[BRIEF NOTE] On a city of villages
Aug. 7th, 2009 01:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldAt his blog, Andrew Barton recently raised an interesting question: why are so many Toronto neighbourhoods branding (or being branded) villages? The major role played by Toronto's Business Improvement Areas is probably central to this.
I agree with him to a certain extent in that an overreliance or overuse of the term "village" is parochializing, but I don't agree with him to the extent that most people do circulate only in certain specific areas and tend to identify themselves with Toronto through these neighbourhoods. Going out of one's way to create villages where none existed, just reappropriating already urbanized territory without a prior history of settlement, does strike me as a studied violation of history.
Thoughts?
I don't understand is why so many BIAs now have to identify themselves as a village. Beyond Emery Village, we've got Davisville Village and Liberty Village and Mirvish Village and practically anything else you care to name and stick "village" at the end of. Of the sixty-seven BIAs presently listed on the Toronto Association of Business Improvement Areas website, twenty-three are "villages." While a few of them, such as Forest Hill Village and Parkdale Village, are legitimate in that Forest Hill and Parkdale actually were independent villages before becoming part of Toronto, we've also got names like, say, Yonge-Lawrence Village that have no basis in history.
Maybe it's the idea of a stronger, more interconnected city, the prospect of reconnecting with the people next door, or simply the security of uncomplicated peace that you'd find in a country village where everyone stands up for each other. Villages have practically been fetishized since the beginning of the Industrial Age as reminders of a less complicated, more pure lifestyle, and the rural impulse that villages represent keeps cropping up again and again.
[. . .]
To me, it's something different. Villages don't suggest security and bucolic happiness to me. They suggest isolation, provincialism and parochialism. The traditional concept of a village hardly even exists anymore.
I agree with him to a certain extent in that an overreliance or overuse of the term "village" is parochializing, but I don't agree with him to the extent that most people do circulate only in certain specific areas and tend to identify themselves with Toronto through these neighbourhoods. Going out of one's way to create villages where none existed, just reappropriating already urbanized territory without a prior history of settlement, does strike me as a studied violation of history.
Thoughts?
