Race to the Bottom

I have nothing profound to mention about the beginning of this blog. It has no quirks, no agenda, no theme. It isn't the beginning of a countdown, it isn't a list and it isn't that interesting. I'm doing this mostly for me and for the few who will read it. It's a way that I can get back to writing for pleasure. University kind of sucks at encouraging the joy of writing. 

This will be a place for the speeches I always wish I'd given. This will be the essays I write in my head when I should be paying attention to the road. This will be the nights I lie awake, arguing myself in circles. It will also be long-winded and tedious. Just FYI. 

I live in a suburban city. It doesn't really matter which, because they all look the same. That's not an expression of trendy weariness with uniformity and the mainstream. The mainstream is pretty okay most of the time. That's why it's the mainstream. Anyhow. It's just plain true that most cities that have experienced booms in construction in the post-war years have become more-or-less interchangeable. In any major metropolitan centre, there will be a downtown/core area with lots of boutiques, high-rises and high end department stores. There will also be a lot of men and women in kind-of-dated business clothes who hate the people they're with. Most of them are also probably alcoholics. Outside the core, there's the high-end inner-city revival communities made up of heritage houses of varying sizes, colours and shapes. Pretty much the only thing they have in common with one another is that they're all worth more than the GDP of most former Soviet Republics. Beyond these areas are the suburbs- the dominant form of urban development since the late 1940s (in North America, at least) and one of the thorns in the sides of people like Kurt Cobain and David Sedaris. Obviously, some people have coped better than others. 

Most of you reading this live in the suburbs. And if you're between the ages of 12 and 20, you probably fucking hate it and wish you lived in a downtown loft, or in one of those cute little character houses along the river built in 1912. These new communities usually have names inspired by the natural splendor of the countryside beyond (which continues to be annexed by sprawling suburbs. Go figure). Things like "Misty Haven" or "Water Song." I live in one of these places. I don't hate it because I feel stifled creatively, or because I feel it encourages mass uniformity and delusion. I hate the suburbs because they're just fucking inconvenient, confusing and really impractical (also because they've fallen short of almost every goal they've set out to achieve). Every street has the same name. Take the example of "Misty Haven," an imaginary suburban community. If it were built, there would be street names like Misty Cove Drive, Misty Rise Close, Misty Close Drive, and so on in that fashion until you'd rather shoot yourself in the knee cap than try and find your friend's house. Second, there's nothing about the suburban model that creates community. The suburbs came out of the post-war years when scores of men returning from Europe wanted to find more room in which to raise families. A mass exodus from the core to the edges of cities occurred and the suburbs were established as imitations of the patchwork inner-city communities where the pre-baby boom generation had been raised. The unfortunate part about the trend is that the imitations were shitty. Really shitty. Like that fake ID you got from that guy who knows the guy who goes to University. Pre-war communities were mixtures of single family and multi-family housing: row houses alongside detached homes with shops scattered liberally throughout. This planning encouraged walking from place to place, as well as a profound mixing of different types of families. In other words, it encouraged community. 

The suburban planners took pictures of the architecture of these communities and built what they thought were the same thing. They kind of missed the point. Rather than mixing single and multi-family housing with shops and community spaces, single family housing became the sacred cow. Almost all the land in the "community" was reserved to build single-family, detached housing. This pushed the multi-family units to segregated areas and forced shops to become clustered in "town centers" entirely outside the community. Now, rather then encouraging a walking lifestyle, residents were forced to get into their cars to go to the store and high income was isolated from lower income. In short, the whole notion of community which was so desirable in the post-war years had been totally obliterated by the project of suburbanization. Isolation and segregation replaced cohesion and amalgamation. 

Now, every new suburban community which is constructed on the outskirts of the city appeals to our desire for that idyllic, patchwork, pre-war community by the river. So we buy into it. Finding it no more a community than "Misty Haven" had been, we pack up, move further out and end up in the same situation in "Autumn's Grove." The more we chase the dream of the true community, the further we run from it. Until we realize that single-family housing and enormous town centers 20 minutes by car from the front door were not the norm of the pre-war community, we're shanked, doomed to keep leap-frogging from Grove to Cove to Haven to Rise, searching for that perfect spot. All the ingredients for a real community are in the suburbs- shops, homes, people, trees. Just throw them in a blender and hit pulse once or twice. You'll be amazed how quickly "Misty Haven" starts to look like where you grew up. 

I like my suburban home. I like where I shop. I don't feel numbed by my cookie-cutter existence. I just think there's a better way. Sorry, Sam Mendes, I loved "American Beauty," but I just don't quite agree.