Urban Impressions

Musings on Urban South Africa

From a post-Mozambique perspective, South Africa has been quite a show. First and foremost, arriving in suburban Pretoria a month ago was a jarring return to our dear industrial world where everything you could possibly want- but don’t really need – is neatly arranged on a bright, quasi-sterilized supermarket shelf. Far from the endearing, overgrown decay of Pemba, I was now surrounded by well-manicured laws, tidy suburban homes, regularly cleaned surfaces, plastic-looking late-model cars, faux-stucco strip malls, theme restaurants and shopping centres of such scale and garish lighting that they could easily double as space stations. The arid hills here flow with wide freeways and give off a hazy orange hue from their coverage of neatly packed Mediterranean tile rooftops. Far from the elite lifestyle on offer in some other such ‘developing’ countries, where the illusion of hermetic affluence is easily shattered by shoddy construction, poor maintenance and often farcical attempts at cultural imitation, this was the real deal in all its mundane, mall-hopping, pudgy middle-class glory. Suburban Pretoria is clean, polished, well paved and surprisingly designed. Surrounded by moneyed, post-modern office parks and an environment engineered into the oblivion of sprinkler systems and planted trees, I could be forgiven for believing I was relishing in the urban vistas of one of the warmer, more arid corners of a certain Anglo-Saxon country with a heavy penchant for car-dependent sprawl. 

Well, at least at first glance. 

The more I paid attention, however, the more I lost those superficial cultural bearings so effortlessly provided by conspicuous drive-in consumption. Soon enough, glitches in the program started to appear. Like rebellious single frames spliced into a film reel, apparitions conflicting with my perception of this neat suburban setting would wander into view. A truck would rumble by belching smoke, its flatbed a pile of worn out black workers in tattered clothing lying on disorganized construction materials. At every red light, black men would wander the lanes of vehicles filled with white faces, hawking their random assortment of wares. Alongside the car traffic of soccer moms and commute-weary office workers, white minibuses packed with black people careened in and out of road shoulders to drop off and pick up passengers. People would speak to me in Afrikaans before my look of confusion informed them it wouldn’t take the conversation very far.

I soon noticed that everyone on foot was black, while almost everyone speeding by in a car was white. And pedestrian traffic was hardly bustling: in this automobile haven mostly devoid of sidewalks, people on foot wandered in isolation on dusty road shoulders and through parking lots. It is likely they were somewhere on their journey between a minibus and a job as a cashier, waiter, gas station attendant or housekeeper; needless to say, pretty much everyone in any sort of service job is black. I know emphasizing the race issue vis-à-vis South Africa is treading some very tired and clichéd waters, but nevertheless it really struck me as to how visible a divide there is in suburban Pretoria.

It’s also not very hard to notice that absolutely everything is walled, fenced, gated and guarded. “Armed Response” signs seem to be one of the more popular posters in these parts, doors need to be double-locked and windows mostly barred. Security complexes are an obvious lifestyle trend, with razor wire and electrified fencing adding a subtle decorative touch to any nice, upstanding home. The suburban dream isn’t quite the same when your veranda door is doubled by an iron gate and your garden wall topped with deadly wire. The newspapers are full of reports on crime, public outrage about crime, political response to crime, debate over the real extent of crime and…well, I’m sure you get the idea. Apart from any hasty and uninformed opinion I have made for myself, it is clear this country suffers both from a serious crime problem and an obsession with security bordering on the ludicrous, to the point when a guard at the exit of a parking lot will make drivers turn their cars off and back on in front of him to demonstrate they haven’t hotwired it. 

After some observation, Pretoria in my eyes has thus changed from a prosperous manifestation of the suburban dream into something slightly more disconcerting. Interaction with public space for white faces (mine included) revolves around driving between walled compounds and sheltered malls, security concerns logically translated into a fear of walking. It’s a place where enjoyment is a largely private endeavour relegated to backyards and restaurants, and where picnics in gorgeous botanical gardens are witness to the regular rounds of security guards. The spaces outside doors and walls are left somewhat derelict, the domain of a black population which quietly and separately navigates this tidy automobile world on foot or by minibus. And it is this disconnect which is perhaps most jarring to me: the multitude of people wandering about are very obviously of an income-level far below the prosperity of their surroundings, leaving my mind at odds on how exactly to read these neighbourhoods. Perhaps this is one of the enduring legacies of apartheid planning: the less-than-stellar living conditions into which a large percentage of the population are crammed lie far out of sight of these leafy suburbs, where the black townships are acknowledged but not experienced as a reality just down the highway.  And then, lest I thought I was getting even a bit of a handle on what Pretoria was about, I ventured into the city centre to pick up a friend at the bus terminal. As her arrival from Mozambique was delayed for an hour, I left my car under the somewhat watchful eye of parking lot security and ventured off in search of a newspaper and a cold drink. As it was rush hour and there were throngs of people moving about, I feared little for my safety and felt relieved to be going for an actual walk in an urban area. It only took a few moments to dawn on me that I was the only white person around, a sharp contrast from the prevalence of pasty faces such as my own in the air-conditioned consumer environment of the suburbs. Here was a wholly different urban world, one where the bustle of informal street vendors was steadily creeping in on the landscape of stark, late 20^th century concrete towers left behind by the flight of wealth to greener pastures. Traffic was erratic as minibuses and markedly more worn cars weaved across lanes with both ease and reckless abandon. It was like unfettered street life had sprung up again amidst the ruins of a once rigid central business district.

I guess in this sense Pretoria is not unlike many other urban areas the world over where suburban flight has been the name of the game, only here the whole process seems heavily accentuated by the loaded history of skin colour, with two rather distinct realities living beside each other much more than they really intermingle. As a very wise woman once said, “South Africa truly is the rainbow nation: it has lots of colours, but they don’t mix.” I should say, though, that I was warned Pretoria would have this sort of impression on me. I was told it the most staid, conservative and, well, white corner of the country, and that I should not base my opinion of urban South Africa solely on impressions gained in its suburban enclaves. It was in this spirit that I was excited to embark upon my weeklong trip to Cape Town, which received glowing praise and recommendation from pretty much anyone questioned.

And Cape Town did its very best not to disappoint. Found in what must be one of the more naturally beautiful urban locations in the world, here was an actual city. Forget comparison merely with other urban South African centers, this place could hold its own in any international competition. Nestled in between the Atlantic Ocean and the stunning heights of Table Mountain, I found the city reminiscent of Vancouver in its rugged beauty and San Francisco in its hilly bohemia, topped off by a bright dash of Mediterranean sensibilities (think stubby palm trees and flashy sports cars) and British colonial architecture. Accordingly, as would fit the environment, the place basked in a liberal, laidback feel paying homage to the hippy era with lots of dreadlocks, funky shops and cafes, VW Beetles and some main urban drags which manage to be bright and clean yet still enticingly unkept around the edges. People crowded the major streets and, at least in the centre, there was little divide according to skin colour. Unlike Pretoria, this felt like much more of an organic urban centre, one where unspoken lines weren’t so clearly defined to a relatively uninformed outsider such as myself.

Beautiful neighbourhoods replete with quirky bungalows and coffee shops just begged to be explored, as did the many mountain paths and peaks which offered stunning views of the city, the ocean and beyond. Bo-Kaap, the traditionally Malay district, was a quiet explosion of brightly coloured homes perfectly contrasted against the deep blue sky. The V&A Waterfront was typical of that popular collision between old docklands and private-led development so popular the world over: it’s a sanitized marine-themed consumer bonanza inhabiting the shell of old industry, packed with tourists and relishing in the authenticity of some functioning docks, seagulls and the salty Atlantic air. Given the city’s location and natural beauty, Cape Town is also inevitably home to some spectacularly moneyed real estate. The Cape Peninsula sports some majestic homes saddling what little space there is between ocean and mountains, many quite oddly designed to provide maximum value in terms of views. Similarly, post-modern condominium towers of brick and glass add to the city’s polished, well-kept image. Like any self-respecting ‘happening’ urban area, large windows of strange logos and carefully designed minimalist furniture are framed in the rough exterior of old industrial structures. It’s a place that very evidently relishes in its hip sophistication, where you can feel you are part of something trendy just by being there. But, as happened with Pretoria, when I paid closer attention some things didn’t quite click- some of the picture-perfect frames started to skip a beat. Outside of the cluster of central streets, the pedestrian bustle gave way to slightly eerie quiet. Amidst the nice homes and industry-to-condo conversions wandered a small but steady mass of people visibly down on their luck, wearing tattered clothing or huffing on bags of glue. Turn a random corner, and the street life that makes Cape Town so refreshing after Pretoria gives way to an uncomfortable urban emptiness in which public spaces are once again somewhat unsettling to the visitor. And tucked somewhat more tastefully into the bright and cheery surroundings is the same omnipresence of CCTV cameras, wired fencing and promises of armed response. While substantially more welcoming and walkable than Pretoria, Cape Town nevertheless appears similarly hostage to crime and security, although admittedly in a more palatable and visually attractive manner. It is perhaps telling that the areas which are bustling and lively seem to have fluorescent-vested security guards on every second corner. 

The pieces of the strange puzzle that urban South Africa presented to me started fitting together more clearly when I visited some of the townships in the Cape Flats, to be found quite far east of the city centre. The transition is sudden and unexpected: from the humming lanes of a smooth expressway pouring down the gorgeous lower slope of Table Mountain, a routine off-ramp drops you into a landscape of overcrowded corrugated iron and a tangled sea of haphazard electrical wires, potholed roads and decrepit old public housing blocks. If I didn’t despise the terminology so much, I would probably echo the chorus that describes this transition as a stark shift between the upper-class “First World” and the scruffy street reality of the urban “Third World”.  Streets are crowded and busy, with informal shops cramping the roadside and its denizens. These were chaotic urban hubs in their own right complete with services, supermarkets and buzzing bus stops, kicking up a dusty haze that relegated Table Mountain to the horizon of some other reality. After the vacuous and manicured suburban automobile worlds I had become somewhat accustomed to, I was hit by the sensory bustle of an overcrowded place where life and commerce happen largely in public, on the dirty streets and built into the cluttered sidewalks. Coming from Mozambique, this was an urbanized, industrialized and much denser version of what I had come to accept as reality over the past eight months. I would have felt like I was back in the normal swing of things- if I didn’t feel so uncomfortably like a complete and gawking outsider, that is. Despite well-publicized and serious social problems like rampant crime, these places nevertheless seemed full of life to me, for better or worse the result of people being largely left to their own devices outside the rigid formalized world of good infrastructure and strong state regulation.

To my non-South African sensibilities, the mere fact that these places existed in such mundane, daily proximity to the Cape Town of wine bars, bright streets and polished condos is slightly mind-boggling. But I guess that is, ultimately, one of the joys of traveling for me: to assault my sensibilities, to mess up my bearings and challenge my culturally embedded notions of what is true, normal or ‘natural’. To me, the night and day difference between wealthy suburb and township that I have briefly seen here borders on the insane, while to many South Africans I’m sure it is quite simply that thing called reality.

Another, related joy of traveling for me is trying to figure out why the particulars of a place might enthrall, confuse or shock me. While I’ve only been in South Africa for a month now, and can hardly claim any intelligent conclusions on its state of affairs, I’ve certainly begun to realize why it makes me often feel so out of place and disjointed. And strangely enough, it donned on me looking down on the vast urban masses of Cape Town, Pretoria and Johannesburg from an airplane window: the landscapes of urban South Africa are somewhat the reverse of what I would expect from a place where such a large majority of inhabitants are considered ‘poor’. Instead of elite enclaves of wealth surrounded by a sea of shantytowns, these cities instead appear to me as large expanses of suburban wealth patched together with township enclaves of highly dense urbanized poverty. Because, in the end, suburbanized wealth takes up a lot of space: big homes, lots of tress, big lawns, huge shopping malls, swimming pools, golf courses, expansive gated communities, tidy farmland and gorgeous vineyards. So from a purely spatial perspective, in this way it’s quite easy for the large majority of an urban area to look well off even if the numerical majority of its inhabitants are anything but. It’s not very hard for a few million relatively people to take up a large expanse of space. Following this, you can have a large, poor majority crammed into intensely overcrowded conditions which take up much less space, confined to more marginal areas easily avoidable by those living on the other side. The trick behind the illusion is thus quite simple: have the large, unfortunate majority of the population crammed into a very small percentage of the total land area, and the rest of the place can wallow in the well-trimmed green of quiet suburban contentment. Well, gated contentment that is.

And in a way this all explains why I experience such uneasy collisions of realities in this place, realities that to me belong in quite separate countries and continents rather than adjacent and even on top of each other. While the large majority of the population might still live crammed into overcrowded and rather desperate urban conditions, they can go wherever they want to work, walk or loiter about. And so you have two realities that seem to be grudgingly moving along beside each other but not necessarily together, with one of them retreating behind gates and guards, away from public spaces and their real or perceived threat of crime and the unknown other. With apartheid being such a ludicrous attempt at controlled environments and social engineering, a nice example of modernist planning gone horribly wrong, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that its gradual and continuing unraveling produces such strange and slightly unsettling landscapes. 

Patrick Bennett is spending a lot more time in a car than he is used to.

Reconnecting with the World

There is nothing quite like the shock of rejoining the urban world after months of existence in a quiet little isolated town. From the plane window Dar Es Salaam spread out before my eyes, with its cluster of highrises crowded up against the coastline and its spiraling mass of tin sheet rooftops shaping the landscape as far as I could see. Miniature-sized traffic snarled intersections in dense settlements, industrial silos and petroleum tanks poked out of the fray, humanity scurried around in its self-made concrete world- all these were reminders of a reality I knew existed but had forgotten how to digest with my own senses. Disembarking at the airport, I suddenly felt reconnected to the ebbs and flows of the world, a connection that is often rather tenuous during my current stint in northern Mozambique. A crowd mobbed the visa application windows in the terminal, with passports flailing and US dollars waving. As I struggled to get noticed by the immigration officer amidst what seemed like half the population of the Comoros Islands just off a plane, I could feel my excitement rise. Crowds. Bustle. Energy. Life. Welcome home, urbanite.

From the airport parking lot, my taxi pulled onto a roadway larger than I had seen in months, into a flow of battered dala dalas and rumbling trucks. The smell of diesel hung in the air as the roadside offered a steady string of disheveled industrial estates and warehouse size commercial ventures. Intersections were a dusty jumble of market stalls overloading the corners, people darting across the lanes, and immobile vehicles purring in line as the crossing road flowed by. As the taxi waited far back from the frontlines of the traffic light (a traffic light!), hawkers streamed down the lanes of vehicles and by my taxi, selling everything from oranges, newspapers and snacks to globes and a wall clock. As we snaked our way from intersection to intersection, soon we were in the city center, surrounded by busy streets, worn-looking concrete office complexes and people in business suits darting down the sidewalks. From my perspective at that particular moment, Dar was an urban explosion, a place of previously unimaginable bustle and energy. I guess northern Mozambique will do that to a man. I was enthralled by the chaotic dance of the rush hour dala dalas, packed to the brim and swerving liberally about the way.

I found Dar a hard place to read in the few days I was there, as my impressions of the place were dominated by the mere fact that I was back in a city. So whatever one may think of the place, to me it represented a wealth of urban delights; a helping of crowds, consumerism and bright lights wrapped in a sun-baked, dusty package. This overwhelming sensation was furthered by the disorientation encountered in a new place when one has no sense of direction, and every experience is an isolated island in unrecognizable surroundings reached by taxi. Raucous barbecue restaurants, bamboo garden bars, roadside stalls for sampling the local moonshine, darkened discos where the guards try to get you to buy them drinks; I had no clue where I was, but I was loving it.

Dar offered the sort of sprawling, rudderless urban form that emerges when density and a moneyed class combine with a glaring absence of public infrastructure and zoning enforcement. Randomly located islands of wealth scatter among shack-lined dirt roads in suburban areas, sometimes kilometers away from the small portion of the city that is bank towers and boulevards. Guarded and enclaved, you can enjoy your pastries, your coffee, your Subway or your South African chain restaurant in a comfortable bubble of wealth and expats, gated off from the dusty jumble outside. These environments offered me a chance to pretend I was home for a few minutes, wandering down hospital-like aisles of useless food products and junk food calling to me in their shiny packaging. Of course, the fantasy was tempered slightly by the darkness of a quasi-permanent power outage.

In my experience of this corner of the world, limited to fragments of Mozambique and Tanzania, I’ve had to readjust my ideas regarding the display of wealth. There seem to be no really wealthy areas per say; everywhere the general infrastructure is shoddy if existent at all, the environment raw and unkept. Rather, there is only private wealth, concrete block homes with grated windows behind walls; isolated shopping centers with expensive wares suffocated by shacks, taxi stands and garbage-strewn streets; expensive-looking 4WDs navigating bumpy dirt roads. Apart from a few major boulevards and a basic city grid in the city center, urban layout is left to its own chaotic yet dynamic devices. Suburban sub-divisions appear in dusty fields next to slums; highrise apartments grow randomly from the landscape miles from anywhere; generators rumble away. Public services are barely provided, and little expected. Everyone who can afford a car drives and parks anywhere, creating congestion on roads that cannot handle either activity.

So long have I focused my interest in the urban on skylines and transportation systems, on panoramic views of landmarks and highways of flowing tail lights. This might work to some extent in the ‘industrialized’ urban areas of North America or East Asia, for example, where we have built up our environments on such an enormous scale that the citizen is lost amongst showcase urban skylines and elevated highway concrete pillars. My time in southern Africa has been helping me to overcome this bias, and understand the city more as a sum of its people than its infrastructure. It’s not that difficult really, since public infrastructure is on the rather sparse side in this corner of the planet. If it exists, it is likely falling into disrepair or under permanent construction.

So Dar wasn’t so much a landscape of physical urbanity as it was a swirl of Kiswahili, people in business suits, drunk mzees, young south Asians in suped up cars, or perhaps the entrancing call to prayer right outside the window. It was having access to Chinese food and drinking ice coffee at a drive-up diner. It was joining the expat crowd on a beautifully situated suburban terrace with waves crashing against the rocks below; it was dancing in random one-room clubs to all the same music I’ve been hearing for the past three months in Pemba (apparently, Sean Paul is taking over the world). It was getting a wash and a haircut at a salon, the first time hot water had graced my head in longer than I can remember. It was just watching the daily lives of traders and hawkers as they sat outside their shops and stalls. It was navigating the bustle of faces and stories on a sidewalk in the city centre, or maybe dashing across a roundabout, the vehicles too caught in traffic to make their usual effort to hit pedestrians.

Dar Es Salaam was my reintroduction to the urban world that we as humans are flocking to in ever-larger numbers despite the fumes, crowds, grinding traffic and strained infrastructure this environment increasingly offers worldwide. Seeing the city from the air, I was reminded of something I read in Mike Davis’ Planet of Slums:

The cities of the future, rather than being made out of glass and steel as envisioned by earlier generations of urbanists, are instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks, and scrap wood. Instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven, much of the twenty-first-century urban world squats in squalor

This is perhaps an overstatement concerning Dar- I found on a whole the city was bright, cheery and mostly devoid of the bleak urban cynicism that clouds much larger, more dangerous and more dysfunctional cities. My shock at being back in an urban environment aside, Dar was less of an onslaught than it was a pleasant encounter at a manageable level. Nevertheless, its disregard for the trappings of planning and infrastructure, its jumbled landscape of shacks, gated malls, SUVs and loitering hawkers, reminded me once again that our standard conceptions about life emanating from realities such as Canada are perhaps off the mark. We like to think of the planned, organized city as the standard for humanity, a state attainable by those ‘backward third world’ countries if only they would stop being so corrupted, poor and chaotic. When every society eventually gets its act together and emulates the Euro-American world, as the Economist tells us they should, they will join the modern world of glass and steel through the inevitable march of economics and progress.

Somehow, I’m less and less convinced of this. The world of glass and steel is not so much a natural outcome of human progress as it is a forced landscape of state grandstanding and real estate speculation, hermetic worlds built for a quasi-imaginary ‘global elite’ by sweeping the unsightly masses aside. Maybe those of us emanating from the more regulated areas of the ‘developed’ world need to stop seeing ourselves as the human standard, the shining example, and come to terms with that fact that perhaps we are the anomaly on this planet, an over-regulated fluke in a sea of tin shacks, power outages and raw human interaction. Lest this make one overly pessimistic about the human condition, a place like Dar Es Salaam demonstrates that, even in these nooks of the planet labeled ‘backward’ or ‘poor’ by arrogant self-appointed centers of power, there is much life, culture and energy to be celebrated. Where the resources and coordination necessary for gleaming urban mega-projects are but a distant dream, the people shine through and make the urban experience a fascinating one.

Patrick Bennett misses traffic and other urban delights.

Impressions of Urban Tanzania

        As you step off the plane, the stale taste of recycled air is supplanted by the sweet smell of burning brush and so Dar es Salaam has, with a subdued intimation of what will come, begun its assault on your senses.  As you languidly unfold from long hours spent sitting in the ordered universe of your assigned seat, you proceed farther from the world it represents and the city begins to push a little less gently as the customs lines pile up behind imperious bureaucracy, but still you remain in a limnal place, even as you notice the tang of body odor when those in line crush closer in anticipation of the city beyond the security.  Exhale deeply and it comes to you, the new city, Africans press against the glass waiting for arrivals just as at any other airport in the world but here, the similarity to what you know just serves to sharpen your impression of the place’s foreignness.

      And Tanzania is foreign to little western sensibilities and no place more foreign than the bus stands where chaos erupts at the smallest provocation where each man clutching his bread to sell waits, tense with poverty, the need to eat, and crouch and burst after the bus, slap its sides, get attention before it stops, thrust what you have to sell deep into the window with desperate voice implore and hope that the window doesn’t bargain too hard, and when that bus dried up, sprint off for another just arriving, slap the sides, get their attention, and should you, a passenger, disembark, one foot on the ground, soon joined and jostled and pressed by the bodies of so many more as you read the raw need in their eyes, and push your way through the slime, officious, unctuous abuse, not the peace you want nor the ease of travel you expected, throw a coin for a boiled egg, but no more, don’t want to attract his friends, you don’t need oranges nor directions, no, nothing please, step back and what a way to scrape together a living, if you could call it that –  and those idle, with nothing to sell, settle, too, in the bus stand like water down a drain, hollering with malarial eyes, yellowed, sallow cheeks, call to you for nothing more than amusement, confusion, derision, why did you come to my country, can’t you see we’re dying, throw me some change. The strident, deafening horns of the garishly painted, dilapidated buses occasionally obviate all other sound with their raucous tunes, but the faces, voiceless, never cease talking, jostling for some opportunity.

      All a matter of context, the arrival in the city after a long trip abroad to American, or even European cities, and Dar was a shabby little city with noisy, unruly people, and hot, humid, soporific heat, beating down on dirty streets and dirty people. But fresh from a small village where the brightest colour is the white of ugali and a paucity of sensory stimulation pushes one day into the next, and suddenly, experience was alive with the vibrant smells, tastes, and sounds of the Swahili coast and the welcome assault on our senses amplified whatever essential charm that its picturesque streets and people held. And step off the bus and the heavy coastal air, pressed your damp shirt against your body and the dust from the trip ran down your neck in sweaty rivulets, and it all brought anticipation of variety, meaningful choices in what type of food might slake whatever hunger you can muster in the heat, and juices pressed from the fruits that hung heavily off the bicycles that wheeled through the narrow streets of the old city. The choices were endless, and even as you waited through the long last bit of your bus ride, as the stops grew more frequent until the huge hulking bus with the strident horn was little more than a dala dala and passengers hurried off into the dark, past the kerosene lamps in the roadside stalls, even then you’d plan the meals that you’d eat during your stay there, and knew that you’d have to make up for months of salt and fat by gorging yourself on pizza from the South African strip mall, where two guards with shot guns stood ready to protect the customers rich enough to afford the food and where businessmen would hold important lunches during the day.

     Pizza was better for the evening, though, and lunch, there was so much variety, but always sandwiches and french-fries in the air conditioned womb of the American club, recent movies playing on the large television and saucy Australian proprietor signing off bar tabs of American beer and cold sodas with ice. The American club without competition until a French Lebanese opened her café with fresh hummus and romaine lettuce, and she didn’t realize that she was on the wrong side of the continent, that the Indians owned Tanzania, its shops and its foreign cuisine. Indian restaurants were frequented often, and hamburger joints too, Chef’s Pride with its chapati, flaky perfection absorbed most who breakfasted, but the pinnacle, the quintessential, and always the most coveted of all the options after a long layover in the bush, the street chicken, deep masala flavour consumed outdoors as cars rushed by on the dark streets. Wealthy Indians pull up in their Mercedes for takeaway as scruffy Americans indulge in a meal appropriately foreign and delicious to satisfy our hunger for both flavour and experience.

      The food was the heart of any experience in the city, but Dar presented many temptations not found in the confines of claustrophobic communities; gambling, discos, questionably for sale women, painfully beautiful and Western after months of girls too Tanzanian and untouchable in their garish khangas, infants strapped to the back of any child old enough to conceive. Temptation, permissible in humid, exotic nights, wandering home to the morning’s call to prayer, the muezzin drawing the abstemious from behind their private wooden doors, safari beer is only 500 shillings a bottle. The Holiday Hotel sat among 4 mosques, and the nearest, with his voice so deep would wake you in time for the early bus to Songea, and in the dark, the voice so loud and filled you so that nothing else could enter and you thought it was God as you abruptly left sleep behind. I miss the call to prayer most among those things that might instantly remind me how foreign Tanzania was to a boy from Connecticut, and my scratchy recording is less the voice of god than a tinny reminder that not everything can be captured.

      Arusha first opened up to me on the drive home, and as I began to think that the city might be left behind, we’d driven so far, the crowds off to our right parted from the impetus of our surprisingly loud horn and revealed a small dirt lane wending deep into a warren of markedly more ramshackle, confused and derelict buildings that was Sakina, our neighbourhood. He aimed his battered car into this mysterious engulfment of potholed streets walled in closely on either side by the garishly signed pharmacies, dukas, and high, glass-topped cement walls that protected the homes from the desperate crime that ran rampant soon after the sun went down around 6 pm. This near to the equator, the day always ended at 6, dusk would bring a quick emptying of the streets and families huddled around their low wooden table, scooping ugali in their right hands by kerosene lanterns. And this was what I, too, would come to once we completed the maze of streets that climbed higher and less resembled roads the farther the car groaned up the incline littered with boulders, stream crossings, and at least one dead cat. And turn right at the second butcher, “Jesus’ liberty meat of cow,” and then past the “third corner” hairdressers, and up and over rutted, gutted road, deep, grey dust hiding gullies, which we’d hit suddenly and bottom out and throw clouds of the stuff into the air behind us as we came perilously close to a gorge, rusted cars in the bottom, a church on the other side, and up the road climbed and narrowed as it went, banana trees replacing the lively shops of below and not miles, but seeming farther the more foreign it all became. And finally, a left before the gorge engulfed the remainder of the road and up a steep driveway, past the house with electricity into an alley, dark even when elsewhere the hot, African sun shone, and beyond our house.

Adam Dobson is a failure. He hides in foreign countries.

City of Life

Looking out the window of the plane as it flew over the Sea of Marmara on the final approach to Ataturk International, I caught my first glimpse of the bustle of Istanbul.  It wasn't, however, the intense street-level activity I was to experience over the next few days- the plane was still far too high up to see that and heck, we weren't even going to be over land until the final few seconds before landing. Rather, from my little airplane porthole view of the world, I could see many large tanker ships busy criss-crossing the waters and jockeying for position both going into and coming out of the Bosporus. If a city is that busy on the water, I thought, what's the rest of going to be like?

After the rumbling jolt that passes for a smooth landing these days, I started to get a bit more of an idea. In this evening of early September, the sun was setting and bringing down a beautiful day with it, leaving the fading light to glow through a low-lying layer of smog .  As the plane taxied off the runway, I saw silhouetted through this haze the first several of what were to be the countless mosque minarets of Istanbul, protruding as they were from the dense urban settlements jutting right up against the airport fence. I was certainly a half-world away from the landscape of London, arriving as I was on the very fringes of Europe.

My distance from the Anglo-Saxon world was further confirmed upon my arrival at customs and immigration, where I payed for my 'visa' (read: entrance fee) and cleared immigration without even so much as a question; this, I believe, is pretty much unheard of in the great lands of the West these days.  Within minutes I had collected my bag and emerged from the arrival gate to greeted by my girlfriend and her father, mustering that quiet smile most appropriate when politeness is needed while simultaneously not having much idea of what is going on.  Before I had much of a chance to get my bearings, I was in the father's car as it emerged from the parking garage and into the fading day, speeding up to join the crowd of vehicles already vying for space in a free-for-all expressway entrance.

At first, things felt comfortably European.   The style of the roadway, the signage and infrastructure, the car models; these linked the scene unfolding before me, however tenuously, to the cultural sphere I had just left behind. And yet the more I stared quietly out the window, the more I realized something else awaited me. In the fumes of the heavy traffic, we passed alongside dusty buses carrying what I imagined t0 be manual labourers. Vehicles slowly but surely floated back and forth across the roadway, the concept of lanes barely an afterthought.    And the scene that lay beyond the expressway consisted of a haphazardly constructed urban density like I’d never seen.

After my time spent navigating the monumentality of urban China, I certainly thought I had experienced the gamut of overwhelming urban vistas. But this was something completely different from anything I had previously seen.  Before me spread absolute mountains of city. Heaps of city. Absolutely nothing but city. Waves of urbanity undulated across the landscape to the extent that I could rarely make out any space  not occupied or crowded over by low-rise tenements, shacks, warehouses,  satellite dishes,  rumbling highways, and tangled power lines. Junk-strewn lots seem to be the rare and sole respite from this urban crush. Needless to say that,  lover and avid student of cities I am, I was both overwhelmed and awestruck. And I'm fairly certain my girlfriend's father thought I was a mute.

Zoning wasn't overwhelmingly popular in this great urban sprawl. Four-to-five floor buildings looked to be built beneath, on top, beside and through each other,  windows facing off in haphazard directions. After some time navigating the rumbling expressways and crowded scenery, our vehicle emerged to follow huge and ancient city walls which suddenly sprung up beside the roadway.  Before long we were snaking along the shores of the Bosporus, allowing me a sudden rush of the central city and its famous waterways. I couldn't quite believe it: before me lay a scene that met all the stereotypes of exoticism head on and easily surpassed them. Here, for once, was a pulsating, 'modern' metropolis that actually delivered the scenery its postcards  promise.

As darkness settled in, so did the density of traffic. The relative  space of the expressways gave way to a gridlock of vehicles and pedestrians trying to navigate an urban space formed long before the automobile was even a dream. As we  approached a bridge over the Golden Horn, a woman danced wildly asking for change in the midst of traffic, being ignored by the belching buses as they rumbled around and past her.  Before I could come to my senses or get my bearings, or even unpack my bag, I found myself in the midst of a family birthday dinner, sampling raki and delicious food all while trying to follow animated conversation in a language I couldn't understand. I could barely catch my breath. Welcome to Istanbul.

Istanbul turned out to be all the worlds I had known, only crashing into each other and emerging as one massive urban experience. The city was overwhelming, sprawling, bustling, chaotic, noisy and dirty, but also beautiful, stunning and impeccably clean where you'd least expect it to be. I would do a disservice to the cultural wealth of the city if I even attempted to describe it here: pick your major Islamic-Judeo-Christian religion, historical kingdom or Eurasian cultural group, and chances are you will find a material ode to it somewhere in the cacophony of architecture. Istanbul has a European cafe culture vibrancy hopelessly tangled in Asian traffic sensibilities; a world-savvy middle-class swerving their way around the less fortunate; wild bazaars and winding, quiet leafy streets. The infrastructure was as shiny and new as it was overwhelmed and crumbling.  But like any city worth the trouble, it was the sheer life of Istanbul that stood out above all.  One evening, as the sun set itself down behind the Golden Horn and silhouetting the mosque minarets, I watched the bridges pulsating with glistening traffic and pedestrians, the water below rushing with ferries, and just soaked it all up. It was the sort of moment I live for.

Of course I wasted little time joining in on this life. With my girlfriend- an Istanbul native and veteran to its delights- as a guide, we wandered through neighbourhoods, relaxed around Turkish coffee, took ferries across the Bosporus, chatted around tea, visited astounding historical relics, enjoyed coffee on a rooftop terrace overlooking a bustling pedestrian street. Needless to say that caffeine was a permanent fixture of my Istanbul experience.  The call to prayer was equally omnipresent; emitted from a number of mosques probably in the thousands, it had the tendency to make itself heard.

We even took a decrepit motorboat ‘ferry’ taxi across the Golden Horn, on which the operator encouraged me to stand up and take pictures of the surrounding sights.  I quietly wondered to myself if he charged for fishing foreigners out of the water, because given the rocking of the boat that is surely where I would have ended up had I followed his advice. I just couldn't do it, having been raised in one of those societies where safety is paramount and innocent fun is often sucked out of everything through tedious over-regulation.

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My impressions of  Istanbul were, I admit, certainly coloured by the brilliant, smog-free blue sky and sunshine that accompanied me throughout my stay. Its rather amazing how even a small amount of clean air and nice weather allows a city to shine; and shine through this massive city did,  coming across as bright, cheery, exuberant and rather clean considering the chaos visiting its streets on a daily basis. I was particularly impressed by the scenery of the Bosporus on a beautiful afternoon, taken in from the deck of a boat with my feet up on the railing. I was told the waterway has been significantly cleaned up in the past few years,  and the results were certainly tangible.  Floating along quite literally between Europe and Asia, the crisp bright beauty of the scenery was enough to put most so-called 'developed' world cities to shame.  Here was the very heart of a city of untold millions in a ‘developing’ country managing, for the most part, not to live in its own filth. I know more than a few places that could benefit from this approach.

Of course, I recognize that my perspective on Istanbul was one of both an outsider and a tourist. I’m not so naive as to imagine it is an exotic utopia. I'm sure that for millions of its inhabitants, this enormous city offers its fair share of drawbacks, dangers and frustrations, and that for many the life limitations of poverty are harsh realities.  I was offered a rather privileged perspective on the city and I recognize this;  like almost any self-respecting superficial tourist,  I never ventured into the dense landscape of poor settlements that help make Istanbul the massive urban world it is. But a few minutes staring beyond the edges of the expressway were certainly enough to tell me they exist en masse.   

So why am I so unabashedly exuberant about Istanbul? Why did it have such an effect on me, as opposed to the many other cities of untold millions I've visited? I will dare to say that I found the city fundamentally refreshing. Yes, refreshing.  Sure, it has at least twenty times the volume of traffic than would be sane. Sure, it has its share of ugly highrises and gaudy shopping malls.  Obviously, like any self-respecting 'poor' city, Istanbul is in the throes of the usual  'modernization'- whatever that really means  -as it tries to build itself out of perceived backwardness to rather interesting results.  For example, there is a nice sleek, state-of-art tram system literally plunked down in the middle of major roads, leaving those wishing to use it the sole option of dashing across wild and heavy traffic. I guess someone forgot to worry about how pedestrians would actually get to and from the nice shiny tramway without getting killed.

And yes, it has Starbucks. Someone call the anti-globalization police.

Yet ultimately, I found the place refreshing because unlike so many others, I think it dares to be a bit different. As a lover of cities, it was a delight to experience a place in which the perseverance of a unique urban form results from  a conscious celebration of cultural heritage rather than poverty.  I found it to be a place that didn't need to completely destroy its urban fabric to project 'modernity' , cosmopolitanism or class: its people and vibrant life more than take care of that- and with style. But above all, the city restored in my cynicism-hardened mind a little magic,  a bit of faith that cities aren't all going to end up as horrible hybrids of Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Standing on a bridge over the Golden Horn facing the minarets and domes of Sultanamet at dusk, I found it very difficult not to feel that, after all, the world can still be a pretty wondrous place. Teşekkürler, Istanbul.

Patrick Bennett can still remember those sunsets over the city.

From The Mental Archives: The Persisting Uniqueness of Places

This is a heavily revised, much refined version of a post written last year for another site.

In late 2005, I travelled a little too much in a short period of time, to the point where things and places quite far apart from one another melted into mundane conformity. Airports, buses, train stations, subways, highways, hotels- they were identical brands and shapes, only explained in different languages.  In particular, the architecture of international transportation I encountered exhibited a special distain for originality, the culprits likely being that select group of transnational star architects who relentlessly produce near-identical buildings the world over. Paris? Beijing? Doesn't matter, make that terminal huge, white and cavernous.

In my moments of fatigue and mental weakness, which can occur quite often when travelling, I surrender my critical faculties and bask in the superficial rhetoric of globalization. Knowing better but too tired to do anything about it, I relish in the surface evidence that the world is become smaller, more homogenous and, ultimately, more 'Western' (What does that mean, anyways- American? British? Italian? Dutch?). While for me these thoughts are for the most part limited to daydreams in the numb landscapes of airport expressways, for others this has become a much more engaged, and perhaps lucrative, affair. Contemporary urban studies is replete with theorists trumpeting the rise of a 'single, global urban discourse', or similarly the 'global' city rising through 'global urban change'.

From this general perspective, urban areas the world over, despite an immense diversity in historical, cultural and politico-economic circumstances, are increasingly growing, forming and functioning in a similar fashion driven by the inexorable tenets of universal market economics.  Sure,  cultural differences remain, but largely as a matter of consumer taste than a way of life.  Culture becomes the flavour of potato chips that is popular in generic urban area A as opposed to generic urban area B. It is no longer an organizational foundation.

This viewpoint has apparently permeated much of the Anglo-American popular press as well. While one perspective writes in an awe tinged with jealousy of the rise of glittering 'global' skylines and 'modern' expressways in the mega-cities of the rapidly developing world, another laments the destruction of local culture as it makes way for this generic landscape of mega-malls, office parks and high-rise condominiums.  Central to  both of these  perspective is the juxtaposition of 'culture' and 'modernity', the battle between the local, national and global. Modernity is represented as the rise of a generic industrial-consumerist landscape, the inevitable outcome of a globalized world.  Culture is  represented in the resistance to this transformation,  in which old sensibilities struggle against the rising tide of cultural homogenization. Culture also, it seems, becomes the domain of the poor, the desperate, those pushed aside by the bulldozer.  Those living in high-rise glass towers,  with their cars and high-speed internet, belong to a 'global' elite, living a generic modern lifestyle  increasingly detached from its stereotypical 'cultural' surroundings.

And so we get the usual tales of office districts adjacent to desperate slums, hypermarket consumerism contrasted with age-old agricultural subsistence. We get shock and consternation at urban living in which luxury sedans  scatter rickshaws with horns blaring, and in which peasant vagrants grab at Gucci bags and cell phones with more features than one could ever need. We get stories of the clash between 'Westernization' and tradition played out through drastic disparities in income. 

It is certainly not difficult to see where this assumption comes from, that urban areas worldwide are playing host to some battle between 'global' homogenization and localized difference.  Increasingly,  whether surveying a landscape in Asia or Europe, you will see the same hotel logos, the same glass towers, the same  supermarket chains, the same car models, the same annoying McDonald's ad campaign about loving their hyperprocessed meals.  On the dark side, many cities  are experiencing similar problems: ill-planned expansion and runaway sprawl, grinding traffic congestion, drastic wealth gaps and serious environmental quality issues.  The urban existence becomes a homogenized, global phenomenon not only in its advantages, but also in its shortcomings.  Cities become a theory to examine, an abstract space to solve; with the rise of 'global' thinking, the conditions of actual physical places appear to matter less and less. One size fits all.

This belief in global urban homogenization stands up when judged against surface appearances and superficial evidence, yet I believe it ultimately crumbles when one digs deeper to look at the important cultural, social and political dynamics driving the bustle of any particular city. The persistence of the 'global modernity' perspective, in my opinion, is driven not so much by a careful consideration of actual places, but rather by our love for judging books by their cover.  Complexity is complicated and time-consuming; generalization makes for an easier reality, neatly packaged and consumed.

This simplistic perspective also serves more political interests particularly well. Many of us in the "Western" world are so deeply lost in cultural arrogance that we assume our theories to be universal, that our way of imagining the world is not a perspective but a fundamental reality that everyone will get around to eventually if they would just stop being "backwards". And so the landscapes of 'global' cities become our easy justification that others are becoming more like 'us', that we were right all along. It is our evidence that wealth and prosperity cannot be separated from "Westernization". Globalization is a comfort blanket reminding us that our 'way of life' is a fundamental truth.

On the other side of the coin,  the superficial landscapes of 'modernity' can become a potent tool of political survival. Glass skyscrapers and multi-level expressway interchanges become a tangible symbol of a society's success, no matter how poor the average citizen might remain.  Visions of American cities are appropriated, warped and rapidly constructed as symbols of wealth and power, perhaps in the hopes that respective societies can convince themselves through real estate speculation that they are no longer 'inferior'. If America (as much the idea as the country called the United States) is the ultimate power, then perhaps by stealing its surface appearance some of that power can somehow be recreated. Image sells much more than reality.

But I fear, that in the end, this conceptualization of a single urban discourse, in which cities are evolving into an objective 'modern' form the world over, will do us all more harm than good.  By reducing the infinite complexities, histories and cultures of the world's cities into simplistic abstract models (be they 'global' cities or 'third world' cities), we are running the danger of ignoring urban resident's needs rather than meeting them.  Sure, it is certainly easier to think that cities are growing increasingly similar just because they might look similar;  after all, we live in a world of 'best practices' and one-size-fits-all technocrat consulting, in which a traffic problem can be planned away on a computer regardless of whether it is in Lagos, Shanghai or Istanbul. 

But what, really, is the guarantee that an approach that works in one place will work in another?  What is the guarantee that Shanghai will ever be a New York, no matter how hard its government tries to plan free-wheeling capitalism? In the end, I don't think there is one.  The fundamental cultural dynamics driving each urban area will send it off on its own unique course, no matter how superficially generic its skyline becomes.  And until we finally move beyond our preoccupation with surface appearances and grand theories and accept the urban world as the confusing, chaotic, diverse and diverging reality it is in each real place, we will be mired in futility, trying to solve urban problems with the wrong set of conceptual tools.

Patrick Bennett likes to take old material, re-write it and make it new, all in the hopes that he might sound more intelligent.

Industrial Tourism

Perhaps because of long-held stereotypes regarding the Chinese and communism, there has long been, at least at a superficial level, a portrayal in the West of China as a land of totalitarian control, a place of mass mobilization in which the countless masses march in step to the glory of Party and Country. Regardless of how accurate or inaccurate this characterization might have been in the past, it often lives on into the present-day "China Rising" paradigm. The country's growing military might is visualized through the impeccable marching of soldiers in Tiananmen square, while its powers of production are displayed by countless, identically uniformed migrant workers assembling electronics at a countless number of identical workstations.

Certainly, these images are drawn from reality, usually to be found in the export powerhouses of the southeastern coastal provinces. This China is as real and relevant as any other, with its neat rows of high-rise blocks in instant new towns, with its mind-boggling infrastructure projects and highway networks. It is the China that, through determination and planning, has harnessed the material wealth of urban capitalism to serve the regimentation and control of socialism. It is the rising power that keeps Western politicians awake at night. It is the China of shimmering financial skylines and world dominance.

In April 2005, however, I found myself in a place quite far removed from that particular Chinese world. In the outskirts of Zibo, a mid-sized provincial city in central Shandong province, I explored a very different face of the country's industrialization. Zibo, like many other cities in the country, covers a huge geographical area, enough to claim a decent swath of central Shandong. And also like many other cities in the country, it is in this vast space that the boundaries between urban and rural are increasingly blurred and ill-defined, lost in a swirl of cranes, peasants and pollution.
Using rapid urbanization as the weapon of choice, Chinese cities have been quite busy sprawling headfirst into their surroundings, barreling into and over older settlements, agricultural land and a decaying state-owned industrial infrastructure. The result of all this unchecked expansion is that in many areas, between the over-planned high-rise 'modernity' of the city centres and the isolated poverty of the rural hamlets, stretches a landscape that is industrial yet poor, urbanizing yet still somehow remote.

The area I found myself in was certainly not one of idyllic pastures. It was the domain of dusty roads and expansive scrapyards, of roadside stalls and fume-belching trucks. It was a land of haphazard white-tile sheds andelectric folding gates . Unlike its more centralized and superficially prosperous urban neighbour, this space was one of grit, faded signs, smokestacks and twisted metal. And more so than its purely agricultural counterpart, it bore the deep scars of China's concerted assault on its own environment.

Unlike Masterplan China, the subject of so much awe, fear, envy and greed, this place was a chaotic, ill-planned affair. Perhaps this is the inevitable outcome of lax controls, systemic corruption and the astounding entrepreneurship unleashed by the country's economic reforms. Sure, the 'state' is heavily involved at some level in the growth of this peri-urban industrial world, whether through ownership or local official activity. And yet this was a world away from the showcase development zones and post-modern towers of Beijing and Shanghai, and perhaps closer to scenes from the Industrial Revolution grafted onto a dense Chinese rural society. It was urban yet not 'modern' in the stereotypical sense of the term; firmly industrialized but completely out of control. And through it all, there were certainly still farmers quietly tending to their fields.

Through the hospitality of an old acquaintance, I was afforded the chance to tour one of the factories in this area. After a bumpy drive through the dusty blend of melancholic villages and decaying industry so common in the outskirts of northern Chinese cities, we arrived at our destination. It was a small-scale manufacturer of replacement car parts destined for the North American market. Here, in the generic anonymity of the country's hinterland (although Shandong is on the coast, most of it certainly is hinterland), China's adventures in global production continued unabated.

This factory was a far cry from the high-tech export complexes so popularized in glossy news magazines. It was certainly low-tech, perhaps even antiquated by certain standards. The labour was decidedly manual, with shovels and wheel barrels responsible for much of the dirty work. Far from being rigidly regimented, this workspace was haphazard, cluttered and scattered randomly across a few cavernous workshops. The air was thick with metallic dust, enough so that after only a few minutes I worried in vain for the workers' lungs.

The scene was one from an aged propaganda poster pushing for industrial production, albeit without the smiles and socialist optimism. If I was to guess, I would certainly place the age of the installation at several decades: it exuded a retro-Chinese industrial aura, complete with workers in old army jackets and blue 'Mao' coats. Of course, my guess is probably completely off the mark- in China, the combination of the speed of development and poor construction quality ages buildings to the point where something a mere few years old becomes a decaying relic of an age gone by. It's quite possible that this ode to the glory years of socialist industry was built in the 1990s.

Regardless, the surreal moment arrived when I was shown the finished product, neatly packaged in stylish boxes bearing the bilingual wording required by its destination: Canada. Here I was, faced with the marketing style and consumer demands of my home country amidst this scene of hard labour, grime and scrap metal. The car parts were packed into nice, blue boxes complete with logos and images, all piled neatly and wrapped to shipping palettes. I can not easily imagine the final end user across the ocean conceptualizing the environment in which these were produced. Similarly, I can not easily imagine them even caring. With all the hype about globalization bringing us all together, these little boxes were the sole link between what are, quite literally, two different realities.

In this peri-urban industrial landscape of Shandong, the relics of socialist industrialization efforts are being harnessed to serve a new master: the unquenchable consumer thirst of far-off peoples. It is a place in which globalization, which I suspect means nothing at all, is to be found in haphazard, low-tech workshops; in unplanned industrialization; in bastardized rural lands. It is a place where the imperatives of production and profit overpower the need for order, coherence or planning. Far from the showcase boulevards of China's urban cores, this is where, in my opinion, the country's raw capitalism is more purely exposed. As much as China's industrial urbanization can be understood as a deliberate, top-down affair, it is places like this factory that remind me that the country's drive for development is also most equally from the bottom up, let loose and out of control.

Patrick Bennett , in his travels, often prefers fascinating over beautiful.

Contemplating Pseudo-cities

       I live in a strange place, confusing both in name and nature and indicative of many small towns in upstate New York, and completely incomprehensible to me as a newcomer. Ready? I live in the hamlet of Scotch Bush which is in the town of Florida which is in the city of Amsterdam…Got it? Well guess what, neither do I. Here’s something else: Amsterdam is in the county of Montgomery, which as a whole has 49,000 residents at last count and is so small that the municipal offices are actually in the same building as our neighbor, Fulton County. And the city? Well, Amsterdam has roughly 18,000…18,000!?! Does that really make an urban environment? As a student of urban landscapes I’m constantly at a loss- to me, it’s more of a town than a city, my town is more of a village (if that) and my hamlet, well, not even discernable to the naked eye. I wonder if they take the livestock into account when they do the census; now that in a strange way would make more sense. 

    Amsterdam was once the carpet capital of the world and, up until the 1980s or so; carpet was still being manufactured at industrial buildings right in the heart of the city. I say ‘buildings’, but there are two, maybe three tops, all right next to each other and all pretty derelict looking at the moment. Carpet was so pervasive in the local culture that I’ve honestly walked into homes that are not just wall-to-wall but floor to ceiling. It’s not uncommon for longtime residents to have carpet in their kitchens and bathrooms, without a second thought to the sanitary or aesthetic issues. Carpet in the kitchen! Isn’t that a fire hazard?

    Another local oddity is the fact that Amsterdam schools are the only ones in the area that have a half-day on Tuesdays. Why? Well no one really seems to know; some say it’s because long ago people went to church on Tuesday afternoons, others say it has to do with our agricultural heritage and still others have never contemplated the issue whatsoever. The true reason I suppose is now lost to history, but happily tradition lives on along with the post-Halloween tractor ride around town. On the Saturday following Halloween the adults get together on a designated farm, have a bonfire and drink copious amounts of beer. Then, they hop onto a hay wagon loaded with other drunk farmers and ride around town tossing rotten pumpkins onto lawns. Let me remind you that adults do this, seventy-year-old men do this and, in fact, one family had three generations take part this past year.

    Admittedly, I’m an urban snob. I grew up outside of what I consider the center of the universe, New York City. I say this confidently with a New Yorker’s undying attitude of superiority: it is THE melting pot of culture, customs, architecture, public opinion and yes, food. My last address was in London, once the center of the Imperialistic world, where my soul purpose was to study ‘the urban’. Both are global cities, financial, cultural, and style hubs, bastions of the very idea of what the urban should be. So, I’ve been doing my own independent research since my return to Amsterdam to reconcile the fact that I am actually living in a city. Of little comfort is a definition I came across on Wickipedia: A city is an urban area, differentiated from a town, village, or hamlet by size, population density, importance, or legal status. In most parts of the world cities are generally substantial and nearly always have an urban core, but in the United States many incorporated areas which have a very modest population, or a suburban or even mostly rural character, are designated as cities.

     Some scholars call it micropolitan, not urban nor rural and definitely not suburban. I’ve been looking into the idea of micropolitan areas myself in an attempt to help explain away my confusing pseudo-city surroundings, but so far no luck. According to Brown, et al: ‘Micropolitan areas are built around core settlement clusters of 10,000 – 49,000 persons (check one for Amsterdam), and include both core counties and outlying counties with high commuting to the core (um…not that I’ve seen)’ (p. 404). In addition, they note that micropolitan areas hold the appeal to many current and potential residents of a small-town community, providing a happy compromise for those seeking both an urban and rural setting. Though fascinating from demographic and cultural standpoints, I see more of the potential toward the micropolitan in Amsterdam than its present actualization. All this leads me to admit that my research has been more of a process of rationalization to ease me into a false understanding when really I still don’t know how such ‘small town’ cities can call themselves just that.

    So perhaps I’m being a bit harsh on my current non-urban habitat; maybe I’m going through a sort of big city withdrawal, too busy detoxing from midnight kebabs and bus fumes when instead I need to surrender to the fact that here ‘the city’ means Market Street and strip malls, ‘town’ is exactly one diner and one church, and ‘Scotch Bush’…well, that’s still a mystery. Deep down inside, though, I mock this tiny city, wondering what internal delusions of grandeur allow it to be so. Honestly, can it really claim itself as a city when I reside on a dairy farm and am still living within the city limits? Apparently, it can.

References:
Brown, D., J. Cromartie, and L. Kulcsar (2004) Micropolitan areas and the measurement of American urbanization. Population Research and Policy Review, 23 (399 – 418).

Jennifer Jennings one day hopes to unravel the many mysteries of Scotch Bush (including location), but so far she’s been proven unworthy.

First Impressions

      I have been struggling for the past weeks with my first memories and impressions of the urban and I’ve realize that impression is the more apt term for what these early experiences were. Difficult as it is for me to pick out a chronological stream of memories from my first trip to New York City at six, I’ve instead held deep down somewhere the feelings, fleeting images, and vague aromas of my childhood visits into ‘the city’, all of which I find I revisit with every city I enter into. The idea of initial exposures to cities contains with it a stamp that imprints on ones psyche the aspects they love or hate most about urban environments as a whole. For me the two points with which I both judge and remember any city are the development and/or redevelopment and the food. Let me get this straight as it is a key theme in my life: I think in two distinct languages, that of buildings and that of food, and I enjoy most when the two connect revealing a vision of the urban world unseen by most visitors.

  The embodiment of my first exposure to New York City can be summed up in three words: Grand Central Station. As a child, coming into the vast structure from a small Connecticut town on the MetroNorth Railway, a world larger than any other I’d known was contained under a single grime-covered roof. In the early eighties Grand Central stood as a decaying figurehead of the once awe-inspiring and then dying city. Both Grand Central and Times Square shine as examples of how their rejuvenation encouraged the upswing New York has experienced in the last decade and a half. Much can be said about the history of Grand Central as an engineering marvel, a symbol of both industriousness and beauty, and a vital part of the city’s essence. But in my early memories it was dark, dangerous, and downright terrifying.

   Deep cavernous corridors with low ceilings and dingy floors led from the train platforms on the lower concourse up into the grand hall of the station. In alcoves, doorways, and just out in the open, homeless sat begging for change or screaming at those passing by. Men in business suits and briefcases pushed their way through the crowds in a hurry to get to important meetings without regard or visible perception of the faces in their path. As a young child I was terrified of this gateway to and from the city, I remember being separated from my mother for a brief second by a rushing commuter and breaking out into sobs. To me, certain peril lay in every corner of the station and the goal was to spend as little time negotiating your way from train to doorway and out onto the street.

   However, always upon our return into the station after a day of sightseeing, shopping, or a Broadway show, a new more pleasant world awaited me. The grime and dirt and sheer congestion of people remained but a new journey was about to begin. This journey into the food stalls and outlets held within the confines of Grand Central became a passing of traditions from my mother to me, one that always happened minutes before catching our train home. It was filled with fresh breads, bakers’ boxes full of pastries, cheese cake, and bagels all tied up with special red and white twine and held within fragrant bags that contained a magic all of their own, unavailable from the local grocery store or even Main Street bakery. To this day no food tastes as good as something caught moments before departure; bagels are never as fresh, sandwiches never as completely satisfying.

  And so here is where my two languages connect and grow into something superb. In the 1990s Grand Central was transformed from dingy and dilapidated into a sparkling and magnificent urban jewel. The famed ceiling of the grand hall cleared to reveal the night’s sky complete with constellations full of mythical creatures, the info booth with its recognizable clock held the telling of a new history about to unfold. But with this transformation came another change, that of the culinary experiences held under the starry sky. High-end dining, New York classics, bakeries, bistros, and even a gourmet market populate the cavernous corridors of my memory, delighting me with every travel, enticing me to explore all the nooks and crannies of the building I was once so scared of. As a commuter later in life, traveling to and from my favorite of all New York institutions, I developed my own tradition. A frozen custard from the stand downstairs, a crusty bread or dozen bagels from one of the bakeries, or something more exotic and gourmet from a vendor in the marketplace. Within the confines of Grand Central the interchange of food and development has produced an experience I feel embodies the essence of New York itself, that of energy, renewal, and of course, something to nosh upon. But it also is an example of something all cities contain, a vitality instigated by the ambition to surpass all known boundaries of what an urban center must be which is fueled by its unique culinary identity and tradition.

Jennifer Jennings is currently getting re-adjusted to a rural-agrarian existence in upstate New York and seeking ways to make it more interesting.

(sub)Urban

     As someone deeply concerned with both the future of our cities and the state of our planetary environment, I should be expected to consider urban sprawl as a sworn enemy. A celebration of the dominance of the private automobile, it scars the landscape with miles of expressways, industrial parks, monstrous big box stores and cookie-cutter sub-divisions. In a way, it is a fitting physical manifestation of the strange death wish our species holds regarding both our physical environment and our own well-being: we pursue the elusive dreams of freedom, tranquility and prosperity while simultaneously burying them under tons of concrete, congestion and dirty air. Community degenerates into over-sized, drive-through consumerism; citizens become their cars, anonymous weary-eyed commuters in a sea of sedans and minivans. Cities explode in size because, well, we can drive anywhere; as a result, however, we are forced to drive everywhere. As we try to escape the urbanization of older suburbs for the more tranquil pastures of a faux-rural existence, we bring the problems with us and cover an ever larger portion of the landscape with our asphalt wastelands, warehouses and shopping malls.

    As someone who thus believes that our society's love affair with the automobile is busy destroying many of our great cities, I struggle to hide a dirty secret which I feel must now be confessed: urban sprawl utterly fascinates me. In fact, it can often offer up such a spectacle that, although I know it’s one of our most suicidal tendencies, I nevertheless find myself in awe of its size, scope and motion. Planet Wal-Mart, as ugly as it is, can be pretty seductive in its projection of power, industriousness and progress.

  And nowhere do I succumb to this more than in the mind-boggling urban landscape that has grown out of what once was the city of Toronto.

  Describing the greater Toronto area as sprawling would be a gross understatement: this urban megalith has long been at the avant-garde of North American urban growth, a movement in which the very notions of a ‘downtown’ or ‘central city’ lose all relevance. Of course, Toronto still maintains a very vibrant and lively traditional core to do it proud; however, that central area has become increasingly overshadowed by the vast urban landscape it has spawned across a decent swath of southern Ontario. To someone like me, hailing from the ‘small town’ of Montreal, the awe and impact of Toronto are to be felt not in the clustering of bank headquarters near Lake Ontario, but rather in the crush of light and movement to be found on its vast suburban expressways.

  Toronto is, without a doubt, huge and bustling with automobile traffic, and no matter how unsustainable this great human experiment in urban expansion is in the long term, it is nevertheless immediately impressive in both its scope and audacity.

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   On my most recent trip to the greater Toronto area, I got no more than a glimpse of the downtown core as a distant citadel, marked by the CN Tower on the horizon. I was more immediately enthralled with the overwhelming scenery directly around me: the 401 highway, which north of Toronto expands to a number of lanes almost too numerous to count, had thunderous cascades of automobile traffic flowing up and down its arteries. Shiny glass luxury condominium towers rose up to join the already numerous corporate headquarters, gaudy big box malls and vast parking lots. Every which way was an overpass, another highway, another mall, another oxymoronic low-density expanse of dense high-rise living. Nestled in amongst all this congestion and consumption were older neighbourhoods of small streets and single family homes, their mid-twentieth century promise of an idyllic suburban existence long broken by over-development and congested boulevards.

  The greater Toronto area, like many other North American cities, is a place where five million citizens have ceded their places to at least as many automobiles. It is a landscape surprisingly devoid of actual people; they are enclosed in their vehicles, buildings and climate-controlled shopping experiences. There are certainly sidewalks to be found here, but these are more farce than necessity, useful if per chance your car should happen to break down. The scale of it all makes walking a rather hopeless and fundamentally futile endeavor: there is nothing out of the ordinary in driving thirty- five minutes on several expressways to get from daily life point A to B.

  It is there, in the expanse of the greater Toronto area, where I am always reminded that our stereotypical idea of the suburb is hopelessly outdated, its imagery of pseudo-rural tranquility nowhere to be found. Many of the ‘suburbs’, in fact, have become just as overbuilt, congested and urban as the cities they were originally supposed to offer respite from. This urbanization of the suburbs, theorized in works such as Joel Garreau's Edge City   and Edward Soja’s Postmetropolis, is rendering traditionally accepted conceptions of metropolitan areas increasingly irrelevant. As cities grow, sprawl, explode and change, the expansion of urban density makes the ‘centre’ everywhere and nowhere all at once. With businesses, high-rise towers and corporate headquarters all sprawled over a vast landscape, what is to make the traditional downtown core anymore special or relevant than the massive clustering of offices and consumerism adjacent to say, a major expressway intersection by the airport? Not that much.

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  In the end, cities like Toronto are perhaps saved by our desperate desire to instill some sort of order in our chaotic world. The skyscrapers of the downtown core, huddled near the grand spire of the CN Tower, are a desperate plea that cities can still somehow be read and understood, that some places are still more central than others. I gather, however, that the downtowns of many cities retain their importance only in our nostalgic thoughts of what a proper city should be, rather than in the reality of mind-boggling, anonymous urban expansion which we have created for ourselves. We try to identify, and sell, our cities using the imagery of recognizable landmarks and traditional downtown skylines, when in truth the real meat of the urban experience is increasingly to be found in the pulsating expressways and shopping complexes tens of miles away from there.

 Am I being too harsh on Toronto? I don’t think so. There are certainly many fascinating things to see, do and eat in the traditional urban core. However, it is hard to deny that much of the greater Toronto existence seems to revolve increasingly around its urbanized suburbs and their multiplex wonderlands. As a visitor to Toronto, it is this vast expanse of anonymous urbanity, populated with its thousands of drive-through restaurants and gas stations, that both strikes me and fascinates me as a lover of cities. Certainly, Toronto is hardly the best example of this evolution in the urban form; several of its cousins to the south, namely Los Angeles and Houston, have becomes the more prominent poster boys of the post-modern city, in which urban and suburban lose all distinction and meaning in amorphous sprawls of infrastructure, industry and housing. As a naïve Canadian boy, however, Toronto offers me the closest taste of this fascinating, yet ultimately destructive, urban world in which I have always, thankfully, been a spectator rather than a daily participant.    

 

The bright lights and endless city of the greater Toronto area remind me that, in the end, there really isn't very much "sub-" about the suburbs anymore.

Patrick Bennett is gradually learning to like Toronto.

A Flawed Love

      Good son of eastern Canada that I am, I spent my undergraduate years at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.  While that town had a great student community and a pretty rowdy nightlife,  a vibrant metropolis it definitely was not.  The student life did not extend much beyond the central drag and the dilapitated neighbourhood most of us called home.  People came to Kingston for its schools, its summer beauty, its sailing and, if 'invited' by the federal government, one of  several major prisons. However, if the bright lights of the big city are what one is looking for, it would be highly advisable to pass Kingston by.

   Perhaps this is why, on the three hour bus rides back home from Kingston, I always experienced a childlike glee at the prospect of returning to my beloved Montreal.  About forty minutes before our arrival at the central bus station, the dark and monotonous landscape of the journey would give way to bright lights and buzzing traffic.  After what was usually a month or two in Kingston, even the number of lights flowing up and down the arteries of suburban Montreal was a bit overwhelming.  So many people! As we made our first stop in the  evening commotion of a shopping mall plaza, I would smile to myself: not only was I home, but I was back in the city.  Just a few more hours and I would be out on the town with great friends, relishing my return with a big city rush, good conversation and plentiful pitchers.

   At this point, it would be best to back the story up a little.  My relationship with Montreal has been a long, complex and sometimes painful one, not surprising considering I was born and bred in the city.  For nearly two decades of my young life,  Canada's second most populous urban area was not only a city, but my entire world.  Sure, I visited other places; sure, I lived in Paris for a year when I was eleven; but these were just distant and exotic dreams. Normality was to be found in the streets of Montreal. The rest of the world was for vacations, movie settings and exam question topics.

   Of course, at the time I was completely oblivious to how special this normality really was.  Growing up in a bilingual environment as part of linguistic minority (English) within a majority at the provincial level (French) that itself was a minority at the national level,  I failed to acknowledge the complexity of Montreal's language relationships.  Visitors would ask why signs were in French while people around them spoke English, or wonder why two English speakers, strangers to each other, would converse nonchalantly in French in a public setting. To me, this was just the way things were.

   Similarly, I failed to notice, or really appreciate, Montreal's rather incredible urban environment.  Now,  this doesn't mean that I support the tourist brochure fluff that the city is  the "Paris of North America" or "a perfect blend of Europe and North America".  On the contrary, I personally feel these comparisons to be bordering on the ridiculous: Montreal is certainly not European,  and the 'French' culture of Canada is about as similar to France's as the American one is to the British.  These slogans are, perhaps,  clumsy attempts to categorize that there is, well, just something different about Montreal.  It is  a bit  too scruffy to be a bonafide 'Canadian' city, it is certainly not similar to any American city I've been to- heck, it's a world away from its own provincial hinterland.  Like any other city, Montreal is a unique product of geographical, cultural and historical circumstances; and like any other city, the outcome defies easy description.

    So what is it about Montreal? Well, you might hear that it is Canada's party town,  that its  joie de vivre  leaves the urban centres of English Canada far behind in terms of style, flair and, yes, well-dressed cosmopolitan arrogance. You might hear about the  bilingualism (and increasingly multiculturalism) of daily life on its streets.  You might hear, as well, that Montreal's ambience come from its 'latin' culture, whatever that is supposed to mean.  Personally, I believe these explanations do little to describe where the city's strengths lie. To me, Montreal is so attractive because it successfully blends the vibrancy, street buzz and unfathomable 'cool' of a major city with the approachable human scale of a smaller town.  You get fabulous neighbourhoods, funky people,  an impressive nightlife (convenient, what with the largest student population in North America after Boston) and a fabulously liveable environment.

    Perhaps it is inevitable that with all this, many of the city's natives become 'Montreal snobs'.  Spending my undergraduate years in Ontario , I certainly took on this role with an unapologetic fervour.  Surrounded by friends whose world centered on that bastion of evil, Toronto, I would defend my hometown's worth ferociously, often with more emotion than reason. In retrospect, I think this reflected a certain naive idealism on my part, one in which Montreal represented a dream of a life beyond bank towers,  bank accounts and bland sub-divisions.  Montreal, with the funky vibe and attractive lifestyle I perceived it to have, fed my urban bohemian fantasy of a cultured life of cafes, cool streets and interesting, well-dressed people.  How could I not be proud to come from such a city?

    Over the years, however, I have developed another character trait in regards to Montreal  of which I am not so proud: that is the one of hypocrisy.  Professing the city's great charm and my deep love for my hometown, I  nevertheless must realize that I have not lived here since 1998, apart from summers and holiday visits.  So, as painful as this exercise is, a tough question must be asked: if I love Montreal so much, why do I keep leaving it? This contradiction, I think, digs to the heart of  my relationship with this city. After years of being away, growing up and unfortunately  succumbing to a healthy dose of realism,  I bring a much different perspective to bear on my beloved Montreal, one that grapples with conflicted emotions and dreams of what could have been.

   This new perspective has emerged from the grudging acceptance that my urban bohemian fantasy is just that: a fantasy. Many a long-haired college kid dreams of the 'cool life'; unfortunately, this dream usually ends with the triple whammy of jobs, responsibility and adult obligations. Thus, from a pragmatic, failed idealist point of view, I have come to see Montreal's greatest strength, its lifestyle, as a simultaneous manifestation of its greatest weakness.  The city that has managed to remain so funky and liveable has done so because, to put it quite simply, its economy has been such a mess for most of the last few decades.  For those of you unfamiliar with the city (and you are likely many), perhaps a little more explanation is in order.

   Montreal's fate, as the urban hub of Quebec, has for better or worse ebbed and flowed with the tides of the province's nationalist/separatist political movement. Once the business and cultural centre of Canada,  the 1970s  saw a virtual evacuation of both corporations and English-speaking people during the 'nationalization' of Quebec, with many of these heading for the greener and more 'stable' pastures of Toronto.  Since then (and until only recently), one could hardly say the city has ever been on the up-and-up; for a major urban centre, the amount of vacant lots in the downtown area has always been rather disturbing.  Boarded up shops, economic decline, Anglo flight: this was the name of the game well into the 1990s.  But in a positive twist, this situation is what, in my opinion,  saved Montreal from the ravages of boom-time development and managed to preserve a very liveable and human scale for those who make their lives here. The city retained its flair, its vibe, its cultural je ne sais quoi,  refusing to completely give up and collapse in the face of Quebec sovereignty referendums. And as a testament to the vibrancy of my hometown, it managed this all while taking a severe economic battering. 

   These  forces that have ultimately preserved the city's charm are also, unfortunately, the very ones that have prevented Montreal from achieving its true potential.  It seems to me that the Quebec nationalist movement has always been intent on taming Montreal, making it their city,  and I would argue that they have largely succeeded: cosmopolitanism and culture aside, the city has been relegated to a largely provincial status, somewhat disconnected from the wide world that exists outside Quebec.  I guess in some ways, Montreal can be considered an 'international' city (mix of languages, cultures), but it is surprisingly inward-looking, content to be king of a rather small hill.

   And this is why I get so conflicted and confused regarding my beloved hometown. Frustrated that its potential has been constrained by the petty politics it necessarily suffers, I nevertheless realize that it is the very fact that Montreal is not an international hub that makes it such a great place to build a life for its inhabitants.  Not being the most attractive of destinations for investment and opportunity over most of the last three decades, the city has, in that time, mostly managed to avoid an influx of people, money and real estate speculators that would have indeed transformed the city into something else entirely.

   Over the past few years, however, things have started changing. It seems that Montreal is, for better or worse, "on its way back". A renewed confidence in the city, as well as a recognition of all that it offers as an urban area, has led to a growing buzz, a dusting off of the cobwebs.  Traditionally working-class neighbourhoods are witnessning the telltale signs of gentrification, and a surprising number of those vacant lots are sprouting highrise luxury condominiums.  It is a strange thing for me to see in Montreal, so much so that this whole mini-boom doesn't seem very 'Montrealish' at all.  Nevertheless, I do not feel that the city's small town charm is under threat: the damage has already been thoroughly done to Montreal's international connections, and the city has been comfortably relegated to a not-very-important scale in the grand scheme of things. Whether that is ultimately such a bad thing depends entirely on one's personal preferences.

   It is this removal from the grand scheme of things, however, that keeps me personally from giving Montreal the devotion it deserves. The provincial and inward-looking nature of the place is certainly exaggerated in my eyes at the moment, as I experience it fresh from a year in London and two years in China.  Montrealers have a tendency to highlight the loose, scruffy nature of their lifestyle, particularly when it comes to a disregard for both traffic rules and signals. Yet compared with even the smallest Chinese city, Montreal is more akin to Switzerland.  After the cosmopolitan madness of London, my hometown feels quite parochial, localized and, yes, Canadian.

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   But it is with a very heavy heart that I write in the negative of my beloved city.  I refuse to declare Montreal anything other than an amazing urban experience- what else could I do, given my genetic attachment to the place? My perpectives on Montreal's shortcomings are perhaps, in the end, more indicative of my own life goals rather than any fault in this fabulous city.  I know many people who have built fruitful and satisfying lives here, and I know several more who are in the process of doing so. Of all the cities in the world, Montreal is one of those select few that offers both urban excitement and small town comfort. 

   Sadly, at this point in my life, my perspective is a bit too ambitious to settle into a comfortable existence here. I have a thirst for international  movements and machinations, and I need to be out there, I need to be 'connected' into the big league flows.  I have realized this will likely entail a sacrifice in lifestyle -to pursue my interest in urban development issues, I will have to bear cities that are monstrous, overbuilt, polluted, sprawling and gridlocked. These are, for better or worse, the places where things get done, where big decisions are made.  Montreal, as spectacular an urban phenomenon as it is, cannot hope to compete with them in terms of opportunity in my field. By becoming the city that it is, Montreal has paid the price in terms of both influence and connectivity.

   Sometimes, my ambition to go big frustrates me to no end. Why can't I just accept Montreal for what it is? Why can't I just settle down into what would be a rewarding and comfortable life, albeit with a narrower focus on a smaller scale? I will confess to be intensely jealous of those who do not crave the prospect of an international life, those who can look at Montreal, recognize all it has to offer and make it their world.  For many people, Montreal is the life.  And I can't necessarily disagree with them.  It offers in its daily scenes what many the world over can only dream of: relatively safe and lively neighbourhoods; a beautiful environment; a thriving restaurant/music/bar scene; a mish-mash of architectural delights; a positive collision of cultures; a legendary hockey franchise (that one's for you, Torontonians)- the list could go on and on. And yet here I am, unable (or perhaps  unwilling) to scale down my ego enough to truly appreciate the wonders of the place.

   I hope that, someday, when I am done trying to save the world and finished with thrill-seeking experiences, I will realize that the best city on earth, after all I've seen and done, is the one into which I had the great honour of being born.  Hopefully, after these long years of treason, Montreal will still welcome back one of its loyal sons, heavy-hearted as he will be with his betrayal of home.

Patrick Bennett currently finds himself in Montreal and  is gradually rediscovering its wonders.