Sunday, January 20, 2008

urban sprawl... the apocalypse of community

Christopher Dewdney on the sprawl apocalypse

LUCAS OLENIUK/TORONTO STAR

The Vellore Woods housing development west of Hwy. 400 at Rutherford Road in Vaughan.

Jan 19, 2008 04:30 AM

Christopher Dewdney

Trouble is, everybody wants their slice of the dream; the upscale house, the luxury car. And everything's getting bigger. Apparently hybrids were a blip. SUVs are once again selling in high gear and personal trucks are Detroit's new glamour rides. Size is everything. The "middle class" homes rising by the thousands in Toronto's burgeoning suburbs are big, too, even by Forest Hill standards. They boast cathedral ceilings, cavernous kitchens, hardwood floors throughout, and often sport massive winding staircases that lead to half a dozen bedrooms, (most with en suite bathrooms) – and all at half the price of a comparable space downtown. They're not much to look at architecturally speaking, but they are selling like hotcakes. Downtown may be downsizing into condos, but 905 is super-sizing into Dallas style manors.

And more and more families are moving there. On a grey, overcast afternoon a few weeks ago I drove up Bathurst Street to Aurora and was amazed at how, in little over a year, the suburban frontier of "monster" homes has been pushed right to the brink of the Oak Ridges moraine. I saw angular, particleboard silhouettes on distant hills that once sported thick woodlots, I saw armies of earthmovers and row after row of empty homes sprouting out of the contoured mud. There were no stores, no schools, no malls, no theatres, no restaurants, just mile after dreary mile of new homes. And I can think of nothing that can stop this advance.

In the film Airsick there is a scene where the camera pulls out from what seems to be a verdant forest. As the view expands to take in more and more landscape you realize that the "forest" is actually an island in the midst of a suburban development. A very small island. I imagined then how I would make my own film about urban sprawl, one that made the same point but from a very different vantage. Like Airsick and Koyaanisqatsi before it, my movie would use time-lapse film to speed things up, but I wouldn't speed up traffic or clouds; my time-lapse would accelerate urban sprawl and would require years to film. Technically speaking it would be simple, and I think it would be very dramatic.

I picture my film camera mounted on a tripod set in concrete (in order to stabilize it) on top of a hill overlooking a forested region north of Toronto. Every month I would visit the camera, (which is pointed south), and take a few frames. For years the seasons would come and go, but the forested hills and cornfields would remain relatively unchanged. On clear days you might see the CN Tower and a few office buildings, but they would look more like distant mirages than anything substantial.

Then one year, at the edge of the southern horizon, the first silhouettes of houses would appear. Each year they would edge closer so that, over the 15-year period of the film, a time-lapse version of the encroachment of suburbia would be captured. What would the film look when it was finished? I think I can guess.

Most of us have seen footage from the pre-dawn nuclear tests that the U.S. conducted in Nevada during the late 1950s and early 1960s – the countdown, the anticipation and then, suddenly, the empty desert landscape is flooded with a blinding flash as the bomb detonates some 10 or 20 miles distant from the position of the documentary film camera capturing the blast. As the light gradually dims you begin to see the shape of the mushroom cloud, its cap a glowing fireball rising into the sky. The light from the fireball illuminates the desert around the explosion, as well as the distant mountains behind it.

It's visually spectacular in a grotesque sort of way, and harmlessly distant, until you notice something racing along the ground – a low disc spreading out from the base of the mushroom cloud. The shockwave. Racing outwards from the explosion at the speed of sound, the shockwave creates the most damage from the blast. Where its leading edge brushes the desert it stirs up a two-foot-thick dust storm of sand and nothing stops it. Within seconds it races up to the position of the camera which recoils from the impact of the shockwave. The film wobbles a bit. Even at this distance the explosion is dangerous.

The metaphor is straightforward, I guess. Toronto's downtown office towers are the mushroom cloud rising toward the sky and the suburbs are the shockwave, racing over the desert. Only instead of desert this shockwave is levelling forests and streams and farmland. And there is another difference. Suburban sprawl is much more dangerous, and permanent, than an atomic concussion. There is no "day after" a subdivision has been installed. My time-lapse film would end when the camera and its concrete base was removed by construction workers. No transient wobble from a dissipated shockwave. Blackness would end this film.

If the shockwave metaphor captured the outward movement of suburban development then I'd have to shift analogies to describe the permanence of a suburb. Perhaps a lava flow would be more accurate, because after lava has spread out from the volcano and cooled, everything beneath it has been destroyed and buried. The dream costs more than we think.

http://www.thestar.com/article/294701

Tuesday, January 1, 2008

a real honour...

every time a doula attends a birth, we feel privileged to have been invited into such a personal and special event in people's lives.  at a recent birth i was blessed with the honour of cutting the baby's umbilical cord and each time i remember that moment i feel a wave of emotion come over me.

at the time it was sort of a blur; it had been a long labour and i think we were all a little loopy by the end, but looking back - i swell with pride and joy.   being allowed to witness tiny little babies enter the world is such a wonderful gift.  but the fact that the mother, after such a momentous event and such a huge journey thought of asking me to cut the cord truly speaks volumes to me.

as a doula, i am constantly wondering if i could have done something differently, improved an outcome, changed a path for a client... and then every once in a while there is a gesture or a moment or an event that reminds me that i am just one person, doing the best i can.

and so every once in a while i think about that cord cutting moment and then i know that i am in the right line of work.  :)