[URBAN NOTE] People-less Toronto
Jul. 30th, 2007 11:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldIn the Sunday Star, Allen Chung has picked up the theme of Weisman's The World Without Us and imagined what an unattended Toronto might look like in centuries hence ("What would Toronto look like without people?").
Chung's picture of a Toronto that, after centuries of neglect in a highly variable climate, reverts to nature is believeable. The return of the suppressed waterways of the Greater Toronto Area is especially believeable for me, since not only since there have been enough instances of flooding elsewhere in the city to illustrate the point that the water has to go somewhere, but because I saw at least two streams trickling down the side of the ravine of the Rosedale Valley Road onto the roadbed. Not too far away from me, at the corner of Ossington and Dupont, is a memorial to lost Garrison Creek, rechannelled--as John Sewell described in eye weekly back in 2003--into a network of sewer tunnels. One minor irony: The memorial to Garrison Creek is an inscription on a plaque made out of what looks to be bronze, the same metal that Weisman predicted would long outlast homo sapiens sapiens by millions of years.
The corner of what was once Avenue Rd. and Bloor St. is a rushing creek surrounded by a dense and vast forest, a blanket of riverbank grape and wavering reeds, and watched over carefully by a lone eastern cougar, perched majestically atop a crumbling north wall of the Royal Ontario Museum.
Humans disappeared 500 years ago. No one knows why. It wasn't an apocalypse. The rest of the world went on. Only the people vanished.
Today, there are few hints that they once reigned over these parts. Before Toronto was tamed, dozens of creeks snaked through the land like crooked witches' fingers, creeping toward the lake. They were filled in, the water flow redirected to sewers.
When the maintenance stopped, it took less than 20 years for the water found to find its way outside the margins, and roads became the logical path.
Chung's picture of a Toronto that, after centuries of neglect in a highly variable climate, reverts to nature is believeable. The return of the suppressed waterways of the Greater Toronto Area is especially believeable for me, since not only since there have been enough instances of flooding elsewhere in the city to illustrate the point that the water has to go somewhere, but because I saw at least two streams trickling down the side of the ravine of the Rosedale Valley Road onto the roadbed. Not too far away from me, at the corner of Ossington and Dupont, is a memorial to lost Garrison Creek, rechannelled--as John Sewell described in eye weekly back in 2003--into a network of sewer tunnels. One minor irony: The memorial to Garrison Creek is an inscription on a plaque made out of what looks to be bronze, the same metal that Weisman predicted would long outlast homo sapiens sapiens by millions of years.
