![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldThe always-thoughtful blog Castrovalva has a very interesting post up ("Invisible Cities") wherein he links to pieces by China Miéville and Michael Moorcock memorializing London as a fantasy city, describing its complexities both as they were and as they changed.
Says Miéville (in part):
Says Moorcock (in part):
That this can be said in the same way about Toronto, simply because the city is so young: A hundred years ago, most of the land area of what is now the city of Toronto was farmland, occasionally a village or a small town. The ongoing project Imagining Toronto could make the point, I think, that Toronto's starting to acquire this now, achieving a new resonance in literature and music and popular culture generally, as neighbourhoods and entire districts change, but still, we're so young. Give us a century or two to take root, and then we'll catch up to London and Paris and the other great historical cities.
That's Toronto. What about your cities? Are they as dense with history as London (are you in London?), are they not, is there great change happening and if so what kinds, is there a lot of nostalgia for the old or happiness with the new?
Please, discuss.
Says Miéville (in part):
A shoved-together city cobbled from centuries of distinct aesthetics disrespectfully clotted in a magnificent triumph of architectural philistinism. A city of jingoist sculptures, concrete caryatids, ugly ugly ugly financial bombast, reconfiguration. A city full of parks and gardens, which have always been magic places, one of the greenest cities in the world, though it's a very dirty shade of green –and what sort of grimy dryads does London throw up? You tell me.
Says Moorcock (in part):
[There are] the places where London was simply not – a few irregular mounds of grass and weeds with rusted wire sticking through concrete, like broken bones, exposed nerves. These parts of London could very easily be identified because almost nothing survived except the larger 17th- and 18th-century buildings such as Tower Hill, the Customs House, the Mint, the Monument. And, of course, St Paul’s, her dome visible from the river as you came up out of the delicious stink of fresh fish from Billingsgate Market, a snap of cold in the bright morning, and walked between high banks of overgrown debris along lanes trodden to the contour of the land. You had made those paths by choosing the simplest routes through the ruins. Grass and moss and blazing purple fireweed grew in every chink. Sun glinted on Portland stone, and to the west, foggy sunsets turned the river crimson. You never got lost. The surviving buildings themselves were the landmarks you used, like your 18th-century ancestors, to navigate from one place to the other.
That this can be said in the same way about Toronto, simply because the city is so young: A hundred years ago, most of the land area of what is now the city of Toronto was farmland, occasionally a village or a small town. The ongoing project Imagining Toronto could make the point, I think, that Toronto's starting to acquire this now, achieving a new resonance in literature and music and popular culture generally, as neighbourhoods and entire districts change, but still, we're so young. Give us a century or two to take root, and then we'll catch up to London and Paris and the other great historical cities.
That's Toronto. What about your cities? Are they as dense with history as London (are you in London?), are they not, is there great change happening and if so what kinds, is there a lot of nostalgia for the old or happiness with the new?
Please, discuss.
