Ecotone: Writing About Place: SuBurbs

The topic for July 15, 2003:

Suburbs

The original posts on this topic are located at:

[under the fire star] When I first saw it, Thiruvanmiyur was a village on the southern edge of Chennai. Now it has been swallowed up as the city expands to the south. Here are some impressions of Thiruvanmiyur as I first knew it: Chickens roll in small piles of ashes and fluff their feathers. Goats stand on their hind legs to tear at the lower branches of trees. Dogs dig holes in the dust to lie in, for coolness' sake. The street is always full of children, crying out to me over and over -- "Hello, hello, hello..." "Good morning, good morning..." If I respond they greet me more urgently, trying for one more response. Animal shit stinks, and human shit too, in the sun. Ten women stand in line at the communal pump, but dozens of brass pots are piled one on top of the other, waiting their turn...

[Other Wind] The more suburban a place becomes, the less real energy it seems to have. It becomes more rote and more sanitary. Its people box themselves up in cars and houses or in malls. We get connected to the TV, to the Internet, to trendy clothes and toys, and forget to look outside and connect with the people in our own community and to the land over which we commute. We float on top instead of swimming to the bottom and looking for pearls. Floating is fun, but so is diving.

[Guest Post on Other Wind] I suppose maybe birds don’t mind at all how ugly strip malls are. Their presence adds a lot of beauty and always makes me smile.

[Feathers of Hope (Pica)] I hang my laundry on a line outside our front door (front, not back) -- this would probably be enough to get me arrested if I lived in Mace Ranch, not four miles from here...

[Fragments from Floyd] Ms. Dickenson may have been on to something with her prairie consisting of only one flower and a bee. Where I grew up, a quarter acre vacant wooded lot and a small boy was enough to make a wilderness. Like so many kids in the boomer generation, my early years were spent in the suburbs on the edges of an expanding metropolis and I learned about life from the midst of a pseudopodial subdivision sprawled out beyond the old city center, up out of Jones Valley and onto the low mountainsides of the far southern Appalachian ridges around Birmingham, Alabama.

[Field Notes] I remember taking my first solo bike ride across that patch of grass, but that might be my brother I see riding unsteadily across the grass, triumphant and vulnerable. The outdoors was our own domain, theater for neighborhood alliances and the small betrayals of early friendship, and the easy-flung daggers of brother and sister. We didn't consider the exposure, didn't need walls to hide our games...

[Notes from an Eclectic Mind] Some words cannot seem to escape their associated stereotypes. When the Ecotone bloggers announced “Suburbs and Place” as their July 15th topic, I immediately thought of Malvina Reynold’s song “Little Boxes.” The lyrics speak of houses made of “ticky tacky” that all look “just the same.” An anthem condemning 1950’s suburban conformity, the song epitomized the reaction of the generation that came of age in the Sixties to the post-war bubble of contentment from which they sprang.

[TheCassandraPages] My neighbor wears wild grapevines wreathed about his shoulders. He wrestles and pulls, wrenching the honeysuckle from the earth, and vines from the trees where they once hung in wild joyful loops...Angry, hot, sweating, he sits now and wipes his forehead with the back of a wrist, sets his face and begins hacking again...

[Pax Nortona]Suburbs are the ripples of big cities. Here in Southern California where I live, the working definition I have developed is that a suburb is a community that connects to a larger metropolitan area. To tell the difference between an independent city and a suburb, you mark the developments: when there are clear, rural spaces between a large city and a smaller one, the smaller city is its own metropolitan area. Where towns and developments run on and on without break, you have suburbs.

[London and the North] 1. Summer Holidays. Travelling in from West Acton with my father to work. In Greek Street. soho. On the Central Line. Hot, very hot. He knew where to go. From the bright and interesting outdoors of west London to the dark black tunnels of Town. Who knows where we were.