Willowdale Project
Many representations of urban life harbour a nineteenth century cliché of the centralized metropolis, obfuscating the fact that suburbs are an intrinsic part of North American cities. In much of the literature on the culture of cities (from Jane Jacobs to Richard Florida), the experience of suburban spaces is generally left out of any discussion of urban culture. Urban and place based cultural researchers need a new vocabulary to describe the complex and differientiated spaces we call suburbs since more than 40% of Canadians live in suburban places. Given the gaps, omissions and assumptions about suburban culture in work on the culture of cities, "Exploring the Culture of Suburbs," is an initial foray into new methodologies and research questions for studying these metropolitan spaces. The proposed study will redirect urban cultural theory to consider new objects and places of study alongside new methodologies to take into account the contributions that suburban communities make to the economic and cultural significance of cities.
The project begins with the assumption that suburbs are not unified and uniform spaces. Rather in Canada, they are complex places that are among other things the product of organic growth (extensions of central cities) as well as economic development. For this reason, a case study approach is being proposed as the most beneficial way to develop a grounded and detailed analysis. The suburb of Willowdale in North York near York University, has been selected for the focus of the study as it is one of Toronto's oldest inner suburbs and is known for both its cultural diversity (59% of the residents are immigrants) and its spatial complexity being annexed to Highway 401 and being the last stop on the Finch subway from downtown. Willowdale also houses a variety of cultural architectures and spaces: a civic square, a performing arts centre, a library, two art schools, a community garden, several galleries and community centres. The methodological framework that the study will seek to develop, derives from the Toronto School of Communication (Marchessault 2005) and relies on the notion of 'cultural ecology'—that is, culture as an environment that is dynamic and shaped by the interaction of the non-human (built and natural environments, urban design, objects, histories and technologies) with human actions. This approach to place takes into account the historical and phenomenological complexity of built spaces and will utilize a variety of audio-visual and new media technologies to carry out the studies of individual and interconnected places, daily rhythms, forms of social interaction and patterns of movement across space, cultural events and objects, as well as interviews with appropriate stakeholders, community groups, and cultural policy makers. It is hoped that this research will lay the foundation for the initiation of a larger comparative study of the cultures of suburbs in Canada, recognizing the specificities of these spaces, to increase our understanding of metropolitan cultures in Canada.
