Typing "my Edmonton" feels like stealing, because Edmonton's not mine at all.
It's sort of like waking up in bed and realising you're sleeping next to a stranger, even after twenty years of arranged loveless marriage. I always assumed I knew my city, but even though I've made its spaces into places they've never cohered for me in a way that gives me a sense of the local.
I go places to do things. Then I come home. It's hopelessly utilitarian. And so my sense of the city is just a handful of isolated, unconnected spaces: my house; bus stops and LRT stations; campus; the Whitemud Crossing library, to which I have paid literally hundreds of dollars in late fines; the Confederation pool, preferable to the YMCA because it's saltwater; friends' places; doctor's offices; bookstores on Whyte and coffee shops along 109th. I have an intimacy with the places themselves, but no idea of the communities that grow in and around them, no idea of their spatial interrelationships because my sense of direction is a joke which my friends laugh at often and loudly.
I go places to do things. Then I come home. It's hopelessly utilitarian. And so my sense of the city is just a handful of isolated, unconnected spaces: my house; bus stops and LRT stations; campus; the Whitemud Crossing library, to which I have paid literally hundreds of dollars in late fines; the Confederation pool, preferable to the YMCA because it's saltwater; friends' places; doctor's offices; bookstores on Whyte and coffee shops along 109th. I have an intimacy with the places themselves, but no idea of the communities that grow in and around them, no idea of their spatial interrelationships because my sense of direction is a joke which my friends laugh at often and loudly.
Rhetorically speaking -- in a de Certeau kind of way -- my Edmonton has no narrative. It's just sentence fragments, walked over and over again to create a familiar but incomplete poem. It's constrained by bus routes and truncated by self-created "city limits" like my comfort zone, mobility issues courtesy of chronic pain, the fact that I am just too lazy to get my drivers' license. (I know, I know.)
It's time to salvage this relationship. It's time to fall in love.
It's time to salvage this relationship. It's time to fall in love.
Since I was raised by books, my first instinct is "read lots of Edmonton books!" but I suspect the real solution is the same as it is for a lot of the Grand Theoretical Problems which sulk inside my head for weeks.
GET OUT MORE! DO THINGS!
Rita, you're killing me! I want to give you Special Homework: Have One Fun Experience a Week, that doesn't involve doctors, library fines or staying on the sofa. :-) Incidentally, I love the name of your blog. So very Certeauian. Nice...
ReplyDeleteIs a sense of the local predicated upon a cohesive narrative? If so, whose job is it to impose that narrative? City planners? Business owners? Or anyone who can consider Edmonton local?
ReplyDeleteMy point is that imposing a narrative to create a sense of the local will be exclusionary depending on author subjectivity. Its that difference between history and archeology. Think of the city not as a story or even as a character, but as a hypertext with infinite avenues of expression, a text we all author and interpret.