(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.

<>

   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.

<>

  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.

Comments

[John]

In this fine country I live in, a couple of years ago the number of registered vehicles surpassed for the first time the number of registered drivers - something in the 190 million range. Sounds like Toronto is hot on its heels. How anyone can breathe in that city is beyond me.