placespace

Culture/Nature

Why do I have to be here to know where I am?

(L. Taylor 2005)

Place as a Camel's Mouth

Don't look a gift horse in the mouth, but what about looking in the mouth of a rental camel on the shores of the Persian Gulf?

Inbound LGA, Prospect Park

 Photos by Davina Pardo

Sand Storm

If we had galloped into Saudi Arabia, we wouldn't have known it. If we had galloped off the edge of the dune...

For the movie version, see http://www.aebrinton.typepad.com/doha/

Tanzania - welcome to the tourism board

Masai Boma #1, Tanzania

Little touched by tourists.  Traditional houses made of cow dung and (obviously) whatever can else can be found along the way.  Women are the 'constructors' here.

Cue tourism bureau: people come to Tanzania on safari and want to see 'the locals', especially the famous Masai, so they spruced the place up a bit.  Turns out, despite what the young, English language trained guide will tell you from his 'script' (he was lovely, by the way, and doing the best for his community) very few Masai likely live in this model village (as in sleep here).  They work here showing and selling 'Masai culture' to tourists. 

Paradise, USA

In Travel and Leisure this month Karrie Jacobs proves once again-- far more elegantly than I've ever read before-- that "New Urbanism" is absolutely confounding. I remember one particularly heated argument about Celebration, back in 1997, just as the town opened-- an argument I would have won if I knew this, even if it was obvious!:

Everyone I meet along the way tells me the same story: Disney actually has less and less to do with Celebration. In 2003 the majority on the Celebration Residential Owners’ Association shifted from representatives of the Disney-owned Celebration Company to the home- owners. According to the locals, Celebration—à la Pinocchio—is on its way to becoming a real town. On the other hand, in early 2004, Disney sold the entire business district to a company called Lexin Capital. The fact that downtown Celebration can be sold in its entirety—18 acres, 16 shops, six restaurants, some office space, and a number of apartments—explains a lot about why it doesn’t feel real.

Make sure to read through to the part about the "Third Place Pub & Grille." (link)

photo of downtown Celebration by Martha Camarillo for Travel & Leisure

LANDSCAPE OF IDEAS: MODIFYING AND SHAPING NATURE

Announcing the opening of a Landscape Exhibition at McGill University's McLennan Library

LANDSCAPE OF IDEAS: MODIFYING AND SHAPING NATURE

Featuring selections from the rare and special collections of the Blackader-Lauterman Art + Architecture Library, including items housed in the John Bland Canadian Architecture Collection.

McLennan Library Lobby (3459 McTavish Street, Montréal)

10 January--30 March 2007

Make no little plans...

This hasn't much to do with cultural landscapes, but Toronto expats among you may be interested in knowing the American Planning Association has given its Daniel Burnham Award to the Government of Ontario's "growth plan" for the Toronto metropolitan region, which it insists on calling the "Greater Golden Horseshoe.

Landslide: "Landscapes at Risk"

At the Landscape Foundation's website (has anyone encountered this?!), I've just come across a set of fascinating tensions between "landscape" and "environment." The two landscape cases nominated for attention to their endangerment are endangered by classic environmentalist projects: a stream restoration at the Rockefeller Park & Cleveland Cultural Gardens
and a Dan Kiley landscape in Burlington threatened by the expansion of a public transit facility.

Given that the Cultural Landscape Foundation defines Cultural Landscapes in terms of providing a sense of place and of "reveal[ing] our relationship with the land over time," I'm curious about the preservationist impulses and failure to engage more explicitly with the tensions between the things like the impulse to restore a stream and the desire to save the cultural landscape of a park.

I've been thinking about the eruv impulse and where I've seen it (surreptitious stations of the cross, guerrilla gardening), and the ways that such subtle markers make claimable space for people, or manifest and create comfort with the ideologies expressed. The concept of cultural landscape -- even if I'd like to see it in more critical and dynamic form -- does seem to create more space than the usual restoration imperatives for the subtleties of the struggles of placemaking between a stream made picturesque (or channeled) and a stream made ecological.

And to add the other usual layer: the call to preserve here is centered around the "cultural" of the Cleveland Cultural Gardens -- 23 gardens representing the various ethnic backgrounds of Cleveland. But this illustration is sheer picturesque -- Treib's "asian touch for your garden," perhaps, but not the image of 23 "cultural gardens," for which image searches turn up awfully little. Fascinating.

Hidden religious landscapes

Toronto presently has its knickers in a twist about religious symbols in public buildings. A judge, you see, has had a Christmas tree removed from her courthouse and the radio call-in show switchboards have gone supernova. Is a Christmas tree a Christian symbol? Is putting a Christmas tree in a courthouse the same as a giant monument to the Ten Commandments, as occurred in Alabama a few years back? I'm not going to answer this question.

More interesting is that this fooferaw happened the same week that the Toronto Globe and Mail published an article about an eruv located in a Orthodox Jewish suburb north of Toronto. An eruv, for those not in the know, is an implied spatial container than extends the privileges of indoor space to the outdoors. A man need not wear his prayer shawl when walking to synagogue while inside the eruv, whereas he would if it did not exist. An eruv is typically established by stringing a very thin filament around the area, usually around telephone poles and trees. To see if the Toronto eruv is intact, you can visit www.torontoeruv.org.

I've been interested in eruvs for awhile. Back in 2001, in my former home of Montréal, there was a major controversy because city workers kept cutting down the filament in the very Orthodox area of Outremont. Apparently non-Jewish people had complained. (I find this hard to believe — I lived in the 'hood for years and never managed to find the thing.) The upshot, and this brings us back to the Christmas tree, is that the local city councillor told the newspaper that she thought it deeply inappropriate that religious symbols (even if they are invisible) be put in public spaces.

And here's the punchline -- did this councillor ever stop to think that a four-storey cross located at the highest point in the city might be a religious symbol in a public space? I mean, my god, it lights up purple when the Pope dies! Talk about how everybody's version of "normal" is embedded in our personal cultural landscapes...

Has anyone else encountered eruvs or other hidden or semihidden religious landscapes?