Imagining Toronto

A short update to note that I’ve had a couple of new pieces of writing released into the wild.

The first is a short commentary called “My Literary Leviathan,” about the challenges and rewards of reading Josef Skvorecky’s award-winning, deeply resonant novel, The Engineer of Human Souls (1977; trans. 1984), in the July issue of the [...]

Hello to members of the Professional Writers Association of Canada (PWAC) attending the MagNet conference, ongoing at the Chestnut Hotel in downtown Toronto from June 1-4, 2010.

As part of the conference I will be leading a literary walking tour of the City Hall area, including Nathan Philips Square and the area once known as ‘the [...]

In Soft City, Jonathan Raban contrasts the reasoned, ordered, regulated city projected by planners and politicians with the mysterious, often magical city experienced by urbanites.

Cities, Raban suggests are far less rational and comprehensible than we think, meaning that if we are to understand them or make them more functional, we must recognize and work with [...]

The shortly forthcoming Imagining Toronto book (Mansfield Press, spring 2010) is profiled briefly in the March/April issue of This Magazine. Here’s an excerpt of the review, written by Ava Baccari:

“In her new book, Imagining Toronto, York University geography professor Amy Lavender Harris creates a literary map of that identity building. What she finds is a [...]

In The Urban Experience, geographer David Harvey reminds us that a city—and its suburbs—should be understood as a process rather than a thing. In this light, it is important to remember that Toronto’s suburbs did not appear out of nowhere at mid-century, emerging all at once from the landscape like earthbound Leviathans. In his 1898 [...]

As we navigate the urban labyrinth, whenever we follow the invisible paths laid down by our longings, we trace desire lines across the city. Like the rutted footpaths worn across well-used playgrounds, and the spontaneous shortcuts that materialize at street corners, desire lines mark the movements we make by choice rather than at the command [...]