[FORUM] What's your city's arbitrary psychological boundaries?

[rfmcdonald]

Over at Spacing Toronto, Shawn Micallef has a blog post, ("(Psycho)Geographic boundaries and cozy urbanism"), accompanying his recent eye article "Toronto is all in your head", talking about the many ways in which Torontonians cut themselves off from huge chunks of the city thanks to arbitrary boundaries. From eye weekly:

Some of this is unintentional. We easily get into habits and routines; it helps us get things done. If our friends and favourite stores and, if we’re lucky, even our work are in the same area, we’ll naturally stay in that area. Living locally makes for smaller carbon footprints and more time for everything else.

Certain parts of the city also have more stuff going on, so it’s natural that they become common places of congregation. Petula Clark sang a song called “Downtown,” not “Uptown” or “Post-War Suburb” — there’s a reason people head to where many things are located, and that concentration is part of what makes cities attractive.

Fetishising a neighbourhood turns insidious when it leads to the balkanization of Toronto. The worst is an often-heard West Queen West hipster sentiment that goes something like “I never go north of Bloor, there is nothing there.” I sometimes respond to this with an equally stupid comment like “I never go south of Dundas because it’s full of venereal disease-ridden hedonists.” The downside of this kind of thinking is two-fold: it devalues other neighbourhoods and limits how much of the city people think they are allowed to experience.

The hipsters are not alone in this feeling (but are the most obnoxiously vocal about it, mostly in online media) as the city blinders go in all directions. I’ve met folks who live in North Toronto whose sons went to Upper Canada College, who only shop at Holts in Yorkville and go to the Second Cup in Forest Hill Village when they need a coffee. Some of my OCAD students are familiar with either Malvern Town Centre or Pacific Mall, but have rarely walked through Kensington Market. Why not just move to (lovely) Cornwall and pay much cheaper rent if your city-footprint is going to be so small?

Worse, these dark patches on our mental map can become malignant. For that UCC parent, Queen West and Malvern are where people get shot and little else. When parts of the city are unknown and unfrequented, they seem farther away, they can easily be inaccurately perceived, as your undergrad philosophy course may have suggested, as full of “The Other.”

Myself, with the exception of axes along Yonge and Bloor and Dufferin, and to a lesser extent along Queen Street West and Dundas Street West and College and Jarvis and Dupont, all in the downtown or the west end of central Toronto, my mental map of Toronto may as well be mostly occupied by "Here are dragons." The strength of this map leads Micallef to go so far as to bring in the Jewish eruv as an analogous structure (literally).

These psychological boundaries are loosely similar to an eruv, a physical perimeter set up by Jewish communities that allows for a relaxation of Sabbath rules, letting folks go about most of their business inside those boundaries. An eruv is a metaphorical wall with many doorways, sometimes using existing fences, hydro wires or natural barriers like a river, other times requiring the installation of a new wire or nylon fishing line along the top of poles (the space in between the poles and under the wire the “doors”; the wire and poles the “door frames”). Toronto has a massive eruv that spans from Highway 7 in Thornhill down to Davenport, and from roughly Dufferin to Leslie. Each week much of the eruv is physically inspected for breaches, and followers can check the Toronto eruv website (www.torontoeruv.org) to see if it’s Kosher.

For a non-Jew, Toronto’s eruv might seem like an impossible limitation on one’s mobility, but it’s likely much larger than the area many Torontonians confine themselves to. Is there any value to breaking out? If life is fine in the neighbourhood, why go elsewhere? The shame is missing out on what else Toronto has to offer.

So, what's your city's boundaries, and how do your experience them? Are you lucky enough (?) to live in a city's that's universally porous, or do you also stick to some neighbourhoods, and if so why? (Myself, my main excuse is laziness.)