{"id":43468,"date":"2018-05-18T05:00:55","date_gmt":"2018-05-18T09:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=43468"},"modified":"2018-05-17T21:49:40","modified_gmt":"2018-05-18T01:49:40","slug":"deploy-scare-quotes-as-required-when-considering-the-cultural-impact-of-the-suburbs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/05\/18\/deploy-scare-quotes-as-required-when-considering-the-cultural-impact-of-the-suburbs\/","title":{"rendered":"Deploy scare quotes as required when considering the “cultural” “impact” of the suburbs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rick McGinnis<\/a> has a thoughtful piece on the creation and evolution of the modern western suburb, in the context of the ongoing Ontario election:<\/p>\n

Maybe it\u2019s some remnant of our tribal past, but it\u2019s hard for us to leave behind some impulse to fear and vilify whoever lives one village over, beyond the river or in the next valley. We might think we\u2019re sophisticated, cosmopolitan people, but this nascent tribalism is never far from the surface, and I saw it re-emerge with a roar during recent municipal elections here in Toronto.<\/p>\n

Back when the late Rob Ford won his surprise mayoral victory in 2010 \u2013 certainly a surprise for his opponents, who couldn\u2019t imagine how decisively he\u2019d win \u2013 the electoral post-mortems painted his triumph as the revenge of the suburbs that once comprised a group of independent townships over the downtown, Toronto\u2019s older urban core.<\/p>\n

It was a battle between the suburbs and the city, won this time by the suburbs, who rallied behind various standards \u2013 summed up in the media as a love of cars, ethnic and cultural homogeneity and lower property taxes. As with any history written by the losers \u2013 the media, for the most part, who identified as urbanite, not suburbanite \u2013 it relied on conveniently ignoring facts that didn\u2019t fit, and the deployment of sweeping generalizations, many of them out of date \u2013 if they were ever true at all \u2013 by decades.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Up here in Ontario, the imminent provincial election means that the suburbs versus city scenario will be revived, to either apportion blame should Progressive Conservative leader Doug Ford become premier, or get unpacked if he loses and the boogeyman of a monolithic voting bloc needs to be triumphantly debunked.<\/p>\n

There remains the small matter that Ford Nation events \u2013 held inevitably in the suburbs since the heyday of Doug\u2019s brother Rob \u2013 are visibly far more diverse than, say, the average Liberal fundraiser, and Ford opponents have been chewing on that tough gristle for nearly a decade.<\/p>\n

Obviously, the suburbs can\u2019t be both a politically, economically and culturally monolithic place, and a diverse, complex collection of communities mysteriously moved to unite during election cycles to oppose the prerogatives of certain political parties and the urbanites who love them. There\u2019s a very complex story about the suburbs dying to be told, but we\u2019re still invested in stereotypes that are decades out-of-date for the purposes of situational political utility. It\u2019s an object lesson that politics, more than anything else, is the enemy of truth.<\/p>\n

Diversity has joined \u201cmarriage,\u201d \u201crights,\u201d \u201cprivilege\u201d and \u201cfamily\u201d on that list of words that we\u2019ve come to use without sharing a common meaning, especially when we talk about places like the suburbs, what have come to mean something very different in our imaginations than they exist in reality. For the people living there \u2013 whose lived experience has nothing to do with convenient fictions \u2013 the suburbs are really just a place where a mortgage might be affordable, where you can have a front and a back yard, and where you don\u2019t share walls with your neighbours.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rick McGinnis has a thoughtful piece on the creation and evolution of the modern western suburb, in the context of the ongoing Ontario election: Maybe it\u2019s some remnant of our tribal past, but it\u2019s hard for us to leave behind some impulse to fear and vilify whoever lives one village over, beyond the river or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7,53],"tags":[262,1188,188,87,1207,207],"class_list":["post-43468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-history","category-politics","tag-culture","tag-dougford","tag-electionwatch","tag-ontario","tag-suburbs","tag-toronto"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-bj6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43468"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43468\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43469,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43468\/revisions\/43469"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}