Environment and the Ideology of Nature on the Metropolitan Fringe

Kirsten Valentine Cadieux and Laura Taylor, editors

Draft Annotated Contents/list of contributors 
 

Chapter 1 Introduction

The contemporary myth of the natural haven

by Kirsten Valentine Cadieux and Laura Taylor

The ideology of nature is a compelling force behind exurbia. What does exurbia promise? What is the content of the impulse to seek a pastoral haven? Exurbia may mirror what we flee in the cities; are there ways of looking into this mirror that would help change or disrupt the undesirable circle of urbanization we call sprawl?

Chapter 2 Bridges in the cultural landscape: Crossing nature in exurbia

by Laura Taylor

A new bridge in exurban Toronto provides an opportunity to explore an everyday landscape of attitudes and choices where country and city collide at the edge of a growing metropolis.

Chapter 3 Exurbia meets nature: Environmental ideals for a rootless society

by Richard Judd

The promise of the suburban pastoral landscape and the defense of distant remarkable natural environments forged an American consciousness of nature that transcended the local and the specific, and called into question the relationship between human tradition and natural process. What trends led to the generic, commodified regionalism and abstract environmentalism of exurbia?

Chapter 4 Airworld, or life in between

by Andrew Blum

As an escape from the technologically mediated experiences we think of as urban, we increasingly cast exurbia in a natural mold. But what happens when we include modernity in our sense of place? Examining the contradictions of exurbia’s enabling netherworld—the “Airworld” of telecommunications and travel, abstract place relationships and pervasive networks—helps us to see how modernity might be engaged in our dwelling, rather than escaped.

Chapter 5 Walden Woods: Reconciling preservation and use in Thoreau’s country

by Brian Donahue

Exurban nature both as a literary landscape and a landscape of utility. Through the history of Walden Woods, an exploration of the relationship between people and forest in Thoreau’s Concord, and in our own time.

Chapter 6 Exurbia and the Near North: Coming to terms with sojourns amidst nature in central Ontario cottage country

by Nik Luka

What can we understand about our aspirations for relating to nature by looking at the way we sojourn there in the Ontario vacation tradition of cottaging? A sense of respite and escape in short-term closeness to nature helps define our sense of the cities and suburbs where we spend the rest of our time--but how does the temporary nature of this ideal of natural sojourn get in the way of our longer-term plans for dwelling amidst nature--in exurbia, or in cities?

Chapter 7 Design and conservation in Quebec’s rural-urban fringe: The case of Lac Beauport

by Geneviève Vachon and David Paradis

This studio project in Quebec's exurbs explores how politicians, planners, and residents can work together to negotiate the meaning and form of exurban communities where the desire to create a landscape of escape brings with it urban-style growth and services.

Chapter 8 Time, place and structure: Typo-morphological analysis of Calgary neighbourhoods

by Bev Sandalack and Andrei Nicolai

The historical development of residential subdivisions in the prairie landscape of Calgary displays changing ways of responding to the desire for residential access to nature and the role of the public realm.

Chapter 9 The imagined landscape: Language, metaphor, and the environmental movement

by Thomas Looker

Literary landscapes are intertwined with our experience of the everyday world. These imagined landscapes are the ones that captivate our imaginations and we seek to re-create them in our everyday world. How do we embrace our contradictory experiences of the natural world – our wish that it be orderly and beautiful, our knowledge that it is filled with disturbance and uncertainty? 

Chapter 10 The mortality of trees and other problems of a pastoral modernity

by Kirsten Valentine Cadieux

An imagined nature alienates people from engaging with everyday nature in their own backyards. Focusing on the way in which trees function within environmental narratives offers a perspective that might allow us to find new and alternative ways to balance the search for nature and our present environmental realities.

Conclusion Negotiating sprawl; addressing the ideology of nature

by Laura Taylor and Kirsten Valentine Cadieux