on indigenous space, rearranging its geographical traits into the cultural profile of the emerging nation. In return, indigenous space has been frequently seen to affect, sometimes even infect, the outsiders’ gaze, causing profound transformations in the latter’s response to the space they came to settle. In its final stage, this essay will single out a few Canadian examples to analyse the effect indigenous space has on the observer in order to determine how the landscapes that have emerged in Canadian culture have prompted new perceptions of space that question established oppositions between colonizer and colonized.
Rethinking Urban Landscapes as Vital Infrastructure: Toronto’s Potential Landscape Framework
From the South: Global Perspectives on Landscape and Territory, 2019
Growing urbanization and landscape fragmentation over the last century has led to the loss of landscape coherence in many urban regions around the world, resulting in the degradation of urban dwellers’ understanding of their relationship to the land. Urban park systems have emerged as regional planning and conservation tools that have the potential to structure urban growth by establishing spatial limits and protecting the natural and productive cultural landscapes that support the city’s infrastructural operations and establish its distinct identity. Toronto presents an interesting case of a rapidly growing urban region that has managed to preserve the key components of its landscape system, but has yet to bring them together into a comprehensive vision. This paper formulates Toronto’s potential landscape framework by unifying the Green Belt, the ravines, and lakeshore parks into a coherent system that can serve as resilient green infrastructure, a mobility network, and recreational eco-tourism destination, and define the city’s emerging identity. By repositioning the urban landscape system as part of the city’s critical infrastructure, the cultural understanding of their interrelationship can be restored, and their roles redefined in the public imagination.
Contested periurban amenity landscapes: changing waterfront ‘countryside ideals’ in central Canada
Landscape Research, 2017
Periurban second homes have received limited attention in landscape research, but they can offer important insight for landscape histories of urbanisation. This paper focuses on the hundreds of thousands of waterfront 'cottages' or 'chalets' found in central Canada's densely-populated Toronto-Montréal urban corridor. A review of scholarly work examines how wide swaths of forest have become periurban amenity landscapes over the last 150 years. An interwoven theoretical narrative centres on the 'countryside ideal'-an enduring concept linking Anglo-American attitudes about nature and culture with context-specific assemblages of landscape, urban form, and social practice. Finally, a critical discussion highlights how these periurban amenity landscapes have become increasingly contested, taking stock of new clashes between rapid processes of landscape transformation now underway and the broader Anglo-American images, representations, and material cultures expressing what nature is (or ought to be).
Ways of Knowing the Landscape of the New Towns: A Lefebvrian Analysis
2020
This chapter explores how knowledge of landscape has been produced by different groups of interests in the Mark 3 partnership New Town of Warrington, UK, referring specifically to a neighbourhood called Birchwood. I introduce my on-going research project Days of the New Town and present findings as a point of encounter between knowledge of landscape as professional expertise and as socially lived experience. I place this encounter within the theoretical context of Lefebvre’s writings on social space. Specifically, I use his spatial triad, three overlapping concepts on how space is produced as lived, conceived and perceived (see The Production of Space 1973 translated into English in 1991). Having grown up in Birchwood, I carry with me a knowledge of this space in terms of lived experience. Whilst I do not call upon personal experience in this chapter, the aim of bringing about a greater awareness of the New Town as a space of lived experience has been a motivational factor in resear...
Reading the landscape: peoples and processes
Looking across the landscape towards the Brookton settlement, "reading the landscape'', from a ridge of high land, what first comes to mind is the disintegration and fragmentation of the landscape and the division of land-uses for varying productive purposes. On the one hand there is to some extent productive farmland for the canola production industry, reaching right towards the undulating hills on the horizon. Scanning over the landscape, it is worth taking note of the paleo channels or ancient rivers which once carved their way through the ground.
Beyond the Rural Idyll: Agrarian Problems and Promises in Exurban Sprawl (Kirsten)
2007
Attempting to provide a text appropriate to the style of the Agrarian Studies colloquium, I have written this paper in two parts, each representing work in progress. The setting is a pause in an ongoing research program about people who want to live on a piece of land that is larger than the average suburban plot and about what they do and aspire to do with the rural landscape. Part One presents a rendition of the most captivating theme of my recent research: widespread reproduction of pastoral ideals in the everyday modern urban landscape – agrarian identity appropriated to shape exurban sprawl. These ideals driving exurbanization relate to a persistent sense that the experience of living “close to the land” – or at least within a very solid chunk of landscape, or “green” – will provide residents with a more authentic and satisfying life experience and relationship with the environment. This main part of the text is an exploratory synthesis of some of the central themes of my most ...
In the city of Toronto, which is famous as a multi-cultural city, landscape and architectural development is a language for formation of multiple languages and multiple cultures; however, combination of these multiple languages and cultures should not lead to an uneven understanding and perception of various cultures and lifestyles. On the one hand, designers must look for the past and intellectual memory of the cultures formed in this city and on the other hand, they must engage in the recording and transmitting of new created data. So how can designers provide their designs for the audience in such a society? And how can the optimal reading between the designers and the audience be made possible? In order to unravel this mystery in the field of landscape development in the city of Toronto and more precisely, to discover how a landscape design can communicate with the audience, I have examined Sugar Beach Park in Toronto. Key Words: Landscape Design, Urban Park, City of Toronto.