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[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. |
Suburbs
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[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.
[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.
[Laughing~Knees] On the night my family arrived in Tokyo from New York we were driven into the city from Haneda Airport. It had been a long flight, with a transit in Honolulu for refueling, and we were all tired and a bit dazed. A representative from my father's company met us at the arrivals areas and escorted us out to the street, where he had his car waiting for us. The air was heavy with humidity and insects whirled around the street lights over the taxi stand. The air smelled of burning oil and something else, something sweetly organic that a newcomer like me couldn't identify. And all the while a numb sense of dislocation, like having my sense of balance ripped out from inside me, surged up in my belly, a sense of being physically there, but my soul lingering in another time far away. When I think back on that moment, it is curious that I can remember the details of arriving in Tokyo, but can't recall a single image of the moment we left New York...
[Prairie Point] .... almost every place around here either has been suburban at some time or will be in the future. Now most people would call our place "inner-city" or even "downtown." Once it was part of a farm and before that it is said to have been an Indian campsite. I can travel 20 miles to the north today and see farms that I know will very soon be subdivided into housing developments or shopping centers.
[Feathers of Hope (Numenius)] I grew up in Kensington, California, just north of Berkeley, a little one-square mile municipality perched on hills with about 800 feet of relief from top to bottom of the town. I don't think I considered it a suburb when growing -- that was something you'd call Walnut Creek, or Fremont, or Hayward -- after all it had plenty of secret places to explore -- several creeks, a hidden garden at its heart, even a monastery.
[Creek Running North] Tomorrow's anti-suburban sentiment will take this riotous, exhilarating diversity for granted, much the way we suburban kids of a certain age assumed the existence of swimming pools in every third backyard. There will come a time, and probably not far off at that, when no one will even notice the spectacle of a joyous mob of Black and Mexican and Asian and Arab street kids mobbing the local ice cream truck, its Sikh driver advertising his presence by playing an ice cream truck version of Home On The Range.
But right now, that scene - which played out every day in our Richmond neighborhood - seems as good a summation of the California suburb as one can find.
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