Imagining Toronto, a thematic exploration of the imagined city, will be published by Mansfield Press in the fall of 2010.
List of Chapters
Chapter One: The Imagined City
Chapter 2: The City as Text
Chapter 3: The City of Neighbourhoods
Chapter 4: The Myth of the Multicultural City
Chapter 5: Desire Lines
Chapter 6: Class Fictions
Chapter 7: City Limits
Chapter 8: Imagining Toronto
From the Introduction
In the iconic Toronto novel, In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaatje writes that “before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.” With vivid language Ondaatje shows us how the city is conjured into being by acts of imagination that flesh out and give form to its physical and cultural terrain.
As we navigate the city in restless pursuit of accommodation, commerce and community, we give the city meaning through narrative, through stories that help us chart a course between the concrete, lived city and the city as we understand, fear, remember and dream it.
Ondaatje’s observation echoes the words of essayist Jonathan Raban, who wrote in Soft City that “[t]he city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps, in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.”
Ondaatje and Raban remind us that the cities we live in are made not merely of brick and mortar, or bureaucracy and money, but are equally the invention of our memories and imaginations. We realise that our cities unfold not only in the building but in the telling of them.
Toronto is a city of stories that accumulate in fragments between the aggressive thrust of its downtown towers and the primordial dream of the city’s ravines. In these fragments are found narratives of unfinished journeys and incomplete arrivals, chronicles of all the violence, poverty, ambition and hope that give shape to this city and the lives laid down in it.
Toronto poet Dionne Brand calls these narratives “the biographies of streets,” and adds, “at these crossroads, transient selves flare / in the individual drama, in the faith of translation.” It is here at these interstices that the city’s stories gain their deepest resonance, in the liminal spaces between the pavements and the shadows of the passersby who leave their imprint upon them.
In his story, “The Inner Inner City”, science fiction writer Robert Charles Wilson describes a “paracartographic map” of Toronto in which the visible city is only a mirror of the imagined city, an unchartable labyrinth of hidden avenues laid deep within its core. “There’s a city inside the city,” he writes, “the city at the center of the map.”
This book is a pilgrimage into the city within the city. Beginning with the familiar terrain – the ravines, downtown towers, neighbourhoods and inhabitants who give shape to Toronto – it ventures deep into the imagined city, dowsing for meaning in literary representations of Toronto as its inhabitants experience and narrate it. It explores how we arrive and who we become in this city; how we live, love, and make the city home, and how the city changes us even as we alter its contours.
In doing so, the book seeks to craft a literary genealogy of Toronto, tracing for the first time the long and interwoven heritage of writers and works engaging imaginatively with this city. At the same time, it seeks to do more than simply inventory Toronto’s literary culture: it is also motivated by a conviction that literature, given its unique capacity to confront the most pressing urban concerns — bigotry, poverty and violence as well as tolerance, asylum, desire and ambition — is uniquely able to help Torontonians transcend difference in this most culturally diverse of cities.
In this respect this book is predicated on a belief that rather than comparing Toronto to the world’s other great literary cities and finding it wanting, we might instead realize that Toronto’s literature reflects an entirely new kind of city, a city where identity emerges not from shared tradition or a long history but rather is forged out of a commitment to the virtues of diversity, tolerance and cultural understanding.