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theresatherethere · 8 years ago

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Chapter: The essence of place

[follows No History]

There are, of course, those essential places dripping with uniqueness, shouting out their history, their distinctness - there are no places like them.

But often those places are crammed with tourists. They’re the expensive cities now. They’re museums of themselves.

And in North America, most people live in suburbs, so that’s the space most people have to take up. [Research figures of suburban living in US and Canada].

Country estates have a certain significance in this conversation, especially when a subdivision springs up around it, and the estate goes undemolished, is incorporated somehow into the subdivision, or is the last, stubborn land owner who refuses to leave. Intro to Geography of Nowhere addresses this.

Research: Examples from pop culture - the spooky last estate house in the suburbs - it’s an archetype.

These magic forests, these magic houses. They have a different quality to them. The petina, the decay. The fact that they are unlike anything else around.

Kyle’s cottage, in Barrie, on the south shore of Lake Simcoe.

When it was built: the forest. But, was subdivided and developed into suburban tract housing. But cottage was a hold out - a “thumbnail”.

And is now a surreal bit of what used to be there, sticking out like a sore thumb from the rest of the neighbourhood. But now, the forest is cut down.

A place is always changing and there is no original - the myth of the original, Derrida. [Read Derrida].

Many subdivisions, because they were built on freshly converted farmland, have a rural hold out of some kind. There’s a farm house in South Guelph, by Hanlon’s Expressway on Dowley Road. None of the suburban streets quite lead there. Like a vision, an apparition, always far away, viewed in the distance. Must illicit curiosity from children growing up in the neighbourhood: the thing that is not like the others.

Often, the remnant farmhouse and ecology are less accessible to protect them. The series of winding roads and cul de sacs brings you close, but never quite gets you to the majestic farmhouse that pokes in and house of site like a mirage.

Often, these remnant houses get the reputation for being haunted. They are just so different in quality from anything else around. And they are haunted! Haunted by the kinds of lives that used to be lived in that space. The kinds of vegetation that used to exist. The place before it was the place it is now.

Now, they’re incorporating the farmhouses into the developments, because heritage sells. (They’ve even recreated the historical homes in the Winchester property at Gordon and Clairfields) - Gordon and Lowes, Victoria and Arkell. Whats lost when they do this? What's found?

Also: Ward 2 Wilson farmhouse in Guelph.

In urban contexts too.

Forest Hill, used to be the suburbs. [History of Forest Hill, evocative description of it in relation to Toronto, before and after the city grew around it]. A neighbourhood perched above the city.

The last farmhouse: and breaking in (Do research at archives to uncover history of that house).

The thumbnail houses of St. James Town. Imagine growing up in those high rises, and your entire world is cement, concrete and vertical. And there’s this house, like nothing like it around.

What about when they save the buildings but move them into a cluster?

A Skansen - collection of historic buildings moved from their geographically disparate original locations to one site, an intentional collection of old buildings: Sweden, Black Creek Pioneer Village, the Markham Museum, Country Heritage Park in Milton by the 401.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skansen

Markham Heritage Estates. It's a Tim Burtonesque subdivision of historic homes moved to a totally new context. It helps to preserve old Georgian and Victorian houses from all over Markham. It's a one of a kind subdivision.

Cathedraltown

Can a Genus Loci remain within a building, though, even if it moves places?And what of something much stranger? Downtown Centreville, Toronto Island.

A place will always change it. To wax poetic about a bygone age is to freeze time and live unrealistically. What happens when they incorporate an old farm house into a subdivision, move all the old buildings elsewhere and into a museum to make way for progress development?

It’s the creation of a new place, a new container for memories

And those that we worship for their qualities of good place’ness, we museum'ify- we take away their essence.

Sartre writes in Being and Nothingness that being is a constant becoming. Each moment, our conciousness reaffirms itself, but it could really affirm itself as anything. We continue to act our personalities out of choice.

When we act authentically and don’t hold ourselves rigidly to past versions of ourselves, Sartre calls this being “in good faith”.

Being in bad faith is when you stubbornly hold yourself to past versions of yourself, and not allow your conciousness to freely express itself in this constant becoming. Sartre points to the waiter and the cashier as those who are in bad faith. As Marx called it, their “character mask” freezes their authentic selves, and they become a two dimensional, frozen version of being - a chipper smile, an attendant question.

Cities are organisms, right? So we can extend this concept to cities and our collective conciousness and behaviours that manifest to give them specific personalities. [Research: writers who say cities have personalities].

Old Montreal and Venice are in bad faith. They’re stuck on an idea of their identity and don’t evolve organically and naturally.

Toronto and Rotterdam are in good faith- precisely because they have no history they can be authentic.

But the places that we consider the most mundane, monotonous- those that have completely wiped out any trace of anything that came before them- could they possibly have authenticity? Is there really no there there?

Whistler Public Library is an assertion of localism, responds to faux alpine pastiche: maybe inauthentic origins but their presence necissitates a response.

Other places - Barbados, UAE, build specifically in USA suburban style. It’s a style. Like Whiteness - not invisble even though it’s treated as such. Interview developers of that style and what they like about it,

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theresatherethere · 8 years ago

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Chapter: Urban form, Suburban Spirit

With the move back to the city, and architectural approaches like New Urbanism, and the construction of super dense mono-cultural tower neighbourhoods, we’ve confused urban form with urban spirit. You can have urban form with a suburban way of life (i.e. super private, consumption based, non relational). And you can have suburban form with a very urban spirit (co-dependant, messy, spontaneous).

Look into etymology of urban and suburban (walls), cultural uses, and redefine them based on spirit and not form.

Rebecca Solnit references this in her introductory essay in Nonstop Metropolis City Atlas

Urban culture exists within very suburban spaces: Starbucks at Clair and Gordon. People chatting, laughing. Jazz playing. At its worst, we’ve packaged urbanity and can let it loose wherever we choose. At its best, the human spirit can’t be dampened by inhumane landscapes.

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theresatherethere · 8 years ago

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Case Study: the first IKEA

I visited the world's first IKEA. Located in Älmhult, Sweden, it is the centre of a global furniture empire often accused of facilitating homogenous globalization.

It was interesting to be at the place it all began, and explore the specificities of Småland (the province of Sweden it's in), and how local conditions, economics and culture influenced what would become one of the world's great monotonizers.

Afterwards, what else could I do? I walked across town to the real IKEA to buy a shoe horn, a cheese slicer and a whisk. As soon as I walked in, I was back in North York, and Etobicoke, where literally the exact same building design is found. I know my way around even though I've never been here before.

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theresatherethere · 8 years ago

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Case Study: Burlöv Center, Sweden

Originally written as an academic paper -- to be re-written

INTRODUCTION

Although the concepts of ‘non-place’ and ‘placelessness’ have been explored within academia, they also describe an everyday attitude toward spaces of transit, residence, and consumption that ‘could be anywhere’. Airports, suburban subdivisions, and shopping centres are some of the sites most commonly referred to as ‘nowhere’, often with a dismissive or negative tone. Relph (1976) and Augé (1995) examine concepts of non-place and placelessness within an academic context. Together, these texts form the basis of a critique of spaces that are produced for consumption and movement through, rather than a meaningful integration with the specificities of history, geography and ecology that underly them. According to Sieverts (2000), the in-between landscapes, lacking the centrality and coherence of previous urban forms and resembling Relph and Augé’s ‘placelessness’ and ‘non-place’, are now where the majority of the world’s population inhabits. Despite their growing prevalence, we continue to disregard these in-between landscapes informally within everyday language, and professionally within architecture and urban planning’s fixation on centrality (Sieverts, 2000). This essay will investigate the consequences of dismissing peri- and suburban spaces, informed by Massey (2005), Creswell (2013) and Ingold’s (2011) conceptions of place as an active process of meaning making, applied to a site. The essay will also examine the contradictions within Relph’s definitions of ‘place’ and ‘placelessness’ before testing the concepts with a case study of Burlöv Center, a shopping centre between Malmö and Lund in Skåne. The case study is concerned with everyday attitudes toward places, and thus uses ‘non-place’ and ‘placelessness’ interchangeably. Many who live in Skåne consider Burlöv Centrum a ‘non-place’. During two site visits, observations were made alongside short interviews with employees and visitors regarding their relationship to the shopping centre. The results of the site visits form the basis of a critique of ‘placelessness’. I will argue that we cannot dismiss Burlöv Center as a ‘non-place’. It is, rather, a place imbued with meaning by its users. Acknowledging the authentic relationship users have with supposed ‘non-places’ is necessary to overcome a perpetuated notion of ‘placelessness’ that exempts a place’s inhabitants from their social, environmental, and aesthetic responsibilities. The essay concludes with a discussion of the role of urban planning and architecture in fostering authentic relationships within sites dismissed as ‘placeless’.

CONCEPTS

‘Placelessness’ and ‘non-place’

Relph’s Place and Placelessness (1976) argues that places are losing their authenticity, and people are losing an authentic connection to place, as a result of globalization, industrialization, consumerism and increased mobility. For Relph, ‘placelessness’ is both a location “without significant places” and an attitude that “does not acknowledge significance in places” (Relph, 143). ‘Placelessness’ is the consequence of an “abstract geometric view of place, denuded of its human meaning” (Relph, 143). Relph points to a failure of modern urban planning and architecture in the creation of ‘placelessness’, noting that design’s reliance on computerized technology “has tended to result in places which are single-purpose, functionally efficient, often in a style independent of the physical setting, reflecting mass values and contrived fashion” (Relph, 78). More to the point, Relph defines ‘placelessness’ as “cutting across or impos[ing] on the landscape rather than developing with it” (Relph, 90). As most contemporary humans did not build their own houses and do not subsist off of food grown from their immediate surroundings, they have an “inauthentic existence”, which is at “the very root of and essence of placelessness” (Relph, 121). Though Augé worked within the discipline of anthropology, his Non-Places: introduction to anthropology of supermodernity (1995) has been a frequently cited source within geography. Augé defines ‘non-place’ as “a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity” (78). Augé focuses on highly programmed non-places — supermarkets, airports and highways — and their effect on the individual, noting that within a non-place, a person gives up their identity, and social responsibility in exchange for their “desire for individual freedom and comfort” (Augé, 132). While informed by Relph and Augé’s concepts, this essay is most concerned with the effects of every day language on behaviour toward a place. The idea of ‘nowhere’ is often used to negatively evaluate the quality of a place. Speaking about peri- and suburban developments, we often speak “dismissively, using derogatory terms such as ‘suburban sprawl’, ‘cancerous growth’, ‘overdevelopment’, ‘overuse’, and ‘wasteland’” (Sieverts, 33). Despite the subtle differences in meaning between Relph’s ‘placelessness’ and Augé’s ‘non-place’, the remainder of this essay will use the terms interchangeably, examining how the idea of ‘nowhere’ affects behaviour toward the in-between, ‘non-places’ that a majority of the world now inhabits. Within the discussion, the essay will focus on contradictions within Relph’s prescriptive arguments regarding ‘placelessness’, setting aside Augé’s descriptive ‘non-place’ (Cresswell, 2009).

Non-places are where we live now ‘Non-places’ have become dominant forms of human settlement worldwide. As Sieverts (2000) argues in his book Zwischenstadt: zwischen Ort und Welt, Raum und Zeit, Stadt und Land, the semi-industrial, peri- and suburban developments at the edge of cities are so pervasive, he simply calls them “where we live now” (22). While he doesn’t use the terms ‘placeless’ or ‘non-place’, Sieverts refers to these sites as “nameless and indistinct space[s]” (22). Relph, writing three decades before Sieverts, observed that “we appear to be forsaking nodal points for thinly spread coast-to-coast continuity of people, food, power and entertainment” (79). Echoing Relph, Sieverts describes the character of “where we live now” as “a seemingly diffuse, unordered structure of varying urban tracts, containing individual islands of geometrical order, no clear centre, and many functionally differentiated branches, networks, and nodes” (Sieverts, 23). Technically speaking, there is no such thing as a ‘non-place’; colloquially, any place that is somewhere cannot be ‘nowhere’. What academics have termed ‘placeless’ or ‘non-places’ have specific locations, qualities and characteristics, and as noted above, are increasingly the setting for a majority of the population’s lives. Within their critiques of modernity, Augé acknowledges ‘non-places’ “never exist in their pure forms” (Augé, 78). Rather, places exist on a continuum, depending on many factors including the authenticity of the architecture, the degree of programmed space, and the relationship inhabitants have with the site (Relph, 44). Further complicating the discussion of ‘placelessness’, Relph contradicts himself within his criteria for place. While “most of us are condemned to live in other peoples’ houses and machine made places,” …what appears from the outside to be homogenous and placeless, is from within closely differentiated into places by the personalization of property, by association with local events and the development of local myths and by being lived-in, all of which provide a genuineness and authenticity to somewhere quite inauthentically created” (Relph, 77, 71). However, despite these “genuine” processes of meaning making, Relph maintains that “such ‘authentification’ can never be complete and “can never reach the deepest levels of sense of place” (Relph, 71). As a result, Relph’s ‘placelessness’ seems to operate as more of a value judgment, examining the quality of places rather than their degree of ‘placelessness’. His standard for place authenticity is based on “the exception of the work of… talented individuals” that design and build the structures they inhabit (Relph, 78). Relph’s distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity contradicts his own argument that as we inhabit places, we inevitably imbue them with meaning, “confer[ing] some authenticity on even the most trivial and unrelentingly uniform landscapes” (Relph,1, 80). The distinction also overlooks the many small alterations users carry out onto the structures and sites they inhabit, intentionally through renovations, and unintentionally through the wear and tear of daily use.

Place To examine the concepts of ‘non-place’ and ‘placelessness’, it is also necessary to understand the concept of place. Many humanistic geographers understand place as an active process of meaning making, applied to a space. Cresswell describes place as “the application of meaning to space” (2013: 255). For Massey (2005), places are collections of stories and processes that “we (must) make something of ” (130, 141). Ingold (2011) avoids using the term ‘space’ entirely, arguing that any site used by humans is a place. Humans inhabit places actively. They are “wayfarers” that are “not fundamentally place-bound but…place-binding (Ingold, 148). Not concerned with the quality of places, Ingold views places as anywhere that human movement intersects. He describes places as knots, “where inhabitants meet, [and] trails are entwined, as the life of each becomes bound up with the other” (Ingold, 148). In opposition to his definition of ‘placelessness’, Relph defines place as having three basic elements: “static physical setting, the activities, and the meanings” (46). Relph also defines place as an active process, noting that “a place is centre of action and intention, it is a focus where we experience the meaningful events of our existence” (Relph, 41). Furthermore, Relph recognizes that humans inevitably make meaning wherever they might inhabit. As noted above, Relph points out that humans “confer some authenticity on even the most trivial and unrelentingly uniform landscapes” (Relph, 80).

CASE STUDY: BURLÖV CENTER

When Relph wrote Place and Placelessness in 1976, he was reacting to profound transformations in urban form. The effects of mass-produced suburbia, the de-industrialization of western cities, technological automation and the increased dependency on the automobile and communications technology were creating radically different forms of human settlement, “bearing hardly any relation to local, preindustrial city forms” (Sieverts, 23). As these new forms of human settlement have become increasingly dominant – many built more than a half-century ago – they have inevitably been imbued by meaning by their inhabitants. By examining a location known to many as a ‘non-place’, I will explore whether its inhabitants are able to transcend ‘inauthenticity’ within a highly programmed, privately owned space they did not build themselves. Burlöv Center is a shopping centre located between Malmö and Lund in the southern Swedish county of Skåne (see figure 1). As an exchange student, I was unfamiliar with the specificities of southwestern Skåne’s geography, so I asked my friends and colleagues — many of whom are landscape architects — where I could find a nearby ‘non-place’. The resounding response was Burlöv Center, known to many as an anonymous stop on the pågatåg commuter train. Burlöv Center was built in 1971. Forty-six years later, the shopping centre has decayed, been renovated, and used by a generation of residents. It is an ideal location to assess the possibilities of what Relph calls ‘authentification’, i.e. the creation of place, within a shopping centre – a quintessential ‘non-place’.

Figure 1 – Location of Burlöv Center. (Image from Google Maps). I visited Burlöv Center twice in May 2017. From these visits, I understand why I was directed there. Surrounded by expansive parking lots, train tracks, and highways, Burlöv Center is the kind of place that ‘could be anywhere’. Its neighbours include an abandoned bookbinding factory, an industrial bakery and a used car parking lot (See figures 2, 3 and 4). Indeed, Sieverts description of the typical in-between place could have been written about Burlöv Center, with its light industry tracts comprising the most astonishing mixture of still-functioning workshops, but also villas, empty sheds, and warehouses; overgrown gardens and abandoned fields…hospitals, stables, and remnants of farms; groves and ponds; power lines, old train tracks, berms and footpaths (Sieverts, 23). The disorderly area surrounding Burlöv Center also fits within Relph’s description of ‘placeless’ subtopias: “the mindless mixing up of all man-made objects without any pattern of purpose or relationship” (Relph, 105).

Figure 2 – Burlöv Center

Figure 3 – the parking lot surrounding Burlöv Center and the industrial bakery across the street

Figure 4 – unkempt, empty plots across from Burlöv Center, with informal trails Yet, despite the area being “ugly and chaotic, look[ing] awful in many different ways,” the area surrounding Burlöv Center could also be said to be in line with Relph’s description of place as “a vital mess because it is unpretentious and uncontrived and a more or less unselfconscious expression of peoples activities and wants” (Relph, 132). During both of my visits, a shipping container repurposed as a falafel kiosk was busy with customers, who ate their lunches in the seating area overlooking the street. Many people were using Burlöv Center’s parking lot as a short cut between the apartment towers to the south and the train station to the north, carving informal paths in the unkempt roadside grasses. A group of men gathered at the used car parking lot were chatting and admiring the latest deliveries. After exploring the area surrounding the shopping mall, I entered Burlöv Center. Largely populated by globalized chain stores like H&M and Ecco, the corridors of Burlöv Center were adorned with generic light fixtures and seating areas (see figure 5). Without any windows, with air conditioning at full blast, and pop music being piped through overhead speakers, the inside of Burlöv Center bore no relationship with its location. I once again felt like I ‘could be anywhere’ (see figure 5).

Figure 5 – the indistinct corridors of Burlöv Center During both afternoon visits, the shopping centre was busy. While several people were quickly passing through the mall, many others were gathered in small groups, chatting, watching passersby, or smoking on the benches outside. Near the lottery and mail kiosk outside the COOP grocery store, a group of older men were gathered around a table watching a horse race (see figure 5). They seemed to know each other well, talking and laughing with an air of camaraderie signaling longtime friendship. My suspicion that these men were regular visitors to Burlöv Center was confirmed when I returned to the mall later that week. The same men were seated beside the COOP kiosk watching the horse races. Despite the highly programmed nature of the privately owned shopping centre, the facilities within Burlöv Center allowed these men to congregate daily, thus “allowing scope for individuals and groups to make their own places, and to give those places authenticity and significance by modifying them and by dwelling in them” (Relph, 146). Since the mall is privately owned, the men probably do not have a chance to modify their surroundings. Yet, this does not differ from a similar situation in a square of a historical city centre. As Sieverts argues, “historical downtowns increasingly resemble shopping malls” (33). While the distinctions between private and public space are beyond the scope of this essay, the modification of space within privately owned shopping centres is prohibited in much the same way as they would be in a historical city centre.

Figure 5 – a group of old men congregate to watch the horse races Unfortunately, the men watching horse races by the COOP kiosk did not speak English, and I was unable to interview them. The language barrier was a major limitation to my research. Many of the subjects I wanted to interview did not speak English, including the seniors sitting and observing the mall, the employee of the key and shoe shop (one of the only non-chain stores at Burlöv Center), and a group of Arabic speaking women. While I did not speak with them, I noted how these users of the mall seemed at ease with their surroundings, inhabiting it with the air of familiarity, routine and intimacy. I saw many of them again on my second visit to the shopping centre. Fortunately, I was able to find several English-speaking interviewees. Many were dismissive of Burlöv Center, while others acknowledged its important role in their lives. (Please see Appendix A for a transcript of my interview questions.) When I asked what made Burlöv Center unique, only one respondent used the term ‘non-place’ to describe the shopping centre. Most were unfamiliar with the term but did express the sentiment that Burlöv Center “could be anywhere”. An employee at a women’s clothing store who had been working at Burlöv Center for only a month, but who had visited the shopping centre for the last decade, was quick to dismiss Burlöv Center. “There is nothing special about this place,” she said, describing her experiences of eating at the generic food court, and quickly leaving when her shift was over. An employee at the mall’s bookstore who had worked there for eight years had similar feelings. “There’s not much to see here”, he said. “It could be any mall in Sweden”. When asked if Burlöv Center was considered a part of his home, he was emphatic that it was not, noting that he tries “to get out of here as soon as I’m done work”. While these employees are quick to leave Burlöv Center at the end of the day, lack of drudgery is not a precondition for place. Despite the negative associations that the bookstore and women’s clothing store employees had with Burlöv Center, “drudgery is always a part of profound commitment to a place, and any commitment must also involve an acceptance of the restriction that places imposes and the miseries it may offer” (Relph, 42). The bookstore employee had a largely negative assessment of Burlöv Center and its environs, but also alluded to a sense of care and curiosity towards it. “During my breaks I take walks along the football fields, and there’s an old windmill that’s pretty cool,” he shared, before speaking briefly about the customers he has gotten to know over the years. While many were quick to dismiss Burlöv Center as ‘nowhere’, I interviewed two people that had intimate feelings towards the shopping centre. “I visit here once a day,” said a man who had grown up in the adjacent apartment buildings. “I would come here as a kid, and it’s always been a place I’ve come to since,” he recalled, describing a few memories from childhood, including his love of the candy shop that preceded the COOP kiosk where the old men now gather to watch horse races. Another interviewee that lived in the adjacent apartments spoke of meeting friends at Burlöv Center every day: “When it’s a boring day I come here to go people watching, to run into people I know”. Her feelings about Burlöv Center were encapsulated in her sentiment that “it may not be a special place, but it’s special to me. My life is here”. The responses of these latter interviewees evoke Massey and Cresswell’s concept of place as the application of meaning to space, and the tying of Ingold’s knots of meaning, whose ends trail off into the neighbouring apartment buildings. It also is consistent with Relph’s concept of place as “where we know and are known, or where the most significant experiences of our lives have occurred” (Relph, 41). For many, especially those who live in the adjacent apartments and grew up there, Burlöv Center could be said to be an extension of home. According to Relph, home is “the foundation of our identity as individuals and as members of a community, the dwelling-place of being” (39). The relationship the latter two interviewees had with Burlöv Center puts the shopping centre within their ‘field of care’. According to Relph, “the places to which we are most attached are literally fields of care, settings in which we have had a multiplicity of experiences and which call forth an entire complex of affections and responses” (38). Within these fields of care, “an authentic sense of place is above all that of being inside and belonging to your place both as an individual and as a member of a community” (Relph, 65).

DISCUSSION

After conducting observations of Burlöv Center and interviews with employees and visitors, I understand the shopping centre as taking on the form of the ‘placelessness’ described by Relph, but the essence of place, imbued by meaning by its users described by Massey and Cresswell. Despite appearing like it ‘could be anywhere’, Burlöv Center is the site of rich meaning for its daily inhabitants. This is encapsulated by my final interview subject’s sentiments that Burlöv Center “may not be a special place, but it’s special for me”. The dismissal of Burlöv Center and denial of the qualities that make it unique are consistent with the rejection of urban form and the bias toward the historic inner cities described by Sieverts (2000). According to Sieverts, we are fixated on “this too-powerful image of the old city”, distorting “our view of the reality of cities today, in which the historic downtown comprises a mere fragment of the overall city” (Sieverts, 33). Bias toward the image of the old city perpetuates an attitude that exempts users of responsibility from the peri- and suburban sites they inhabit. Disregard toward peri- and suburban sites within everyday contexts leads to their neglect. By referring to the sites that have become a dominant form of human settlement as ‘non-places’, we position these sites as outside our ‘fields of care’, absolving ourselves of responsibility toward them. Relph notes that “inauthentic attitudes to place” lead to “individuals and societies fail[ing] to recognize the realities and responsibilities of existence (121). Relph also critiques the aesthetics of ‘placelessness’ as causing “no care or commitment for places” within their inhabitants (Relph, 142). However, by referring to places as ‘anywhere’ or ‘nowhere’, we perpetuate this inauthentic attitude. This attitude leads to the pervasiveness of what Relph calls “uncommitted insiders” who are “the basis for placelessness” (Relph, 142). At Burlöv Center, there are many uncommitted insiders, like the employee at the women’s clothing store who had spent ten years visiting the shopping mall, but who quickly disregarded it as a ‘anywhere’, and the bookstore employee who emphasized that he leaves the mall as soon as he is finished work. What Relph did not recognize, however, is that the dismissal of a site as ‘placeless’ itself creates the conditions for uncommitted insiders. Instead of disregarding the mall as a ‘non-place’, acknowledging the authenticity of inhabitants’ relationship with Burlöv Center recognizes “the deep levels of existential insiders” who are necessary for “the unselfconscious making of places which are human in their scale and organization, which fit both their physical and cultural contacts and hence are as varied as those contexts, and which are filled with significance for those who live in them” (Relph, 143). If we understood shopping centres as being as central to life within peri- and suburban developments as squares are to historical city centres, would the bookstore employee be so quick to leave at the end of the day? Perhaps he would linger, savouring the chance encounters with Burlöv Center’s other inhabitants. Perhaps he would take a seat on a bench in the middle of the mall’s corridors, and watch the spectacle of the world – an old couple going for a stroll, a mother comforting her crying baby, a loud group of teenage boys – pass him by. If he is going to engage in people watching, he will most likely go to Stortorget, an equally commercialized square in historic central Malmö that, within dominant discourse, is conceived as more authentic. The framing of suburban places as ‘non-places’ is within a discourse that is biased toward historical form of urbanity, especially cities built in the 19th century (Sieverts, 2000). Cresswell notes, “power is implicated in the construction, reproduction and contestation of places and their meanings” (2009: 5). What power structures are implicated in the consistent disregard for peri- and suburban development, and the elevating of 19th century urban form? According to Sieverts, most people do not live in historical urban centres, where rising real estate values are making them increasingly inaccessible to the majority of the population (Sieverts, 33). We must acknowledge the economic inequality associated with valuing historical inner cities over peri- and suburban developments. Acknowledging that sites like Burlöv Center are legitimate places is thus a subversion of the power implicated in the evaluation of historic inner cities as places, and everything else as ‘placeless’. This subversion is in line with Relph’s argument that “placelessness must be transcended” (145). Despite his distinction between those who inhabit buildings they constructed themselves, and those that inhabit buildings constructed by others, Relph prescribes his own tools for this transcendence: fostering the care bestowed onto place by its inhabitants. An authentic geography is “primarily the product of the efforts of insiders, those living in and committed to places, and a geography which declares itself only to those insiders to those willing and able to experience places empathetically” (Relph, 117). Places like Burlöv Center are filled with insiders, who, like my latter two interview subjects, have deep place-attachments to the shopping centre. The quality of historical architecture is not a criterion for place. Rather a place “must be shaped, usually over long periods of time, by the common affairs of men and women. It must be given scale and meaning by their love. And then it must be preserved” (Relph, 78).

CONCLUSION

While the Burlöv Center exhibits characteristics ascribed to ‘non-places’ – global chain stores and highly programmed spaces of consumption – the contradictions within Relph’s arguments limit the designation of ‘placelessness’ to the shopping mall between Malmö and Lund. Setting aside Relph’s distinction between self built and non-self built structures, his own arguments affirm Burlöv Center’s status as a place, where, as described by himself, Massey, and Cresswell, it is imbued with meaning by its users. This conclusion has implications for professionals working in the fields of urban planning, architecture and landscape architecture. While Sieverts maintains a non-judgmental evaluation of these in-between landscapes, he notes that design professionals see “where we live now…as a cultural void” (Sieverts, 23). Peri- and suburban shopping malls like Burlöv Center do not share the same form as historical urban centres, but they are nevertheless vibrant and diverse sites. Sieverts argues that “qualities like cosmopolitanism, intellectual engagement, tolerance, and curiosity are not bound forever to specific, historically determined forms of space” (Sieverts, 38) Focusing on historical forms of urbanity and centrality as the only legitimate pattern of development overlooks an increasingly dominant built form, while perpetuating a bias towards historical inner cities now associated with issues of economic inequality. Instead of criticizing peri and suburban developments as lacking urbanity, urban planners and architects “could perceive a decentralized cultural diversity with new possibilities for cultural activities (Sieverts, 57). Rather than “lamenting the loss of centrality”, design professionals can “recognize a modern network structure as well as the emergence of new forms of order that are better suited to our pluralistic, democratic society than the old centralized modes” (Sieverts, 57). Instead of applying historical standards of urbanity to peri- and suburban sites, design professionals must acknowledge them as legitimate forms, so they can meaningfully respond to their needs. Acknowledging the legitimacy of these shopping malls and authentically responding to them would be in line with Relph’s call for “an approach that is responsive to local structures of meaning and experience, to particular situations and to the variety of levels of meaning of place” (Relph, 146). By embracing the legitimacy of Burlöv Centre as a place, design professionals will be able to “provide conditions that will allow roots and care for places to develop” (Relph 146). While Burlöv Center is privately owned, it is set within a landscape typology that has been largely neglected, and worse, ignored. Responding to Burlöv Center as a place is a necessary step in encouraging its users to continue to “make their own places, and to give those places authenticity and significance by modifying them and by dwelling in them” (Relph, 146).

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theresatherethere · 8 years ago

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Chapter: Mercantile History

Mercantile history is history - it is worthy of memory. Just because something is commercial does not make it antithetical to human meaning.

Most cities began as market places, and still are. Within geography, known as “break and bulk points”.

We have warm feelings toward mom and pop shops, but many malls in today’s suburbs are the centre of communities - and despite being characterized by Walmart and Tim Horton’s, these are gathering places and the setting of peoples’ lives. There is an aesthetic bias towards these places because they do not appear like 19th century cityscapes. There is also a class-bias -- 19th century cities are increasingly unaffordable, and many cannot access these kinds of artisanal commodities.

Honest Ed’s -- how a dollar store became embedded in a city’s history

The pickering flea - a chaotic flea market by the 401, the centre of many peoples’ memories of Pickering from the 90s and early 2000s. Demolished and replaced with a plaza -- if we don’t consider commerce as important, we let it escape us, we neglect these parts of our lives.

Many places in Europe hallowed by tourists are commercial in nature. Eg. The queen’s gallery in Belgium

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theresatherethere · 8 years ago

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Theme: Get beyond the highway

Get beyond the highway.

It’s a phrase that I think holds the most power in finding the essence of places we’ve written off as placeless.

The highway is a form that has the power to shape the way you see and experience a place.

The road necessarily alienates us from our context: before, traveling trough the woods and bush

Because of its limited on and off ramps, and its high speed, people rarely detract from their day-to-day routes on the highway. Unlike a smaller road, where if something interested you, it’s within the realm of possibility that you would turn off your route to see it, on the highway, an interesting building at the side of the road will always remain a curiosity, and will only be explored with intense intentional effort.

With the rise of google maps, the highway has become a powerful force in routes we don’t take often too. On a road trip, we punch in the destination and let google maps direct us to the most efficient route. Fortunately, there’s a “no freeways” option on some GPSs, but how many of us press that button?

Geo-guesser game: vital flaw, everywhere looks the same from the vantage of a road! How would this game be different if we landed in people’s living rooms instead?

Get beyond the highway. If the highway is such a strong force in shaping our perceptions, then choosing not to use it has the power to reshape the way we think about a place.

Misunderstanding Saskatchewan

In Canada, you’ll hear many people talk about Saskatchewan in very simple terms.

“It’s flat”.

But Saskatchewan is so much more than flat! Its prairies dominate its south-central latitudes, but it’s a province that also features cliffs, valleys, rolling hills and other spectacular geographic variety.

The only reason most Canadians dismiss Saskatchewan as being flat is because highway 1, the TransCanada highway, goes through its flattest part. It had to - it was a major infrastructure project that wanted to maximize distance while minimizing cost. Of course it would take the flattest route.

Yet this route has shaped the perception of million of geography of the entire million square metre province. It’s a big place, yet this little strip at its south has done a lot of damage.

Saskatchewan from the Trans Canada Highway

Saskatchewan from elsewhere

In the same way, understanding the US from the interstate will lead to similar conclusions. The interstates make for the most sterile landscapes. The older highways thrive with life, character, placefulness.

Not quite “get beyond the highway”, but an opposite strategy of resistance that is just as important, necessary.

What’s it like, driving down the same stretch of highway everyday?

Is it possible to memorize, familiarize yourself to know the passing scenery?

In a landscape that is so hostile to being remembered, so resistant of connection and familiarity in its passing banality, can you memorize the order - which warehouse comes first, where the rivers are that you’re driving over?

When I drive over a river on the highway, I close my eyes and try and think of all the rushing water moving beneath the concrete trellises and my car at that moment.

(Some may say that rivers’ inherent weaknesses can be dominated by building over them, but can you build under a river?)

I moved to Guelph this year, and the worst part about it is that the 401 is between it and Toronto. It is the most effective way of getting between the two cities, at least until they increase service on the GO train.

I reluctantly took on a life that is more car based, a life, as a downtown cycling activist, would never have imagined! My greatest joy is passing, wooshing through cars stuck in traffic while I’m on my bike.

I get upset with my partner when we’re driving. I’m short tempered, and cynical, faced with my worst nightmare: thousands and thousands and thousands of cars driving round and round, getting no where fast. Especially when 401 traffic hits, I am in the worst mood. “We built a cage for ourselves!” “This is what humans built when they were the freest, the most violent thing in a not explicitly oppressive place”. The traffic, the aggression.

I often unfairly take my rage out on Natalie, who owns that car. I blame her on the frustration I feel, she’s the one who is guilty of car culture and has brought me into bumper to bumper traffic with her.

To calm myself down, I try and get to know the passing scenery, become familiar with it, make connections to it. The thumbnail houses, the progression of warehouses, some under construction. But is it possible?

401 -

I illustrated the length of the 401 in Toronto - must love the highway, we spend so much of our time there. It is an immense repository of memory, the busiest highway in North America. A force! But doesn’t figure in civic mythology.

See project here.

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theresatherethere · 8 years ago

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Case Study: Wellington Strip Mall, Guelph

A look into the specific history of a supposed “non place” -- and attachment people have to commercial spaces, ranging from the mom and pop to global franchises.

INTRO

Wellington Street East, between Gordon and Wyndham is a strange stretch of Guelph — its very own “fast food alley” embedded in the heart of downtown.

Despite being one of the first streets laid out in the city, its built form bears little resemblance to the heritage structures that line Guelph’s other historic avenues.

(Many of Guelph’s street names and configurations have changed since they were first laid out. Wellington stopped at Wyndham, which was then called Huskinsson.)

Instead, fast food chains and concrete strip malls line the street with their backs to the Speed River, hidden behind.

By ignoring the river and building over its past, Wellington Street East has become the kind of strip that can be found anywhere in North America. Despite being one the city’s oldest streets, its urban form and architecture has nothing to do with Guelph. It’s the kind of landscape that prompted Gertrude Stein to coin the phrase “there’s no there, there”.

But is there really no “there” on Wellington Street East?

As a landscape for cars in the middle of a dense, walkable city, the street encourages the subversive act of exploring a place for cars, by foot. By meandering through a street designed to be passed through quickly, and dwelling to observe the world in a place where stopping usually means buying, this walk is an attempt to find meaning along Wellington Street East, a supposed “non-place”.

Cash Money

At the NE corner of Wellington and Gordon a utilitarian brick building

Used to be a Quizno’s - same structure

Is now embellished with a crown of stucco paneling, and a flourished roof line providing dynamism - an intentional exercise. This is architecture.

Shrubbery

Wellington Street East’s vegetative landscape is dominated by turf grass. Open ditches appear at regular intervals, and are covered up with plywood spray painted with “Danger”. Because I visited in March, much of the plazas’ landscaping was in progress, however mid-sized boxwood shrubs and tall grasses appear to be popular choices for the fast food retailers.

Other features of the landscaping include open ditches that appear at regular intervals, covered up with plywood that is spray painted with the word “Danger”.

A&W

Used to be a Taco Bell - with its characteristic stucco, arched windows. Sported the old taco bell logo until it was demolished in 2014.

The only thing that remains is the sign.

Now exhibits characteristics of Googie architecture.

Public Space

No benches can be found along the sidewalks on Wellington Street East. The street is meant to be traveled through, quickly and preferably by car. The lack of benches is a visual cue of the behaviour expected on the street. Not a place to gather, Wellington Street East makes you linger less.

Tim Hortons

Tim Hortons does a good job of asserting gathering space into an otherwise hostile environment for pedestrians, confirming its role as the Canadian commons.

Was renovated recently.

Wendy’s

The kinds of businesses that found their way here are disposable. Instead of growing iteratively and adapting, fast food chains are known to demolish the original structure and start anew.

Refuge in a trashed landscape

Wellington Street East is a trashed landscape, a glorified landfill. In every available nook and cranny is garbage, and behind every building are untidy piles of trash, cinder blocks, steel barrels and slumping picnic benches.

A visual miasma, clutter, garbage, defunct satellite dishes, cinder blocks, oil barrels, cigarette butts, and benches of varying qualities.

Gas Station

On the site of the first covered arena in Guelph, home of the first curling club.

Today, its a gas station.

Behind the gas station, a beautiful grove of Jack Pines provides repose from the business of the street. With a gentle slope, its the perfect vantage point to watch the street go by. Cigarette butts and discarded coffee cups are evidence that others also find rest here.

Site of Dairy Queen too.

South Plaza

Atlases from 1892 show the south side of the street unparalleled, taken up by a wider Speed River.

Perhaps in censoring the most egregious aesthetic and environmental crimes against the river, the corporate fast food chains are exclusively on the north side of Wellington Street, while the south, riverfront stores is a mix of more independent retailers.

Tinted windows, air of subdued privacy for these shops - the nail salons, physiotherapists, sex shop.

Sex shop and money mart used to be many smaller businesses.

And then! A whole, over the sound of traffic you can hear the rushing water - the river Speed claiming the quality of its name.

It’s a mirage - it’s not possible.

A lone bench overlooks the river. A decorative circle of bricks seems to mark the presence of this holy place.

Stand at the road and you can’t hear the river from the sidewalk. The whooshing rush of car traffic dominates the auditory landscape. Below a berm, you can’t see the river either, just a gap, a void in the strip mall with trees poking through. It’s of a different quality.

From the middle of the strip of parking you can hear it.

The grey cinder block strip mall is reminiscent of the heritage limestone that many of Guelph’s historic buildings are constructed with.

The strip mall blocks the sound of the river entirely.

Beat goes on - one of the oldest tenants.

South Plaza II

The site of Guelph Caskets and Victoria Mill.

CONCLUSION

Like so much of Southern Ontario, the development of Wellington Street East was an exercise in disregarding its own history and ecology.

Just beyond the Gordon Street bridge, Wellington Street is one of the gateways into downtown Guelph. But gives the first impression of a “non-place”- a sea of concrete punctuated by fast food chains and and strip malls that could be found anywhere in North America.

EDITED OUT

Guelph has expanded and its southern and northern fringes have developed strip mall alleys in earnest - the one on Wellington, however, is in the middle of the city, and is intertwined with dense urbanism that facilitates ways of moving beyond the car - bus, bike and walking. It is the odd appearance of a car-oriented strip mall alley in the middle of a dense, walkable city that makes Wellington Street East an anomaly. It demands passersby to explore an otherwise car-oriented landscape by foot, and is the site of many well-used bus stops. It is one of the major routes between the Ward and the Downtown and forces you to consider it. It’s not at the fringes but right in the middle of the city.

It’s a mini strip mall alley, embedded in the urban fabric. It invites walking.

And, it’s right on the Speed River. No where else along the river is there such an inappropriate use.

Relationship with Surrey

Wellington has a direct relationship with Surrey Street, just to the north. Many of the fast-food restaurants lots back onto Surrey, and their parking lots and drive-thru lanes can be accessed there. Surrey has evolved into a sort of service lane for Wellington.

At a medium density, the fast food chains on the north side of the street have a porous connection with Surrey Street - the kind of semi-public laneways and short cuts Jane Jacobs celebrated.

There is also a visual relationship with the historic urban form to the north of the street.

South Plaza

Glazed windows pf physiotherapists and nail salon lend air of privacy to strip mall.

The future

Across the street - the future? Facsimile of urbanity - parking still exists, but concealed within. Direct relationship with sidewalk, and much more harmonious relationship with river.

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theresatherethere · 8 years ago

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Theme: movement through space is just movement

My trip to Berlin -- Learning that movement through space is in and of itself meaningless. Taking trains across the Netherlands, each city is the same.

It’s connection - friendship - love that makes space meaningful.

The world is projects - Heidegger - Being toward

“There’s no there there” is self perpetuating: when we feel that somewhere is not worthy, it does not become a subject of care. As soon as we orient ourselves toward the project of meaning making, there’s a there there.

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theresatherethere · 9 years ago

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Case Study: Naples, Florida

I finally made it to my parents’ second home in Naples, Florida.

I was reluctant to go since my last visit in 2004. Their house is located in Fiddler’s Creek, a suburban gated community surrounded by a golf course. Its cookie cutter houses are gussied up with overly marketed street names such as ‘Mahogany Bend’, ‘Hawk’s Nest’ and ‘Isla Del Sol’.

My last visit left me with the impression of a development on the frontier of the ever-diminishing Everglades. I remembered a gated community sandwiched between highways leading from one super-suburban strip mall to another. I remembered epic social stratification and no public realm, with wealthy neighbourhoods isolated behind gates, wholly separate from the nearby shabbier neighbourhoods where service workers live. My lasting impression was of gas-guzzling car dependency everywhere.

Of course, reality is much more complicated than my simplified judgement of Naples when I was 13. I understand that Fiddler’s Creek is a beautiful place, and enjoyed my time there with my parents under the perfect sun. While my impressions from my last visit remain largely true, I didn’t remember that a huge area is devoted to Everglades National Park and the Rookery Bay Reserve, protected from development thanks to social movements in the 1960s. I also observed that though gated communities are pervasive, and indeed embody extreme social and economic stratification, Walmart proved to be a very real space where the area’s diverse population could meet on common ground.

During my explorations (by car, but also by bike with my father), what emerged as the most enlightening feature to understand the geography and logic of Naples was the ever-common “No Outlet” sign.

Driving along the wider arterial, highway-style roads, you encounter many intersecting streets. Most of these intersections are accompanied by a “No Outlet” sign.

Essentially, you can only get to different neighbourhoods via the highway. Every time you enter an area from the highway the “No Outlet” sign signifies that there are a bunch of loopy roads that don’t lead anywhere. The only way out is the way you came in.

The consequence is that there are all these areas that are wonderfully different from each other in terms of income level, architecture and vibes, but are completely physically separated from one another. Each has their own distinct internal logic. Entering each neighbourhood from the highway, you experience incredibly different versions of the South West Florida universe.

Hand drawn conceptualization of “No Outlet”

Functionally, “No Outlet” means that you cannot cut through a neighbourhood as a shortcut. It means that residents have no reason to enter another neighbourhood unless they have an explicit reason to do so. As a result, there is no space for chance encounters and understandings between classes and cultures to occur (the very essence and benefit of urbanity, in my view). The social and economic stratification of the communities in Naples is fixed and ingrained due to the “No Outlet” state of affairs. My mind wanders to one hundred years in the future: will the communities integrate, ever? Will increasingly expensive energy prices break down the walls between these side-by-side but physically barricaded neighbourhoods? A closer investigation of the map reveals a life-line between two neighbourhoods here and there, but mostly between those of the same socio-economic group.

For now, “No Outlet” describes Naples, Florida pretty succinctly. It also makes me grateful for the cross pollination that is enabled by the tangled, twisted and integrated grids of my Toronto. Of course, Toronto is no paradise of unified urbanity itself. Poverty is increasingly concentrated in the city’s inner suburbs, which have similar “No Outlet” style isolated neighbourhoods. (Though not as extreme, the scale of the neighbourhoods and their location far from downtown don’t lend themselves to aimless exploration and chance encounters).

Back in Naples, biking through the above-mentioned nature reserves — up Sea Shell Road and toward the Gulf Coast — I began to wonder if the physical geography of the area could offer any enlightenment as to the “No Outlet” mentality of South West Florida.

The coast of South West Florida, south of Downtown Naples

Dense thickets of mangroves hovering above the water, sandy oak scrub and brackish estuaries mean that Naples’ coast lacks any easily understood linear logic. The coastline is rather a series of loops, curves, isolated bays and pockets connected only by larger waterways — nature’s version of “No Outlet”. Perhaps the logic of the mangrove swamp has seeped into development patterns of Naples and its isolated communities. Or perhaps, more simply, the area was developed too recently, too in the thick of car dependency, to have had the chance to manifest any differently.

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theresatherethere · 9 years ago

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Theme: museum cities

Cities that exhibit the most unique qualities have largely turned into museums of themselves. Arguably the suburbs are a more authentic place than central Amsterdam, Venice, central Paris, and Old Montreal.

Many examples around the world, others include old Stockholm

Sartre’s concept of “being in bad faith” -- a whole city can be in bad faith, when it is pretending to be something else.

Within this theme, an exploration of places like Niagara Falls, Las Vegas and Orlando, that have been known as very specific destinations -- how does this effect sense of place?

There are also places that have become stockpiles for old buildings moved from elsewhere. Known as a Skansen, named after theme park in Stockholm where vernacular buildings from every part of sweden were moved to Stockholm. What does that mean for place? Other examples: Black Creek pioneer village, and Country Heritage Park in Milton ON

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theresatherethere · 9 years ago

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Notes: The Geography of Nowhere (Kunstler)

1993 Edition

Chapter 2

The very essence of our relationship with land in North America is based on money, investments, parcelling land for future investment and no sense of sacredness. Real estate is not home, it’s a commodity. We’ve made the very basis of our livelihood as an investment, a means to an end and not an end in and of itself - but what are we trying to get to, what are we trying to attain? - It’s a disconnect that allows “nowhere’ness” to flood in.

Pg. 30

The Grid - “a transcontinental triumph of the abstract over the particular” - but! Grid Corrections, it’s not perfect, even with the Grid. http://www.gercoderuijter.com/gerco/project/first_photo/1248

http://islandpress.org/book/correction-lines

Not perfect - grid corrections - not abstract, it’s on the earth, even the slightest hill bespeaks the geology and ecology beneath, the developer tries to flatten the landscape.

And in Toronto too - the unwavering grid means lots of bridges over ravines to keep the grid in tact.

The grid created dispersion - a house per every 100 acres rather than a village nucleus with many houses at the centre.

Pg 32

Baroque rigidity, not sensitive to place - placelessness was inherent in land division (like Toronto’s grid not sensitive/respecting to topography).

Pg. 29 - the era’s neoclassical spirit, look into abstract neoclassicism.

Pg 33 “Cartesian montonoy” of the grid.

“US cities flourished almost solely as centres for business” as opposed to spiritual, civic buildings and opposing interests of military, ecclesiastical, politial and culture motives.

39 - “The urban culture that this rapid development spawned was provisional and insecure. Private property as supreme meant that public realm (roads) not as important as plots themselves.

43 - Suburban house archtectype emulated English country manor, an essential cultural origin defines supposed placeless suburbia - you can trace its roots.

44 - Andrew Jackson Downing - father of suburban US protoype - Cottage Residences, 1842 - Suburbs come from a very specific lineage!

48 - Llewelyn Park is the original suburb, near Riverside Illinois. Had curvilieanr superblocks, but a finer grain

50 - Engineering, standardized turning radii as the author of motony! (Had a similar realization during my Landscape Arhictecture construction class, lessons from Larry and the University of Guelph).

51 - They were not towns, they were real estate ventures that lent an aura of permanence by way of historical architecture and pictureque landscaping.

54 - Describing wooden framed houses outside of Chicgao’s city limits - now lovely and urbane and heterogeneious and coveted within city limits? “ballon frame housing - “After the blaze, a new city fire law orohibited wooden buildings altogether, prompting a rush by speculative builders to put up blocks of cheap wooden houses for working people beyond the city limits... it made for vast monotonous neighbourhoods of tiny, single gamily dwellings lacking both in rural charm and urban variety, and with no civic design features but gridded streets”.

55 - the Suburbs were places without economies of their own - still the case? No! Brampton.

56 - “Growth...consumed open land like craxy, and included nothing in the way of civic features, no town centres, no quares, artful groupings of buildings... little consideration of public realm expect as conduits for vehicles.

57 - Illusion of dreamy timelessness stage craft - proved to be nothing more lasting than parcels of real estate. “When successive waves of land developers came along and gobbles up the surrounding countryside, they destroyed the rural setting that had provided all the charm. When the automoobile entered the scene... it made a mockery of the suburban ideal. Afterward, all the eements that had gone into creating an illusion of dreamy timelessness - the rampbling wooded streets, tge deep lawns, the fanciful houses with thier storybook turrets - were unmasked as mere stagecraft.

59 - because... Modernism - “all human aspirations into a box” - divorced buildings from history, promoted urbanism that destroyed age old social arrangements, failed to respect limits of growth

60-61 - Moralistic notions of modernism - good intentions

62 - Toronto always decries that it has “no history” - it’s a political atitude, unfounded (every where has history, is a there). Henry Adams on the Chicago World’s Fair “As a scenic display, Paris had never approached it...The world had never witnessed so marvelous a phantasm...One saw here a third-rate town of half a million people without history education, unity or art, and with little capital”

78 - LeCorbusier’s “brand of Urbanism” exerted bland monotony - the “only model for urban development in post war USA” (Modernism is the thing with no history it’s an affect, a position, it’s not real!).

79 - Urban Renewal - carte blanche facilitated by land development scheme. Like CityPlace - suburbs in the sky, the suburbanization of urban space. “From the late forties to through the eighties, thousnads of urban redevelopment in the Radiant CIty mold went up all over America... the defects of the concept quicky became apparent - for instance, that the space between highrises floating in a superblock became instant wastelands, shunned by the public.

80 - condos blandness the result of Mies van der Rohe’s Less is More’ness? Are Toronto’s condo’s modernist?

81 - Robert Venturi’s Complexity: a Contradition - challenged modernism “less is a bore” - his interests lay in “the creeping crud architecture found in sprawling all over the urban fringes and rural hinterlands - subdivisions, shopping centres and commercial strips - “ugly and ordinary” (as opposed to modernism heroic and original).

82 - Also Venturi’s next book Learning from Las Vegas - “rather than struggle against this stuff, the correct strategy was to ‘illuminate the mess.. by first particiapting in it’...” not buildings anymore (cinder block sheds), but signs, communication “Parking lots were fascinating ,the vast spaces between the buildings were fascinating, the luridly painted statues ringing Ceasar’s Palace, the highway, the curbing, even the zone of rusting beer cans” at the ragged edge of town had something to reward the patient observer”

RESEARCH: groups that subvert the aesthetics of banal suburbia - 100 ways to modify your city exhibit at CAA

83 - Venturi: Irony as a trick for relieving inevitable banality of architecture...where there was nothing redeeming, simply a parody and hardly a solution for banal architecture and bad urbanism in USA - a precedent to Post Modernism? - PoMo a joke? “decorations covering same old boxes”.

84 - Modernism and successor PoMO “failed to create a social utipia, but they did tremendous damage to the physical setting for civilization”

86 - Cars were “ a machien that promised liberation from daily bondage of place”.

93 - Cars as communication network

101 - US corporate juggernaut culture an enterprise destructive of cultural traditions and physical settings.

104 - Levitttown - Veteran housing authorty offered guaranteed mortgages without down payments

105 - “less a dream than a cruel parody” - let’s revisit, is it so bad? “It was neither the country, nor the city - it was no place”. What is it now? Commerce? Variation? “combined the worst elements of the city and country and none of the best elements”. “Nature had been obliterated” -- is it back? Use this chapter ti explire the thin layer the suburbs are laced over ecology, and the ways ecology has reasserted itself after 100 years of entropy.

107 - Off ramps as villages - where the highway interchanges meet...

108 - Shopping malls at interchanges replacing main streets - but now it’s reversed! Queen W is an outdoor mall while gallerica, grrard Square, is the organic village/main street (and malls at interchanges too?)

111 - building projects as government stimulators of economy - no other reason = no culture. The places the built were no places.

112- Written in 1993 - “how can we make a transition to a saner was of living. To do so wil certainly require a transformation of the physical setting for our civilation, a remaking of the places where we live and work” - a call for retrofitting suburbia, a nice transition.

114 - Engineering standards disreagrd for design and specifcity of place - designed for war situations ,packaged and sold to other municiaplities, why all subdivisions look and feel the same - and now with CAD all condo look the same too! What has emerges as unique in these places since their construction? Research modification of soviet blocs in different countries: derrek Drummond

114 “Human habitat, that in all likeliehood, will not be able to be usable for much longer” that so? It’s a perfect model for homesteading, transition to conversation about retrofitting suburbia.

114 - “remains to be seen whether its compents can be recycled, converted to other uses, or moved, or even whether the land beneath all the asphalt, concrete and plastic can be salvaged” - can it?

115 - “The suburban streets of almost all postwar housing developments were desinged so that a car can comfrotably maneuver at 50 miles per hour - no matter what the legal speed limit is. The width and curb rations were set in stone by traffic engineers who wanted to create streets so ultrasafe (for motorists) that any moron could drive them without wrecking his car” - cynicism of Kunstler’s day...

117 - Suburban landscape: “no nesnual or spiritual reward”

118 - “the leasr understood cost to [autodepenendancy] has been the scarficie of a sense of place: the idea that people and things exist in some sort of contintuity, that we belong to the world physically and chronologically, and that we know where we are” - converation about making connections ot highways, to suppose non places - feeling nostalgic about a higheay as subversion, it’s a legtiimage connection to a place (close your eyes and try to feel the water rushing beneath). This is all especially true if you’re stalled in stop and go traffic, and are stopped, at least you have time to look around!)

119 - Connections - “the present arrangement has certainly done away with sacred places, places of casual public assembly, and places of repsoe. Otherwise there remains only the shopping plazas, supermarkets, and the malls” - these are scared places of repose etc. - human carve meaning out of anything.

119 - sanitized malls - no downtown and malls are decyaing (sheridan mall in TO)

120 - “The shortcomings of mall as private spaces - no right etc. no freedom of assembly - “where, then, are you going to have your public assmebly. On the median strip of interstate 87?” YES! Significant public realm, blocking a communication corridor, the only place people will listen, while designated protest zones downtown and in squares suck the menaing out of protests/ - The Space of true disruption - Black Lives Matter and Idle No More.

120 - “Real US main streets developed organically, ove time, included both the new and the old, high and low rent” - no longer! Now space, after 30 plus years of develeopment, have developed and grown organixally - let’s reexamine them. “The only merchants who could afford such rents, it turned out, were the large chain store operations...”who had the financial muscle and the proven sales volume to enter into long term leases” Not so much now that they’re decaying - mall in Dallas! “Invariably, these chains stores destroted local businesses outside the mall, in doing so destoryed local economies” - the very same can be said no of downtown development. Kunstler goes on anti - car diatribe, Chapter 6, Joyride - we listened - now unintended consequences... - the economies of homoegenization aren’t dependant on urban form - the very same qualities of the suburban placelessness can exist, thrive even in urban spaced. Jane Jacobvs spawned rise of downtowns, but Capitalism’s creative destruction, it was inevtable that the fringe would be banished downtown and pop up elsewhere. The endless cycle of investment, collapse and revitalization. -- Dallas mall.

120 - “Remains to be seen how the shopping malls of the US might evolve”

122 - Celebrants of suburbia - JB Jackson - “I find myself reocndiled to a great deal of ugliness, a great deal of commonness, and I don’t object to it at all” - author’s interview - Kunstler is elitist’ish.

Pierce Lewis - categorized every last parcitualr of the suburban landscape.

123 - “Totem objects” - houses are fake totems to community to past. Fake bargeboard and towers and such.

125 - “The freeway is not part of the urban fabric. Rather, it is superimposed onto it.. nothing survives at it’s margins”... Under Gardiner, London UK using it so well, New Orleans under highway fest. It is possible!

126 - Inner city houses mundane - It’s the context that matters - it would be illegal to build nice urban streets today.

129 - On garages “Without alleys, garages have moved to the front of the house in America. As a matter of design, the garage in front of the house is a disaster. The gigantic door represents a blank wall to the street...When you consider that every house on the street has a simialr gaping blacnk facade, you end up with a degrarded street as a well as degarsded architecture”.

131- There is little sense in having arrived anywhere because every place looks like no place in particular.

134 - Las Vegas - buitl for gangsters? (there’s a there, there?)

135 - USA has become one big stoage depot that incidentily contains other things”

136 - empty parking lots are most common little dead no places of the post war streetscape

137 - Why not just accwpt the little fake church... because it’s a no place!”

139 - “A freestanding brown anodized aluminium plinth topped by the company’s charasteric logo occupies an otherwise useless grassy median between the parking lot and the street - another little no place” naming it such is disempowering but naming it is empowering ! 99 % invisible.

New ideas need ugly buildings: https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/04/19/in-praise-of-ugly-old-buildings-keenan.html

163 - enduring legacy of balloon frame - turned housing into an industry - those who built them didn’t live in them. Houses without affection. Lead to first speculative subdivisions - (but now beloved and valuable, or still a commodity? - a little bit of both).

166 - the places they stand are just different versions of nowhere because these houses exist in no specific relation to naything expect the road and power cable” - how bout now, after entropy? The myth of the original.

167 - TV/Technology leading to a demise in landscape - “the life of the house correspondingly turns inward” - exyended to entire landscape now with handheld devices.

169 - We prefer sumbols to reality. Evenetually, those symbols become reality we must respond to however.

173 - Constant movement means no attachment to placed - a debased relationshop with “here”.

177 - reflections on Schuylerville - waxes poetic/romantic about its past. But speaks of district as “colourfil and rough, as any district fiull of transient labourers is apt to be” - transience! How is that better? No original!

185 - antidoe to small town (and the community it implies_ but it doesn’t have to look like a little urban village (bourgeois taste culturee) -

186 - community is not something you can have, it’s a living organism based on a web of interdependencies. Wendel Barry “ ‘Most important, it must be generally loved and competently cared for by its people, who, individually identigty their own interest with the interst of their neighbours” - possible in suburban form. And of course opposite is true: Pheonix.

The small towns died, but the suburbs have since developed their own culture and attempt to find community has homogoenized downtowns.

Is it bad that we’re unrooted? We’ve lost connection and groundedness, and as a resultm fetishize a certain kind of rootedness, But we can be connected and move on.

189 - Kunstler laments rotting of cities in US, but what would he think of them now? And their inequality?

198 - A collecion of old buildings - Greenfield Village by Henry Ford - “there was no original Greenfield VIllage to resote. Rather, it as articially assembled, as it were, out of bits and pieces, abd given an artificial name”.

211 - “Mircale mile” on Wilshire blvd, Los Angeles, USA’s first great highway strip - A HISTORY!

213 - in La, very pattern of the city is the underlying problem, and the cirt is stuck with it... is it? “Nobody can reasonably propose how to rearrange the metropolis or downsize it or retrofit it”....

219 - “As if driving 1500 miles from another corner of the nation was not sufficient (and it may not be, for the long distance can travel on an interstate is literallu like going nowhere fast)”.

241 - Community is economy

RESEARCH - bio of Yi Fu Tuan - was he responding to Placelesness?

Everything is a reaction, if you can react to it, it’s a thing, right? Kunstler’s critqieue of things only designed to sell you as fast as possible now condos and lifestyle marketing. While the suburbs ferments, and decays, the real non places are those depitcted in condo renderings.

245 - We’ve forgotten - we can make our own: “A further consquewnce is that 2 generation have hrown up and matured in America without experiencing what it is like to live in a human habitat of quality. We have lost so much culture in the sense of how to build things well.”

246 - “Enough people move to one side of the raft and suddenly, it flips” - didn’t anticiapte wealth disparity of new order.

247 - “Today’s pish suburbs could be tomorrow’s slums”

249 - A field that barely exists - the art of making good places --- now it really really exists! Project for Public Spaces etc.

254 - He praises new urbanism - but its discontents...

Research Leon Kerier - return to Seaside - how’s it going there?

258 - Traditional Neighbourhood Developement is still building more in greenfileds.

Research Mashpee Massachussets, retrofiiting strip mall.

Only the rich can afford transit: http://newyork.thecityatlas.org/lifestyle/developed-area-rich-public-transport-ways-city/

http://www.thecoast.ca/halifax/two-decades-of-world-class-delusion/Content?oid=3930595

http://www.calthorpe.com/publications/pedestrian-pocket-book-new-suburban-design-strategy

262 - Laguna West - “The notion of creating real places is the chllange of the 90s” and still - also, can you make a place, just design it out of thin air The real solutions have happened. Placemaking, contrived, failure? Using past too much as model. Adresses this: traditional, cor principles vs

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