Yesterday I traveled a considerable length of a road that resides in a few cities in Southern Ontario. I rode my bike in two cities and I was able to see how the road looked in both cities and how the neighbourhood felt. The road in question was Burnanthrope. Like many roads and streets that travel east to west, west to east, Burnantrope originates in BigSmoke. I have seen how this road dies, it letters out fifty kilometers away or more north of LittleSmoke, but I would not be too surprised if it still existed in some form a hundred kilometers to the west. People add to roads forever. In LittleSmoke it is fenced in farm fields intersecting with other country roads, it is a little better than a dirt track. I imagine that it was like that in MiserySaga a hundred years ago and like that in BigSmoke too. Now, though, it is different. In MiserySaga it is a four to six lane thoroughfare through the city.
MiserySaga, it is a Sad Story, like most Suburbs it was planned and it is lifeless. The neighbourhoods are planned: this square has people's houses, this square has commercial shopping options, this square is where people work. It does not work. The squares are separated by layers of defence against integration. There is the center of wide roadway. Beside the road on both sides is a two meter strip of grass, sometimes it widens to five or ten meters of grass. Beside that is a strip of concrete sidewalk, sometimes there is an asphalt bicycle trail, that the locals know about but it is not regular and it appears and disappears without warning—I suspect it abuts residential blocks and disappears with them. On the other side of the pedestrian corridor is another two meter stretch of grass and then a fence. The fence depends on the block, wood fencing denotes a residential block, brick and iron announces a commercial or industrial zone. The Residential block faces away from the roadway, the residential zone is accessed by a road that loops through it with a few crescents and courts off of it to fill in the gaps. The houses face these roads but they are closed off too; they are miniature fortresses that stand alone and apart. The people are either away at one of the other zones of commercial enterprise or hold up inside living in fear that some stranger will try to talk with them.
There are lots of parking in the commercial zones as everyone must drive, because the walls and the regulated entrances into the blocks and the distance from the commercial zones and let's face it, not every store is located as close as others. So the stores are all surrounded by two levels of parking spots, a fence, two layers of lawn strips a sidewalk and the road. There is also a sidewalk on the outside of the stores.
Occasionally there is a block for nature. It might be a park that is designed for the people, who hide in their homes or it is a too small wild area with paths to comfort the people hiding in their houses. These spaces are places to go if you want to be alone, because you will be. Unless you have dog or want to see a dog, then you will see people walking there dogs here.
This is the nature of Burnanthrope in MiserySaga.
I crossed a bridge into BigSmoke and suddenly everything was different: everything was pressed closer. The road was still two lanes in both direction but the strips of lawn had disappeared, the sidewalk was pressed against the roadway and the otherside were houses and commercial spaces with no fences. The mono devoted spaces were gone. The houses faced the world not turned into their communities. There were people walking the sidewalks. Not a lot, because I was travelling at the dinner hour, but I saw more people on the sidewalks that the entire trip through MiserySaga, less cars on the road too.
The feel was different. The air was different about the community, it felt like a community. People moving freely about it. But I will not lie about it either. Off the street onto the ancillary streets they were house filled too and I did not travel down them. When I had to leave Burnanthrope, it was on to a residential thoroughfare that felt more like MiserySaga, sans the fences and the controlled accesses. Public transit was more present too.
What I said about Burnanthrope, Should not be applied to all of MiserySaga. I told you it was a Sad Story. Misery Saga is a tale of integration and amalgamation. It is the story of halfa dozen to a dozen smaller communities becoming one city and the spaces inbetween being filled with planned spaces while the organic towns began to lose identity. The organic towns are still there, with their main streets and their open residential areas with integrated commercial stores, with parks that people travel in and play in without having to walk a dog. Spaces that are just as old as the many small communities in BigSmoke, all unplanned. There are planned spaces in BigSmoke too, they are as lifeless as the planned spaces anywhere else, but they are smaller. That is the way of the bigger central city, more organic growth for longer.
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