L. Taylor Thesis

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


2/322


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


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.


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


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


7/322

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


8/322

iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

(forthcoming)


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


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.


11/322


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


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,


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


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


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).


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.


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


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


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


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.


22/322

Introduction18


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


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


25/322


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


26/322


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?


27/322


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.


28/322


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.


29/322


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.


30/322


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


31/322


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


32/322


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


33/322


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.


34/322


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


35/322


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


36/322


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?


37/322


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


38/322


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

Documents

L. Taylor Thesis