Upload
zoia-bafani
View
225
Download
0
Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
7/29/2019 L. Taylor Thesis
1/322
THE PRODUCTION OF NATURE INPLANNING FOR URBAN EXPANSION:
A CULTURAL LANDSCAPE STUDY OFNEW URBAN GROWTH IN OAKVILLE,
ONTARIO
by
Laura Elizabeth Taylor
Thesis submitted in conformity with therequirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Graduate Department of Geography
University of Toronto
Laura Elizabeth Taylor 2007
7/29/2019 L. Taylor Thesis
2/322
7/29/2019 L. Taylor Thesis
3/322
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
ABSTRACT
THE PRODUCTION OF NATURE IN PLANNING FOR URBAN EXPANSION:
A CULTURAL LANDSCAPE STUDY OF NEW URBAN GROWTH IN
OAKVILLE, ONTARIO
by Laura Taylor
Doctor of Philosophy, Department of Geography 2007
Chairperson of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Michael Bunce
The citys edge is a cultural landscape of conflicting and competing meanings. The visible,
physical edge of rapidly urbanizing cities is emotionally charged, representing prosperity
to some, and sprawl and environmental destruction to others. My dissertation is a cultural
landscape study of city expansion at the edge of the Toronto-centred region, where urban
growth pressures are as intense as anywhere in North America or Europe. My research
reveals that ideas about the countryside are produced against the city, and these ideas are
discussed in terms of ecology and natural heritage. This is a study of the cultural politics
of landscape meaning in a contemporary planning process where local area planning
comes face-to-face with the global environmental imagination.
In the Town of Oakville, a wealthy suburb in the Toronto metropolitan area, a planning
process to urbanize the last remaining countryside of the town has been underway for the
past two decades. In the end, the decision to urbanize has been in lock-step with the
decision to conserve: through the creation of a large natural heritage system (almost 900
hectares or more than 2,000 acres), fully one-third of the planning area, development of
7/29/2019 L. Taylor Thesis
4/322
the remainder of the lands can take place. While pastoral ideas of the romantic
countryside underlie the valuation of this landscape, representations of ecological
sensitivity by environmental science were politically the most successful. Local area
politics have undergone a revolution resulting from the negotiation over the future of this
countryside. Using discourse analysis (text analysis of public planning process documents
and popular media), participant observation of public meetings, and interviews with
informants, my research reveals that cultural attitudes toward growth and conservation
are informed by symbolic landscapes of country and city and these are implicated in the
production of real landscapes and places. As planning practitioners and academics
involved in the political process of shaping landscape change at the citys edge, it is
difficult to represent those opinions of the public and other participants in the planning
process that are not supported by scientific, empirical study. The lens of cultural
landscape provides tools to understand and recognize cultural value, meaning and
symbolism in edge landscapes and to engage with them in areas which are being planned
for change.
7/29/2019 L. Taylor Thesis
5/322
Table of Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1 ............................................................................................................................................... 5
INTRODUCTION......................................................................................................................................... 5Focus of research is the countryside as a cultural landscape .......................................................................... 7
Research questions ............................................................................................................................... 7Where the country and city collide [site of study] ............................................................................... 9Major theoretical focus: the ideology of nature in the countryside ................................................... 11Research case study: North Oakville ................................................................................................. 12
Contribution of this research ......................................................................................................................... 16
CHAPTER 2 ............................................................................................................................................. 19
THE PERSPECTIVE OF CULTURAL LANDSCAPE:MATERIAL, SYMBOLIC AND CULTURAL APPROACHES TO STUDYING LANDSCAPE REPRESENTATION.... 19
Collision of city and country landscape values in planning policy and practice motivated study
.......................................................................................................................................................... 20Cultural geography provides conceptual and methodological framework for study .................. 23
Cultural geographys intellectual traditions.................................................................................. 25Landscape as a focus of study ........................................................................................................ 26Spatial descriptions of material landscape .................................................................................... 33
Urban geography produces quantitative and descriptive representations of metropolitan, suburban, sprawl
landscapes ...................................................................................................................................................... 35Landscape representation of the citys edge in rural geography addresses urban influences on thecountryside .................................................................................................................................................... 38Material landscape representation informs the planning process ................................................................. 42
Theoretical approaches to studying landscape representation .................................................... 43Landscapes in social imagination ................................................................................................................. 44Representation is political ............................................................................................................................. 47
Critical and cultural approaches to the study of landscape ......................................................... 48Discourse frames the study of landscape meaning in action ........................................................................ 58The power and politics of landscape interpretation ...................................................................................... 61
Sense of place and landscape interpretation ................................................................................. 68Planning process structures the negotiation of cultural landscape representation.................... 70Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................... 75
CHAPTER 3 ............................................................................................................................................. 77
REVIEW OF LITERATURE ON THE COUNTRYSIDE .................................................................................... 77Countryside as a cultural landscape .............................................................................................. 77The citys countryside................................................................................................................. 79Same landscape, different perspectives: how countryside is viewed from the urban and the
rural.................................................................................................................................................. 80The critical importance of countryside valuation ......................................................................... 83The nature of nature in the countryside ........................................................................................ 86
Concluding with thoughts on the Canadian countryside ............................................................. 90The Ontario countryside is enshrined (but not defined) in GGH Greenbelt ................................................ 93Canadian emphasis is important ................................................................................................................... 95
7/29/2019 L. Taylor Thesis
6/322
ii
CHAPTER 4 .............................................................................................................................................. 99
METHODOLOGY:IMPLEMENTINGTHECONCEPTUALFRAMEWORKORRESEARCHAPPROACH ............. 99
Qualitative methods to study the use of landscape representation in the discourse of theplanning process in Oakville......................................................................................................... 100
Detailed description of the research process .............................................................................................. 103Document review and analysis ................................................................................................................... 103
On the use of the internet for document review .............................................................................. 104Limitations of the archive ................................................................................................................ 106The interview process ...................................................................................................................... 109On the writing and production process ........................................................................................... 111
Concluding thoughts on the use of qualitative methods and case study approach .................................... 112
CHAPTER 5 ............................................................................................................................................ 115
NORTH OAKVILLE:ALANDSCAPEHISTORY ................................................................................. 115The settlement history of Oakville, of which North Oakville is only more recently a part ....... 117
Within the British colony of Upper Canada, Trafalgar was built around the road and Oakville around theharbour ........................................................................................................................................................ 118Dundas Street was settled first .................................................................................................................... 120The town was at the front and Trafalgar was at the back ................................................................... 121From woods to farmland ............................................................................................................................. 126Sixteen Mile Creek in North Oakville history ........................................................................................... 129The beginning of the post-war suburban era .............................................................................................. 131
History of post-war plan-making.................................................................................................. 132How a local landscape fits into large-scale governance............................................................................. 132
Current landscape description ...................................................................................................... 138Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................... 140
CHAPTER 6 ............................................................................................................................................ 143
PLAN-MAKING ...................................................................................................................................... 143
The decision to urbanize North Oakville ..................................................................................... 144Who is planning Oakville? ......................................................................................................................... 145Watershed planning is overarching ............................................................................................................ 147The Halton Urban Structure Plan set the stage for urbanization ............................................................... 150
ROPA 8 and regional planning ....................................................................................................... 151Amending the Towns Official Plan .......................................................................................................... 153
OPA 198: A controversial process .................................................................................................. 153Several background studies supported the Towns amendment ..................................................... 155The Strategic Land Use Options Study ........................................................................................... 157
Few changes visible in the landscape ......................................................................................................... 159Planning the transformation of North Oakvilles landscape from countryside to town........... 160
Charrette begins process of detailed planning ............................................................................................ 161The Natural Heritage System is the focus of the secondary planning process .......................................... 164
Provincially-owned lands provide an example of natural area politics .......................................... 166Conclusion to plan-making ......................................................................................................................... 167
7/29/2019 L. Taylor Thesis
7/322
iii
CHAPTER 7 ........................................................................................................................................... 169
NEGOTIATING LANDSCAPE REPRESENTATION: THE PRODUCTION OF NATURE IN THE PLANNING
PROCESS ............................................................................................................................................... 169Oakvilles self-portrait is of a place where residents connect with nature ................................ 172
Community identity in Oakville is expressed through this connection to nature ......................................173Loss of last countryside an affront to community identity .....................................................................180
North Oakville landscape represented as environmentally significant in the planning process
........................................................................................................................................................ 181Representation of the landscape as environmentally significant by Oakvillegreen dominated the process.....................................................................................................................................................................182
Local newspaper also represented the process as a contest over the environment .........................188Other representations subdued .........................................................................................................190Sense of place within the Town not well articulated in the planning process ................................191Farmed landscape not represented ...................................................................................................193Environmental debate upstages growth agenda ..............................................................................194The representation of the landscape by land economics .................................................................195Representations of this area as a future community were also overshadowed ...............................199Oakvillegreens approach criticized ................................................................................................202
Biophysical science provided by government agencies and consultants ...................................................204The culture of science is rarely in evidence .....................................................................................209
Environmentalism within society provide epistemological space for the dominant reading .................218Influences of environmentalism in North Oakville .........................................................................219
Focus on environmental science a metanarrative for things left unsaid ....................................................222Anti-growth sentiment .....................................................................................................................223Race ..................................................................................................................................................226Last settler syndrome .......................................................................................................................228
The representation of the landscape as natural dominated politically, in the end ......................................229Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................... 231
CHAPTER 8 ........................................................................................................................................... 233
CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................................... 233Cultural politics and landscape representation in Oakville ....................................................... 234The production of nature in planning for urban expansion ...................................................... 241The rise and fall of the countryside ideal.................................................................................... 244
Local area planning and the global environmental imagination .............................................. 248
LISTOFFIGURES ............................................................................................................................. 255APPENDIX A:INTERVIEWQUESTIONS ............................................................................................. 1APPENDIXB:INTERVIEWS ................................................................................................................... 2APPENDIXC:MEETINGS ................................................................................................................... 4
List of Meetings Held ......................................................................................................................... 4APPENDIX D: STUDIES............................................................................................................................... 7
List of North Oakville Studies ............................................................................................................ 7REFERENCES.............................................................................................................................................. I
7/29/2019 L. Taylor Thesis
8/322
iv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
(forthcoming)
7/29/2019 L. Taylor Thesis
9/322
5Introduction
C h a p t e r 1
INTRODUCTION
The citys edge is a cultural landscape of conflicting and competing meanings. Neither
urban nor rural, this visible, physical landscape is a space in between. On one side, the
city accommodates the homes, workplaces, and services of its population with an
infrastructure of roads, pipes and wires connecting buildings and people together. On the
other side, the country is in productive use for farming, mining and lumbering as well as
providing for amenity uses such as housing, tourism and recreation. Between these two is
a zone, which I call the citys edge, that is like the pressure wave in front of the city-
ships bow (Hart 1991). Here the landscape is a jumble of urban-serving and rural-seeking
uses that can only exist in proximity to the city. Yet, there are strongly-held perceptual
differences between country and city here that bubble to the surface when land use
changes are proposed.
The decision to expand an urban boundary to encompass and then urbanize these lands
at the citys edge is always hotly debated in the Toronto area. At the edge of Canadas
largest city are some of the fastest-growing suburbs in North America and a proposal for
urban expansion triggers a local municipal planning process forcing the people involved
to discuss their views about country and city, and other values of community, nature and
home. My dissertation research is the study of the current expansion of the Town of
Oakville, a suburban lakefront community on the western edge of the built up area of
Toronto. It focuses on peoples reaction to the proposed urbanization of this countryside
and how competing ideas about the past, existing and future landscape were negotiated
within the planning process. This particular case of urban expansion has been
controversial and very political and provides valuable insights into how people make
sense of landscape change and contemporary cultural values.
The case study focuses on North Oakville, the last remaining area of countryside on
the inland edge of the lakefront town of Oakville, today one of the wealthiest
communities in Canada. Oakville historically grew around its harbour on Lake Ontario
7/29/2019 L. Taylor Thesis
10/322
Introduction6
and the case study area, much greater in size than the original old town, was the
agricultural back of the township. While the case study is unique to its contemporary
time and place, it deals with issues common to urban edge expansion planning in rapidly
growing Anglo-American cities. Rapidly-expanding urban regions have historically grown
into their surrounding countryside and have raised contested ideas about nature and the
countryside. This case study examines cultural politics and landscape representation in the
urban expansion process in Oakville where a large natural heritage area was produced
through the use of environmental science in the planning discourse. The study raises
important questions about the contemporary valuation of countryside in an era of global
concern over the environmental impact of urbanization.
In this introductory chapter, I will set out my research questions, discuss the approach to
research within cultural geography and describe the site of my research. Chapter 2
presents the conceptual framework within which the research is being carried out;
landscape is a central concept in cultural geography and material, symbolic and cultural
approaches to thinking about and studying landscape are discussed. Following
immediately on the conceptual framework for studying landscape representation, Chapter
3 discusses the literature on the specific cultural landscape of the countryside and brings
this together with questions about the culture/nature dichotomy that has recently
preoccupied cultural geography. Chapter 4 reviews the research methods of cultural
landscape studies that I adopted to undertake the research. Chapters 5, 6 and 7 present
the research including the historical narrative of Oakvilles development, a chronological
account of the use of landscape representation in the planning process following by a
discussion of the politics of landscape representation in this case. The concluding chapter
presents the contribution of my research to thinking through the theoretical questions of
cultural geography.
7/29/2019 L. Taylor Thesis
11/322
7/29/2019 L. Taylor Thesis
12/322
Introduction8
of ecological restoration was produced by environmental scientists and taken up and used
politically by a group of local residents against urban growth. The ideology of natural
heritage raises important questions about contemporary attitudes towards urbanization
and has profound implications for those involved in the management of urban growth. A
major question for the local municipal planning process is the role of the larger societal
discourse of sprawl and the contribution of rapid urban growth to global environmental
problems: residents in this case felt they were taking a stand to address global
environmental problems in their backyard. The production of nature here may be seen by
some to be a victory for local environmentalism but it is not without cost. The use of
science as an objective authoritative way to express landscape value precluded a robust
public discussion of other goals for the new urban area including affordable housing,
provision of transit, the design of public spaces including schools, built heritage
conservation, and scenic beauty.
At the conclusion of the process to plan the urban expansion of Oakville, spanning two
decades, a contiguous area of natural heritage conservation will be designated covering
one-third of the study area. This raises an important question regarding how nature is
produced and mobilized against urban expansion. Why were people willing to go to such
lengths to prevent urban growth? How did one group come to control the agenda? Why
was environmental science so successful in the cultural politics of the process? In the
planning process, deeply entrenched ideas about city and country were expressed
resulting in the creation of an area of future wild nature in an otherwise typical southern
Ontario countryside. Cultural landscape studies provide a conceptual and methodological
framework for studying the politics of landscape representation. Issues of urbanization in
the Toronto area are shared by other rapidly growing cities in North America and the
production of nature against sprawl will be of interest to those who study cities and urban
growth.
I will argue that the pastoral countryside, valued for its amenity and scenic beauty as a
retreat from the city, may have been a motivating force behind the desire to protect this
7/29/2019 L. Taylor Thesis
13/322
Introduction9
landscape from urban growth, butthe use of scientifically identified natural habitat was
successful politically. During the planning process, the size of this area grew dramatically
through political negotiation from the size originally identified as candidate for ecological
conservation and restoration. The planning process produced an area in which nature will
be protected from the taint of human use. The privileging of science resulted in much
less attention paid to the long history of settlement of this landscape shaping its current
sense of place, or the long history of planning the metropolitan area of which North
Oakville is a part, or the impact on the everyday environment of existing and future
residents. Rather than creating an urban area reflecting a better way of living in nature,
the production of nature here is a rejection of the city and in an attempt to recover a
wilderness lost.
Where the country and city collide [site of study]
Raymond Williams (1973) wrote of the country vs. the city as one of the deep paradoxes
of Western culture. He demonstrated how material landscapes are expressions of
dominant cultural values, circulating intertextually within broader societal discourses,
alongside words (and images). Williams suggested that it is useful, also, to stop at certain
points and take particular cross-sections: to ask not only what is happening, in a period,
to ideas of the country and the city, but also with what other ideas, in a more general
structure, such ideas are associated (1973: 290). To this end, then, my dissertation is
dedicated. I explore the persistence of ideas of country as produced against the city, using
a case study at the citys edge. I discuss how ideas about the countryside and the cultural
values that it represents are implicated in the production of real landscapes and places.
Williams wrote, at times these [ideas of country and city] express, not only in disguise
and displacement but in effective mediation or in offered and sometimes effective
transcendence, human interests and purposes for which there is no other immediatelyavailable vocabulary (1973: 291). In my research, while testing the larger question of
how ideas about the countryside are implicated in the politics of the production of urban
landscapes, I find that countryside is the place where nature is. The idea of countryside,
7/29/2019 L. Taylor Thesis
14/322
Introduction10
while not particularly well articulated or well defined in my case study, is valued as the site
of nature in the geographical imagination of most involved in the process. Most of the
debate in Oakvilles process focuses on articulating the importance of nature. Whereas
Williams was writing of the English countryside in the early 1970s and how it had been
represented in classic literature from much earlier, today in 2007, almost four decades
later in a mature English colony, countryside has come to mean nature in the debate
over landscape meaning and change at the edge of this large city region. Preserving nature
in the face of imminent destruction by the city is the preoccupation of the planning
process in this case study, with issues of agricultural land preservation and built landscape
heritage relatively seldom raised. Preservation of trees and wetlands is championed as
having self-evident benefits by local citizens, environmental consultants, and provincial
experts. What proponents hope to gain (the unarticulated normative hopes and
dreams) through the conservation of this countryside and the nature imagined to be here
is less clear.
The edge landscape of my research, North Oakville, is a contemporary example of the
tension between country and city. As discussed, the valuation of the country over the city
has been long-standing and it is no surprise that the proposal to urbanize this area of
Oakville was hotly contested. The arguments used to fight urbanization are a product of
further entrenchment of the nature good-city bad view and strengthening valuations of
the natural environment generally.
I find the negative attitude towards urban growth very troubling. It sabotages the
planning process if there is no agreement in the first place that urban growth needs to
take place. If people do not want urban growth, the discussion should take place in
broader society not within the planning process about the desire to pursue an existence
that rates its health on growth: more houses, more units sold, jobs created, and biggerprofits. In the Ontario context by the time a local area municipal planning process occurs,
the decision to grow and urbanize has really already been made, the process tends to be a
7/29/2019 L. Taylor Thesis
15/322
Introduction11
rubber-stamping at the local level of a provincial mandate, and the guts of the process is
focused around how (not whether) development should take place in a given area.
Cultural geography provides a conceptual framework to get at these issues. The topic ofurbanization is, of course, the subject of other disciplines including urban and economic
geography, rural geography, urban studies, cultural studies (especially American,
Canadian, Chinese, etc.), urban and regional planning and urban design. But in cultural
geography, the contested meaning of landscape is up for theoretical and empirical
exploration. In contrast, for instance, in planning, sprawl is a spectre to be stopped,
and good planning is the grail held against it: communities should have a compact
urban form, have a range and mix of housing, be walkable and transit supportive, have a
good ratio of homes to jobs, have a diversity of cultures, and preserve the natural
environment. The theoretical framework for planning does not adequately excavate this
normative value system, it instead revolves around ways of thinking about issues of
process (rational comprehensive vs. normative vs. collaborative). To look at how these
meanings are contested, cultural geography, in its intersection of more traditional
landscape research and the more recent import of cultural studies, provides ways of
interrogating how landscape ideas are represented and discussed in the planning process.
These ideas about landscape are central to the discussion of alternative land use futures
that are themselves informed by broader societal discourses around country and city.
These ideas do not stay in the realm of interesting theoretical questions about language,
text, and discourse or questions of how individuals represent themselves and their values
spatially: they are implicated in the production of real landscapes and places.
Major theoretical focus: the ideology of nature in the countryside
Within the broad topic of the countryside, the ideology of nature is very important and I
will argue in this case study that the valuation of nature by environmental science hasdisplaced the value of the cultivated pastoral countryside in the discourse of the planning
process. In 2004, in the third year of my doctoral program, the Ontario government
created a 7,300-hectare (1.8 million-acre) Greenbelt around the urbanizing area of the
7/29/2019 L. Taylor Thesis
16/322
Introduction12
Toronto region (north of the study area). The major policy achievement of the Greenbelt
is the addition of a Protected Countryside designation to areas already protected under
other legislation.1
Research case study: North Oakville
For my research, the use of the label Protected Countryside
reinforced the integrity of thinking about the importance of countryside in the politics of
urbanization: the countryside is what you say you want when you do not want
urbanization. Why urban growth is so undesirable needs to be interrogated: normative
thinking among land use planners and policy makers is towards intensification,
revitalization and redevelopment of the city yet so many people if given the choice do not
choose the city but choose nature and the countryside instead. I conclude that in the case
of North Oakville, the idea of countryside is conflated with the ideology of nature in the
planning process. My question is now whether the cultural valuation of nature has
widened and deepened to the extent that it has outpaced the ability of the planning
process to deal with it.
The Town of Oakville is located just west of Toronto (see Figures 1, 2). With its historic
mainstreet closely paralleling Lake Ontario, Oakville has grown in bands northwards ever
since, hemmed in by neighbouring municipalities to the east and west. Its 2001
population was 145,000 and is estimated to be about 160,000 today in 2007 (Oakville
2005b). North Oakville is planned to be the final band of development in the town, an
area of 3,100 hectares (7,660 acres) 2
1Niagara Escarpment Plan, Oak Ridges Moraine Conservation Plan, Parkway Belt West Planand the Rouge Valley Management
Plan.
, one-fifth of the total area of the municipality. North
Oakville is planned to accommodate 55,000 new people and 35,000 jobs over the next 50
years. This area is unremarkable except for how typical it is as an edge landscape in the
Toronto area. The Town of Oakville itself is not so typical, as it is one of the wealthiest
communities in Canada. In a metropolitan area known for its international immigration
and ethnic diversity, Oakville has remained predominantly white, middle to upper class in
2 The entire North Oakville study area is roughly the same width as the distance along Bloor Street fromthe Humber River in the west past the Don River valley in the east and would run from Bloor down toabout Front Street. North Oakville is two-thirds the size of the city of Cambridge which theEncyclopdia Britannica pegs at 41 square kilometres (10,000 acres).
7/29/2019 L. Taylor Thesis
17/322
Introduction13
spite of its rapid growth. The study of this communitys response to urbanization
provides insight into the cultural values of the elite in a place where members of the
community have the time, skills and resources to mobilize with such force in the process.
In September 2003, the Town of Oakvilles official plan (the comprehensive land use
plan for the town) was amended to include the lands north of Dundas Street and south
of the new Highway 407 expressway as part of the urban area of the town. Although the
decision to urbanize these lands was made four years earlier when the Regional
Municipality of Halton revised their official plan through a public process, the decision-
making process in Oakville, the local municipality, was the one that provoked a dramatic
reaction from local residents. The urbanization of these lands was fought long and hard.
The Town portrayed itself as having no choice in urban expansion (the decision had
already been made--with the Towns prior buy-in--by the Region, the upper-tier
municipality). The residents and environmentalists against urbanization used every tool in
the book to block development of the entire area, including evoking the idea of a
moraine in the area as having enough environmental significance to preclude
development, similar to the recent conservation of the Oak Ridges Moraine. 3
3 The Oak Ridges Moraine is major landform 190,000 hectares (470,000 acres) in size stretching 160 kilometres (100
miles) in an arc encircling the northern edges of the Greater Toronto Area. An area of scenic countryside, it is also
the watershed divide and the source of the headwaters for rivers feeding western Lake Ontario, the source of
Torontos drinking water. The Oak Ridges Moraine Conservation Actwas passed in 2001 by the province to protect the
ecological integrity of the moraines natural heritage and hydrologically sensitive features (MAH 2002 and see
Bocking 2005 for a critical discussion).
Following
the Town Councils decision to amend the official plan to designate North Oakville as
future urban, the planning process (still highly contentious) has been focused on the
detailed planning for these lands. As of April 2007, this detailed planning process is still
ongoing. After eight pre-hearing conferences, several postponements, and major
mediation and out-of-court settlements with several landowners, an Ontario Municipal
Board hearing is again set for May 2, 2007, the result of which may be an approved
detailed secondary plan land use map and text policy for the area.
7/29/2019 L. Taylor Thesis
18/322
Introduction14
The future of North Oakville is a consequence of its geography within Canada. North
Oakvilles contemporary urbanization is directly affected by the historical settlement
pattern of Canada as well as the systems and structures of governance that have been
created. The large Central Ontario region focused on Toronto is forecast to increase in
population by about 100,000 people per year for the next 30 years (we are surpassing that
at the moment), and these newcomers will be added to an existing population of about
7.7 million people (Hemson 2003). For greater Toronto, this new population, plus an
aging existing population, means more than one million new housing units will need to
be built within the next thirty years. In the debate about the best way to grow and
accommodate all these people, the issues of urbanizing the countryside--expanding the
city to make room for homes, shops and jobs--are among the most emotional. The policy
at the national level to allow a high level of immigration responds to demographics and
global economies, but the effect is felt at the level of the local landscape where changes to
make room for additional people is very personal.
Within this larger geographical context, the study area, North Oakville, is a substantial
acreage set back from the lake (see Figure 3). It is about a fifth of the total size of the
municipality in area, much bigger than the original historic town. On a map, it looks to be
about the same in size as the new suburbs built within the town north of the new Queen
Elizabeth Way expressway in the early 1950s (linking Toronto with Niagara), but in area
it is not quite. The landscape of North Oakville is an unremarkable slice of Ontario
countryside with straight two-lane roads rolling up and down as they follow the lot and
concession survey grid through local topographical variations in a fairly flat landscape.
The roads carry substantial commuter traffic as they link Mississauga and Toronto to the
east with residential suburbs to the north and west. One of these roads, Dundas Street,
has served for many years as the boundary between the urban serviced area to the south
and the countryside landscape to the north. Dundas Street was one of two original
colonization roads built in this part of the world to link Toronto west with the town of
Dundas and Hamilton beyond (along with Yonge Street which linked Toronto north to
Lake Simcoe). The North Oakville area is also referred to locally as the Lands north of
7/29/2019 L. Taylor Thesis
19/322
Introduction15
Dundas (Figure 4). Immediately to the south of Dundas Street are the recently built
suburbs of the Town where new urbanist-style houses, parking lots and big box retail
stores back up to the six lane road. The contrast with the countryside landscape to the
north is startling: to the north is a wide open area with long views of mostly farmed lands
interspersed by woodlots. The roads within the area are lightly settled by farmhouses on
tracts of 100 and 200-acre farms, with mostly cash crops, some horse farms, and a few
exurban homes on manicured land. The Sixteen Mile Creek is substantial as southern
Ontario rivers go, with a hundred-foot-deep densely wooded valley. The visible landscape
is a farmed, inhabited countryside at the edge of the city. The primary land use here,
though, is speculation. Most of these lands have been held by developers for years, in
anticipation of the urban expansion of the town from the south. As early as 1958,
urbanization of these lands was expected (ODPD 1958a-f) and in 1973, a plan showed
the possible future development of the town into these lands (Paterson 1973).
The North Oakville lands are owned by many people. The properties range from 50-foot
house lots to several hectares in size. Land uses include rural residential, grain and
produce farms, equestrian centres, a municipal water tower and public works yard,
churches, schools and cemeteries. Some of the properties are lived on by their owners,
some who also farm there, and others are absentee landowners renting out their land.
Depending upon what decisions are made about the distribution of land uses and density,
some people will consider that they have benefited from urbanization in monetary terms
or quality of life, some will be ambivalent, and some will think that they have lost more
than they have gained. Some of the residents of Oakville to the south have been very
vocal about what changes should be permitted here and how development should
proceed. Whether the ultimate measure of benefit is money, profit, or quality of life, who
captures the advantage (and at whose expense) will remain to be seen some twenty-plus
years from now. Suffice it to say, the discussions in which this community has been
embroiled over the future of this landscape have been very political. I argue that the
landscape itself is political, given the relative value conferred to different sites. For
instance, a site with large trees is seen either to be less valuable from a development
7/29/2019 L. Taylor Thesis
20/322
Introduction16
proforma perspective or quite valuable from an ecological perspective and very valuable
from an aesthetic one. The discussions and decisions about relative value and the power
relations they constitute are carried out within the structured discourse of the land use
planning process, including appeals to the Ontario Municipal Board. Within this process,
residents and property owners lobby local planners and Councillors, and provide
arguments to the OMB to have certain lands valued in ways that those actors think will
give them an advantage, but their motivations are very complicated.
Contribution of this research
This case study of the urban planning process in Oakville demonstrates that cultural
politics and landscape representation play a role in the urban expansion process. A large
natural heritage area was produced through the use of environmental science in the
planning discourse. Exploring how local community identity in Oakville is expressed
through this connection to nature explains how the impending loss of the Towns last
countryside was seen an affront to community identity. However, the pastoral
countryside was not well represented. Instead the representation of the landscape as
environmentally significant natural heritage dominated the process, the result of the
intersection of the work of government agencies and environmental consultants
mobilized politically by the local residents group. The discourse of environmentalism
and sprawl within society provides an epistemological space for the dominant reading
of the landscape in this way. Oakville proved to be a superb case study to reflect on the
cultural politics of landscape representation within planning because of its long planning
history leading up to the contemporary moment and the decisiveness of the ideology of
nature raised in opposition to urban growth.
This case study of the edge of the Toronto area shows that the countryside is valued by
the public, yet people have great difficulty in communicating its value in ways that theythink will make a difference within the planning process. The planning process is not
designed to deal with qualitative statements of scenic beauty, pastoral landscape, or
spiritual personal or community experiences of nature, nor is it equipped to respond to
7/29/2019 L. Taylor Thesis
21/322
Introduction17
macro-concerns such as global warming, air and water pollution and species extinction.
The process is designed to produce and compare alternative development futures for a
given area, not to highlight or question normative values (although these are contested
and defended throughout). Instead, in this case, people on all sides of the urbanization
question use environmental science as the Trojan horse to insert their values into the
process whether to prove that the nature there needs to be preserved and enhanced or
whether it is degraded, devalued, or altogether absent and as such, developable. The
language and methodology of environmental science communicates landscape value in
ways useful to the planning process. The result in this case, is that one-third of the
future urban area will be set aside for natural conservation. The Natural
Heritage/Open Space System includes lands that are currently visibly wild natural
habitat (eg. in creek valleys, wetlands, and woodlots), as well as lands under cultivation or
other high impact use. These will now be zoned environmental protection with
directed landscape management that will reinforce nature as the dominant reading.
Other visibly natural areas in residential or employment designations will likely be
effaced. Thus the reading of the current landscape and its representation and discursive
construction in the planning process will have produced the future landscape.
7/29/2019 L. Taylor Thesis
22/322
Introduction18
7/29/2019 L. Taylor Thesis
23/322
19Conceptual Framework
C h a p t e r 2
THE PERSPECTIVE OF CULTURAL LANDSCAPE:
MATERIAL, SYMBOLIC AND CULTURAL APPROACHES TO STUDYINGLANDSCAPE REPRESENTATION
For the town of Oakville, Dundas Street is the line where country and city collide. I
emerge with my bag of chilled beer from the LCBO (the provincially-controlled liquor
store) into a large parking lot just south and downhill from Dundas Street. I am in the
land of Wal-mart and its armada of little big box stores at the edge of town where
everything still feels new. Across the road are flat farmers fields; a grove of trees frames a
farmhouse in the distance. The juxtaposition between the new and old, asphalt and crops,buying and growing, black and green is a felt one. There is nothing remarkable about the
fields, or the farmhouse, I could be looking at such a scene anywhere around Toronto
but to hear what some of the local people have to say about this land, you would think it
was remarkable. You would think that at least some indication of its future urbanization
would be visible. But there are no clues that I can see, the impact is in the words. In the
stacks of documents being produced in the process to plan for the future of North
Oakville, this line at Dundas Street represents the line between the present and future,
rural and urban; moving that imaginary line requires a re-imagination of this space. This is
the landscape of the urban edge: visibly countryside but the site of a complex intersection
of ideas and meanings about what this landscape represents.
Perhaps the interest I have in lines such as these stems from my own view growing up in
Ottawa on the line between urban and rural. From the picture window of my 1960s-era
semi-detached suburban bungalow, I would day-after-day stand and look at the cows
sheltered by a few very large trees grazing in the pastureland directly across the road from
my house. The road was literally the line between urban and rural. Today (some thirty
years later) looking out that same window, there are the wide, low buildings of a business
park and the road now has a five-lane curb and gutter cross-section, replacing the two-
lanes with deep ditches that I grew up with. I will admit to being nostalgic for the cows
7/29/2019 L. Taylor Thesis
24/322
Conceptual Framework20
and trees, although as a planner, I have since participated in their loss around the edge of
Toronto. How are choices made about moving the line and how does it affect the
outlook of people who live and work on either side? How and why do these choices
matter?
Collision of city and country landscape values in planning policyand practice motivated study
As discussed in the introductory chapter, the landscape where country and city collide is
highly contested. My enduring interest in making sense of that view out the window has
led me to cultural geography--a sub-discipline of human geography. Cultural geography
has as its focus of study the contested values and meanings of landscape and provides a
theoretical and methodological approach to studying landscape. The negotiation of
landscape meaning, that is the subject of this dissertation, uses the future expansion of
the Town of Oakville as a case study of competing ideas about transforming rural to
urban as these are at the heart of the public planning process. In this chapter I will trace
the intellectual lineage of contemporary cultural landscape theory as it informs my
research.
In this dissertation, I will draw upon the work of several scholars in cultural geography.
But my research within geography is only the most recent phase in my academic and
professional life, with my interest in landscape change beginning with the view out my
picture window (Baxandall and Ewen 2000). My undergraduate academic training was in
urban and regional planning where the focus at the time was on how planning is done,
rather than on the ideologies behind the doing. My graduate studies focused on heritage
planning within the context of environmental studies: the ethnographic and
environment/behaviour approaches to studying the world employed there were more
critical than at the planning school with respect to what questions were asked by whom,
to whom and with what effect. My work experience in the ten years between completing
my masters studies and beginning doctoral studies has been as a consulting land use and
policy planner. My interest over the years has revolved around the same questions about
7/29/2019 L. Taylor Thesis
25/322
Conceptual Framework21
how we make the world we live in (or more accurately, the world Ilive in as I have been
immersed in the urban experience in contemporary Canada). While (put simply) planning
negotiates among different values with the imperative of making decisions about change
in the material environment, cultural geography provides a robust theoretical base for
asking questions about those changes. Planning is action-oriented: we ask questions
about the world in order to influence better decision-making, but planning is seldom
reflexive enough in asking questions of its own practitioners about why the world is
changing or is seen to need changing. In comparison, cultural geography asks questions
about how people interact with and derive meaning from the landscape, how they
communicate their ideas, and above all, how this is political. Cultural geography can be
applied geography too and with its stance in critical and social theory at the same time as
it considers representations of material landscapes; applied cultural geography works to
effect change in socio-ecological justice.
My experience as a consulting planner led me back to academia. Over many nights of
public information meetings and Council meetings, had I not been witness to discussions
where land use change was resisted, the force of the power of ideology in shaping
landscape may not have seemed so apparent. I saw that the same property will have
multiple meanings and through the planning process certain meanings are reinforced
while others are subdued. The dominant reading is embedded in the landscape through
development of that property. The dominant reading may seem to be local and personal,
but on a broader scale, that property must fit into the phased planned future of the larger
area. Geography matters? You bet it does: living on one side or the other of an abstract
line in a planning document can change everything.
In my experience as a consulting planner I often worked in a supporting role to my firms
partners. Although my own work was directly fed into various planning processes, I wasrarely the final judgement-maker in matters of policy formulation, decision-making, or
political positioning. This arms-length stance gave me a good vantage point to observe
how choices were made as the process unfolded in a given project. As much of the
7/29/2019 L. Taylor Thesis
26/322
Conceptual Framework22
planning work in the Toronto area is in growth management studies at the urban edge, or
in creating comprehensive plans for new urban areas, or in helping property owners
negotiate those processes, I spent a great deal of time watching and listening to people
appealing to government, and to each other, about land use change and choices. I see the
planning process as very responsive in some ways to local opinion (recognizing the
limitations of who participates), but I also see the process as a tool of the state to produce
places that are congenial to growth of the economy. Having the opportunity in this
research to undertake an analysis of a planning process as an observer allows me to ask
questions about the larger picture within which this process is being carried out, as well as
who is discursively involved.
The value of researching a planning process is that it provides a limited frame within
which to explore issues of contemporary urbanization. In edge landscapes around
Toronto such as North Oakville, the countryside has been to some extent protected from
change over the past decades through comprehensive municipal plans delimiting urban
areas and through restrictive rural zoning. When the decision is finally made to expand an
adjacent urban area into the countryside, the countryside then pushes back. Urbanization
is resisted through the planning process, and the resistance is in turn challenged by
proponents of expansion. In my work as a planner, I observed that the resistance has
employed arguments of agricultural land preservation, ecological conservation, rural
cultural/built heritage conservation and lifestyle preservation to mount defences to block
growth. In most instances, the resistance is emotional, vociferous and at times quite
personal. The rural blockade is often led by insurgents from the urban area. As a witness
to these battles, I wondered why the development of the country to make room for the
city was so hated. Why are people so adverse to the idea of urban growth? What does it
mean for governance and urban planning that expansion is always resisted?
7/29/2019 L. Taylor Thesis
27/322
Conceptual Framework23
Cultural geography provides conceptual and methodologicalframework for study
The contribution of this research is to draw on the conceptual and methodological
framework of cultural geography in order to demonstrate how landscape values are at the
centre of the discussion of the kind of world people want to live in. Planning for urban
expansion in the local municipal process requires a discussion of alternative visions for a
given landscape that draw upon historical, material, experiential and symbolic notions
about that landscape and landscapes in general. In discussing landscape, people are
revealing their values and beliefs about themselves and their society. Cultural geography
provides concepts and theories to understand how material and symbolic landscapes are
at work in the discourse around the production of real landscapes and places. This NorthOakville landscape (in many ways typical of southern Ontario) has meaning but different
people/groups derive different meaning from the same place--they see it and imagine it
differently--and these meanings are contested within the discourse of the planning
process. Ideas about landscapes communicated within society more generally such as
landscapes of sprawl, landscapes of nature, and countryside landscapes are drawn upon to
describe thislandscape and to talk about how this landscape should be in the future.
The idea of countryside as a valued landscape is well documented in the literature as aromantic pastoral idealization of the rural landscape and valued alternative to
urbanization. In my study of how perceptions and ideas about landscape are at work in
the politics of urbanization, I found that while pastoral notions may be behind it, the
valuation of the landscape as natural heritage was what was politically successful. The
countryside ideal of a treasured amenity landscape of cultivated inhabited farmland, living
close to the land in close-knit rural community was not represented. Instead the view of
this area as wildlife habitat as defined by environmental science and a landscape degraded
by human inhabitation yet worthy of restoration was successful. While this point of view
did not succeed in preventing urbanization of the area entirely, more than one-third of
the North Oakville area will be set aside for open space, with large areas of core natural
features managed for ecological restoration, not human use.
7/29/2019 L. Taylor Thesis
28/322
Conceptual Framework24
In order to research the political use of landscape values, I chose a case study with a
contemporary planning process. The planning process is where major decisions about
managing change in the landscape take place. This process represents a discourse within
which actors articulate their opinions and concerns to influence political decision-making,
and the process has an archive of words and images in reports, meeting minutes and
transcripts which are accessible for research.
Within this archive, landscape is represented through material studies common to urban
and rural geography. In this chapter I present my review of the conceptual approaches to
studying the material landscape to inform my understanding of this work that was carried
out in the process. But material studies fall short of recognizing the ways in which
landscape also circulates as a symbolic concept and is full of cultural meaning about social
value. There has been a great deal of theoretical discussion in the literature about
landscape interpretation and this informs my research by framing how ideas about the
city, countryside and wilderness are represented and discussed in the process. As I will
discuss, however, the theoretical discussion of landscape often fails to ground itself in
empirical study and in my research I show how an existing material landscape is
represented in contested ways. The negotiation of landscape meaning in the production
of everyday space in the real world is perhaps understudied and the theoretical
framework provided by cultural geography provides the concepts and tools to study how
the political process shapes new urban areas and produces the spaces within which
existing and future residents will live.
In order to study the issues of urbanization in this case study through the lens of cultural
landscape studies, in this chapter I will discuss the idea of landscape as an object of study,
and then review the literature on landscape representation beginning with material
approaches, symbolic approaches and then critical and cultural approaches to show howlandscape is a symbolic concept within which various meanings are embedded and then
negotiated in the planning process.
7/29/2019 L. Taylor Thesis
29/322
Conceptual Framework25
Cultural geographys intellectual traditions
Cultural geography brings together several intellectual traditions (Mitchell 1996: 3), at
the centre of which is the idea of landscape as a focus of study, and I have used these to
structure my conceptual framework. The first tradition is the conceptualization of
landscape as tangible and material. Ways of studying the visible, material landscape
belong not only to cultural geography, but are shared by geography more generally, and
by urban and regional planning. A second tradition addresses landscape interpretation.
Landscapes are meaningful; people derive meaning from looking at landscape, they
connect with it, are oriented in it in time and space, and their self-identification is
wrapped up in what they see and experience. Much has been learned from literary studies
about how signs and symbols circulate within society and how landscapes work withother texts (words, images, gestures) to allow people to make sense of the world. Third
and finally, these meanings are contested--the struggle for the dominant reading of a
landscape is political. A sense of belonging and entitlement is given to those who are
comfortable with the dominant reading. Others are excluded--their performance with
respect to that place less compelling--if they do not fit with that reading.
To address my research questions regarding the cultural politics of landscape
representation, I draw upon material, symbolic, and cultural approaches. The material
approach includes ways of understanding the visible landscape including the facilities and
activities taking place there. Traditional urban and rural geographies and urban and
regional planning fit with this approach. The symbolic or interpretive approach considers
the different meanings derived from or brought to the landscape. These meanings are
produced and reproduced intertextually through discourse where words, images, and real
landscapes express ideologies and values. The cultural approach takes on the politics of
the various valuations and meanings of landscape and recognizes that the politics are
ultimately inscribed in the landscape.
This conceptual framework of material, symbolic and cultural approaches to landscape
study put forward by Mitchell (1996) reflects the discussion of landscape in the literature.
7/29/2019 L. Taylor Thesis
30/322
Conceptual Framework26
Material approaches are often seen unproblematically as spatial description and void of
consideration of the symbolic. The symbolichow interpretations of landscapes are
studied--is focused on semiotics and representation to the detriment of research on
actually existing places. The cultural makes use of both the material and symbolic
showing how greater understanding of landscape is enabled when they are seen as
mutually constitutive. In addition, cultural theory in geography shows how landscape
representations in text, art and the media are embedded in everyday life and how studies
of those representations gives access to understanding culture and cultural politics in
ways that are not easily gained otherwise.
This chapter is structured around this three-pronged conceptual approach with a
consideration of how material landscape is studied, followed by the theoretical
approaches to studying landscape interpretation, and then critical and cultural approaches
to the study of landscape. But first I begin with a definition of the object of study --
landscape.
Landscape as a focus of study
Landscape is used in geography as a concept to study cultural processes converging in
time and space producing material artifacts that we see and touch and experience. Theconcept of landscape used in this way to study contemporary everyday environments is a
recent one and there are good genealogies of landscape study which I draw upon in my
work (including Bender 1993; Cosgrove 1985; Crang 1998; Duncan and Duncan 2004;
Groth and Bressi 1997; Osborne 1998; Relph 1981; Rowntree 1996; Schein 1997). While
the term landscape may conjure ideas of paintings hung in museums or views a tourist
might enjoy while traveling, landscape in cultural geography is the context for everyday
living and needs to be understood as enmeshed within the processes which shape how
the world is organised, experienced and understood (Seymour 2000: 214).
The definition of landscape as a material product of culture has undergone a
transformation as cultural theory has revolutionized geography. Donald Meinig dealt with
7/29/2019 L. Taylor Thesis
31/322
Conceptual Framework27
the difficulty of defining the term landscape in his introduction to The Interpretation of
Ordinary Landscapes(1979) and compares the term but dismisses synonymy with: nature
(it also includes things human-made); scenery (it is not defined aesthetically);
environment (it means more than our surroundings which sustain us); place (often a
label resulting from a negotiated cultural politics of a defined area; see discussion in
Chapter 3); region/area/geography (more about spatial relationships) and he declares a
preference in the end for ordinary landscapes to define the continuous surface which
we can see all around us and which is defined by our vision and interpreted by our
minds (3, 6). The scholars of Meinigs era of landscape investigation are J. B. Jackson
(eg. 1984; 1986; 1994; 1997), Peirce Lewis (eg. 1976), David Lowenthal (1976), Ted Relph
(1981; 1987), and Yi-fu Tuan (1974). More recently, landscape study has been influenced
by cultural theory as part of the new cultural geography which I will discuss in a
moment: reflecting these changes, Paul Groth edited Understanding Ordinary Landscapes
with Todd Bressi (1997) and Everyday America: Cultural Landscape Studies after J. B. Jackson
with Chris Wilson (2003). What all of these scholars have in common is their approach to
landscape as a cultural production and within that, an interest in historical contestations
over landscape as the settings for peoples lives. How is the landscape of North Oakville
defined by the vision of those involved in the planning process and interpreted by them,
and how are these negotiated? Conceptually, the idea of landscape opens up a way ofthinking of a place with simultaneous consideration of the material, symbolic and political
through time.
How landscape is organised, experienced and understood is the enduring interest of
cultural geography: more than just the physical environment, landscape refers to an
ensemble of material and social practices and their symbolic representation (Zukin 1991:
16). Trevor Barnes and James Duncan (1992) discuss this ensemble as a medium of
particular discourses and, as I will discuss in this chapter, landscape is read in many of
the same ways as literary text where many different lines of thinking come together
through one or more authors to create an artifact (a book or a landscape) that is then
read. Landscape is one moment framed by and constitutive of larger discourses (Barnes
7/29/2019 L. Taylor Thesis
32/322
Conceptual Framework28
and Duncan 1992; Duncan and Duncan 2004; Schein 1997: 676), in other words,
whether an ensemble, medium or moment, the landscape provides clues to how
we think about things, including cultural attitudes and beliefs. I have studied the current
process of landscape change in North Oakville in terms of its landscape history to
illustrate how contemporary representations are contingent upon the convergence of
prevailing ideas. Cultural values with respect to the North Oakville landscape have shifted
over time and these moments are reflected in the existing landscape. Ideas about the
countryside and nature would seem to be shifting again, and the result will shape the
future of this landscape, erasing some of the past and setting the stage for negotiation
over future representations. While the study of power relations as manifest in the
landscape is the subject of the current work, cultural landscape study has not always been
socially critical and my research in looking at the politics at work in this present day First
World landscape is enabled by the past two decades of work of the cultural turn
(Jameson 1998) in landscape studies; a shift that could be seen in the literature by the
early 1980s.
Recognizing a shift occurring in approaches to studying both culture and landscape,
Linda McDowell published an article in 1995 reviewing the new cultural geography.
She wrote that whereas, in the tradition of Carl Sauer earlier in the twentieth century (see
Sauer 1965), there had been a focus on how cultures over the centuries had shaped their
landscapes, with the cultural turn the focus was no longer an apolitical study of how
cultures shape landscapes but instead how the landscape is shaped and reshaped by many
hands in constant political struggle over time (Duncan 1980; P. Jackson 1989). Indeed as
summarized by McDowell (1995), the central preoccupation of cultural geography--with
how people shape the land, and then how the landscapes and spaces that are created in
turn shape individuals and society--was being reinvigorated by postmodern thought
about the experience of real (unexceptional, typical) humans as thinking, feeling, irrational
and sometimes ambitious individuals each with unique histories motivating their actions.
Postmodernism says that your reality is different than mine because reality is contingent
upon the moment, where you have come from, where you are going and what you are
7/29/2019 L. Taylor Thesis
33/322
Conceptual Framework29
choosing to see. When you and I read the same meaning onto certain material things,
such as landscapes, we are in cultural consensus, and we should be very interested in
unpacking the reasons why. The role of the expert--practitioners and academics--is
questioned by postmodernism and this has implications for both the way that the
planning process is observed and described. So much of the previous science in
planning and geography had abstracted human activity into systems and models (e.g.
transportation, park use, zoning, forecasting, behavioural studies) and practitioners were
constituted as objective experts. With the cultural turn, the contingent and constructed
role of the expert in making claims about the real world is questioned. The role of science
and scientists in landscape representation and production is of enduring interest to
cultural geography and plays a key part in the production of landscape meaning in my
present research.
Linking postmodernist particularity of knowledge and experience (McDowell 1995:
153) with the geographers conventional study of society in space provided the right
conditions for geographers to receive Henri Lefebvre (1974) and the reinterpretations of
his work by David Harvey (1996, 2000) and Edward Soja (1989). Their views
distinguish[] between a scientific, rational view of space, the subject matter of urban
planning and conventional geographic analysis and an idea of space as something that is
experienced or imagined, a more ambivalent concept that is not possible to represent
either in scientific discourse or in sets of social statistics (McDowell 1995: 153). This is
the postempiricist (Schein 1997: 662) approach to cultural geography. Quantitative
approaches to theorizing geographical processes are still important and useful, but
limitations need to be discussed. As I have said, producing knowledge about space is a
political act and science is not neutral in its claims of truth and reality. Bringing cultural
studies to the study of space and landscape opens up lines of questioning about
knowledge production and spatial politics in urban planning, a profession grounded in
the belief that decisions about landscape change are made through rational, objective,
scientific study.
7/29/2019 L. Taylor Thesis
34/322
Conceptual Framework30
Cultural landscape studies enable questions about urbanization because landscape change
is a site of cultural negotiation. In defining the approach to my research in Oakville I turn
again to Don Mitchell, this time in Cultural geography: a critical introduction(2000), where he
presents the scope of contemporary cultural geographical studies and identifies four
dimensions of landscape. First, to look at something as a landscape is part of the capitalist
and Enlightenment transformation, removing the observer from the scene, implying
ownership of the land, and the shaping of the land to suit this particular way of seeing
(Berger 1972; Hall 1999; Jay 1993; Rose 1993). Here Mitchell draws upon the scholarship
of Denis Cosgrove (1984, 1985), who presented the idea of landscape as the result of the
capitalist transformation in land ownership. This dimension of landscape (the view of the
observer as though removed from the society, culture and landscape under study) is still
at work in North Oakville through the descriptive reporting by the various expert
consultants involved in the process. Further, an historical result of the Enlightenment
view is to recognize the study area itself as a product of this thinking: North Oakville is
defined by human-made municipal boundaries (which were located to coincide with road
right of ways, which in turn were opened because of the superimposed geometry of the
original settlement surveys) which are part of the fundamental social construction of the
colonial landscape that permitted property ownership and the rights that went along with
it (Wood 2000: 20-22; J. B. Jackson 1994). The decontextualizing of the landscape asstudy area in these ways enables the circulation of landscape representations ripped free
of the lived-in experience of that place.
Secondly, Mitchell describes the ways in which a landscape can also be read as a text,
similar to the way novels have been discussed in literary studies (Barnes and Duncan
1992; Brown and Yule 1983; Duncan 1990; Duncan and Duncan 1988) and paintings in
art history (Cosgrove 1984; WJT Mitchell 1994; Relph 1981; Short 1991). Landscapes are
real material and concrete, walkable and observable and landscapes can be prose,
photographs, and graphic images that use metaphor and symbolism to evoke a setting (or
a response). In the section of this chapter discussing critical and cultural approaches to
the study of landscape later in this chapter, I draw upon James and Nancy Duncans
7/29/2019 L. Taylor Thesis
35/322
Conceptual Framework31
approach (1992, 1998, 2001b, 2004) to textual readings of landscape in order to
understand how ideas of landscape come together intertextually within the discourse of
the planning process.
Thirdly, landscapes are not just rural or historical as was the focus of earlier landscape
study. Landscapes are also urban and contemporary (Anderson 1988; Davis 1990;
Domosh 1988; Duncan 1992; Relph 1987). As Groth (1997: 5) wrote: one term covers
all. City, suburb, countryside, and even wilderness are all human constructs, all touched
by human management. All are cultural landscape. Studies of the here and now
proliferate under the cultural turn (eg. Cronon 1996; Duncan and Duncan 2004; J. M.
Jacobs 1992, 1996; Kinsman 1993; Ley 1995; Mitchell 1996; Schein 1997; Seymour 2000).
Fourth and finally, landscapes are complicit in the construction of self and identity in
ways that are profound. As Mitchell says, how can ordinary people continue to make
their own histories and geographies (i.e. make their own identities) given the
overwhelming power of the economy, various states, militaries, and even the
confederated media and culture industries to shape our lives and our selvesfor us (61-2,
emphasis in original). Here Mitchell is calling for the deconstruction of the stories society
tells itself (attributed to Derrida 1973) about how individuals are constituted within larger
society (the work of Michel Foucault is especially relevant [1970, 1977]). More study is
required with respect to how culture is appropriated by people in their everyday lives (De
Certeau 1984) and on the impact of the culture industry (Hall 1990). Landscape is
inscribed by culture often in deliberate and purposeful ways, but also sometimes in
fleeting and spontaneous ways as well.
This spatiality of cultural processes is the subject of Doreen Masseys Space, place and gender
(1994) in which she relates the immediate and the local to other spatial scales and asks
questions about their mutual constitution. Masseys contribution is in thinking about how
different places, from the local to the global, are linked. Her work is taken up by Ruth
Fincher and Jane M. Jacobs as they are also interested in the complexity of spatial scales
that flow through place (1998: 21). In their book, they explore how space is made real
7/29/2019 L. Taylor Thesis
36/322
Conceptual Framework32
by individuals. This complexity is defined as the ways in which the local is always also a
national or an international space, or the way in which local identities are always also
constituted through non local processes, or the way in which place-based identities are
tied to the micropolitics of the home or the body (Fincher and Jacobs 1998: 21). The
production of space is fraught with competing meanings and the spatial turn in cultural
studies questions established ways of seeing and understanding societal relations (De
Certeau 1984; Foucault 1980; Giddens 1984; Harvey 1996; Lefebvre 1974; Soja 1989).
David Harvey regards urbanization as a spatially grounded social process in which a
wide range of different actors with quite different objectives and agendas interact through
a particular configuration of interlocking spatial practices (1989a: 5). Therefore, the
landscape may be seen as a cultural production within which people make their lives and
their selves, both in its discursive creation (which I will discuss in detail in a moment) and
in its material form.
The four approaches set out by Mitchell and described above encompass the
understanding of landscape that I bring to my research. My research questions how ideas
about landscape are caught up in the urbanization process, a political process through
which the material landscape itself is transformed. In North Oakville, the ways in which
the existing countryside is valued and represented in the process produces plans for the
future of the area, a community in which 55,000 people will live and work. Landscape is a
concept that is useful in my research to refer to the lived and perceived space of society
(Mitchell 1996: 3-4) especially in the case of this particular planning process where ideas
about the past, present and future landscape are represented. The landscape is the setting
that structures our everyday lives: it is constructed, remodelled, dreamt, photographed,
and familiar, found, and valued. I believe that landscape continues to have purchase
conceptually in cultural geography today because who controls space--whose vision is
inscribed in the landscape--affects the possibilities for peoples lives (Zukin 1991). Who
gains from the politically successful dominant reading of this landscape as important
ecologically?
7/29/2019 L. Taylor Thesis
37/322
Conceptual Framework33
The landscape setting is certainly not benign but everyday landscapes (eg. a suburban
neighbourhood, a busy street, a natural heritage conservation area) are taken for granted
and not always seen as overt sites of political contestation. Landscapes are constantly
being revised and reshaped, both materially and discursively (Williams 1973; L. Marx
1964; Duncan and Duncan 2004). While much of the focus in the literature is on the city,
where the countryside landscape is threatened by the expanding city, the landscape is
especially political (Walker and Fortmann 2003) and how the countryside is seen to be a
site of political contest is a focus of the dissertation.
Landscape, then, is a powerful topic of study as it is a product of culture and politics, at
the same time as it is a material and abstract phenomenon. Its study provides insights into
the processes that create it. Looking at North Oakville as a landscape under contestation
within a planning process enables the questioning of cultural landscape values, in this case
ideas about the city, countryside and nature within the landscape discourse structured by
the planning process. The planning process requires studies of the existing landscape--for
instance its settlement pattern and land use, built heritage, road network, natural habitat
and wildlife--to inform decision-making. In the next section, I review the literature of the
ways in which spatial descriptions of the material landscape are studied, drawing on those
concepts which informing my research. The material section is followed by symbolic and
then cultural approaches.
Spatial descriptions of material landscape
Of great interest to geographical research is the study of urban expansion through
analysis and description of settlement at the urban fringe. North Oakville as a planning
area is a visible, material landscape within which certain land uses and activities are carried
out, that have changed over time. Within the context of my case study, the preparation of
reports describing various aspects of the material landscape of North Oakville was
undertaken to inform the planning process and constitute a major part of the discourse.
In many ways, these reports continue the work of traditional geography focusing on
descriptive analysis of the material landscape, especially the geographical distribution and
7/29/2019 L. Taylor Thesis
38/322
Conceptual Framework34
impacts of settlement. These approaches to the study of urbanization and settlement are
interested in the visible form and morphology of cultural landscapes or the
environmental impact of material cultural practices (Johnston et al. 2000: 136).
While I have introduced cultural geography as the sub-discipline within which my
research is being carried out, urban geography and rural geography are related sub-
disciplines traditionally focusing on description, classification and mapping of particular
landscapes within human geography. Material descriptive analysi