Place, space, and public policy

I wish political scientists would stop using the word "place" when they mean "space." (I have had this argument repeatedly since I started a PhD in poli sci, where "place-based public policy" is a new buzzword.) But then again, I'm glad they are starting to recognize that policies have spatially differentiated impacts...

An op/ed by a poli sci prof in today's Globe and Mail not only uses "place" in the way that I would prefer, but recognizes that policy, identity, and place are linked:

Putting Canadians in their place
Some cultures take root in their geography - others do not
ANDREW STARK
Professor of management and political science at the University of Toronto
Globe and Mail, August 13, 2007

'If some countries have too much history," Mackenzie King said when Confederation was about 70 years old, "we have too much geography." Having now just turned 140, Canada has twice as much history. And what those intervening years tell us is that our national bonds get strained not simply because we have too much geography. Rather - in a way unique among democracies - different groups within Canada have come to relate to geography, to place, in very different ways.

Consider a comparison that can be made between Quebec and the U.S. South, once home to North America's only other serious secessionist movement. The place itself - the Mississippi River, bluegrass, cotton fields, magnolias - has, as the historian Carl Degler wrote some years ago, become central to southerners' sense of their identity. And as southern pride and sense of self has come to focus more and more on place, it has - as a welcome byproduct - come to focus less and less on race.

The political culture of French Quebec, of course, has never embraced the vicious racism that views one ethnicity as superior to another. But for years, Quebec's sovereigntist leaders, in attempting to heighten the emotional pitch of their cause, have flirted with appeals to blood, tribe and ethnic origin. Perhaps, then, it is no coincidence that one scarcely ever hears them talking about the physical glories of the place itself. After all, to speak of forest, tundra, maple trees and plains would be to speak of Canada, not just la belle province.

Is it possible that where the local place hasn't assumed a sufficiently prominent role in a group's self-conception, matters of blood and tribe are free to loom larger - with adverse consequences for national cohesiveness? Another set of Canadian and American experiences would seem to bear this out. Despite valid quibbles, there is a basic truth to the idea that many U.S. immigrant groups, while retaining their unique identities, are relatively socially integrated; for our ethnic cultures, by contrast, Canada is more in danger - as Yann Martel has said - of becoming a "hotel." One of the reasons may be that U.S. immigrant cultures have more readily woven into themselves a distinctive sense of local place. The Jewish-American culture chronicled by Isaac Bashevis Singer incorporated the sights and sounds of the Lower East Side; the Italian-American culture of Tony Soprano is caught up in the landscape of northern New Jersey: He could not have lived in Seattle. As the literary scholar Jeff Karem says, there is a "crucial connection between regionalism and ethnicity ... in American literary history."

Not so much in Canada. The Jewish-Canadian heroes of Mordecai Richler's Montreal could have lived elsewhere - growing up in the Vancouver Jewish community, I certainly knew Duddys and Joshuas - and all that Montreal uniquely provided them were French-Canadian girlfriends. As Caribbean-Canadian writer Austin Clarke says about the characters in his Nine Men Who Laughed, they "could also be in London, Paris, New York or Moscow. They happen to be in Toronto." It is not that ethnic culture fails to shape places in Canada - no one can mistake the charms of Toronto's Greektown for those of Chinatown - but that place often fails to become core to Canadian ethnic cultures. And that leaves room for elements of blood and descent - for the most insular kinds of human differences - to become more prominent.

If some of Canada's cultures have gone no more than a few steps down the road of incorporating a sense of place, others - aboriginals, for example, or Atlantic Canadians - go far in the opposite direction. From the Haida park reserve to the Newfoundland outport, the ways of life rooted in these specific places form the very marrow of their cultural self-conceptions. Consequently, policies that try to preserve their culture at the cost of taking them away from their place (as with various attempts at aboriginal resettlement) or that preserve them in the place, but at the cost of changing their culture (as employment insurance has frequently done) will always be unsatisfactory. Instead, we can preserve these cultures only to the extent we preserve them in the place. But of course doing so is costly, and so the surrounding debates often fray the bonds of national unity.

Here again, we would gain some perspective on how impressive our own challenges are if we glanced at the Americans, who have it easier. Early on, Congress and the Supreme Court began affording U.S. aboriginals greater legal protection for their place-based ways of life than exist in Canada. Partly as a result, economic assistance to American native reservations tends to get debated more purely on its economic merits, without getting as tangled in the fraught question of cultural survival. For a different reason, when small American regional towns stand to lose their main businesses, it is rarely said that a culture is thereby at risk: There is a sense in which small-town America and its culture exists everywhere in the United States. Debate over the economic policies needed to sustain aboriginal and regional places in America does not become as freighted, in the way it necessarily does here, with the idea that a culture is in jeopardy.

Other democracies beyond our own, of course, face challenges because a culture is deeply bound up with a local place - as with the Basques in Spain - or, conversely, because a culture has been unable to incorporate the local place into itself at all, as with the Muslim population of Paris. While some of these controversies have been sharper than our own, no other major democracy confronts challenges as broadly as we do on both fronts simultaneously: because place has taken little root in some of its cultures and great root in others. In this summer of our 140th year, there is some real truth to the claim that if Canada can succeed, then the world can.

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