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ONDINE PARK TONYA K. DAVIDSON ROB SHIELDS Places from Which to Think of Place This book was born in a place with nameless streets. Since 1913, the streets in Edmonton, Alberta, have been numbered, denied the quaint street names of shared city imaginaries like Sesame Street, Broadway, Main Street. The meaningful names of other places evoke a sense of place—place myths—that seems to be absent in a city full of nondescript home addresses like 10731 84 Avenue or 10235 123 Street. The capital of an industrial farming, resourceextracting , boom–bust province, a city of cars that appear to commute endlessly on generic, busy thoroughfares, Edmonton may be an unlikely inspiration for theorizing about affective attachments to place. But Edmonton is born of and shaped by desire. It is an ecology of affect that is placed by and places desire. Stretching out temporally and spatially, it simultaneously desires in pastward-gazing nostalgia and future-looking hope, reaches out toward ever-receding horizons and builds up toward city-ness. With a footprint larger than New York City, but a population a fraction of its size, Edmonton expands across vast territories. Meanwhile, its core is just beginning to bristle with taller buildings scrambling to meet the desires of a rapidly growing population who seek in Edmonton a place of their own. Much of that population explosion is driven by the oil boom in northern Alberta. But whereas Edmonton is rapidly being reshaped and reimagined by some desires, other desires take a longer time to transform the landscape, and in the meantime can’t find a space amidst the expansiveness . When the housing infrastructure couldn’t keep up with needs in the last 1 Introduction 2 INTRODUCTION few years, visible tent cities in the heart of the city and invisible working homeless scattered throughout the city ephemerally marked their presence (particularly in summer 2007), adding to the ranks of already existing marginalized populations. Undesired, and the effect of desires unmet, the conditions of the less privileged in this first North American “Human Rights City” (see http://www.pdhre.org) now face the localized fallout of the so-called global economic recession. Perhaps what anchors these fragile, rapid incursions of yearning is a built form that is the nearly ubiquitous domestic architectural style in central Edmonton: 1970s low-rise apartment buildings with unironically kitsch names like “The Branding Place” or “The Shangri-La.” These two names speak to ambivalent desires for imagined other times (when ranching was the supposed mainstay) and places (in this case, a mythical utopian place). A territory shaped by desires and nostalgic in its built environment, Edmonton also brands itself as a place that produces affective, hopeful attachments. Calling itself the “City of Champions,” “Festival City,” and “Gateway to the North,” Edmonton seems to imagine itself as a place whose hope rests on a glorious past, vibrant present, and expansive future. As the triumphs of Edmonton’s “Champions” (the Grads, Eskimos, and Oilers) have already faded into sports history, they can now be shared nostalgically by all as the basis for a hope that perhaps similar glory days also still lie ahead.1 “Festival City” is a branding of hope and a seemingly perpetual deferment of pleasure. In a city with eight-month-long winters and temperatures regularly below –40ºC, where plugging in your car to prevent the engine freezing is requisite, celebrating and understanding the city based on a few short months of summer festivals requires a continued hope for the warmer season.2 And, as the “Gateway to the North,” Edmonton takes very seriously its responsibility to satisfy the consumer desires not only of its own citizens but also of Canada’s North, many of whose residents travel to Canada’s most northerly large city as their closest urban space to shop. The West Edmonton Mall, still one of the largest and for many years the world’s very largest shopping mall, offers a “hyperspace” for actualizing and spatializing desires (see Shields 1989), and competes with the Rocky Mountains as Alberta’s top tourist destination. “West Ed” was the first example to showcase the mixture of retail and leisure in a single facility, combining wave pools and aquariums with shoe stores, and juxtaposing skating rinks with the interior facades and merchandise of clothing chain stores and live animal shows. Naively and exuberantly postmodern, the mall has managed to convert the potential of drawing on a huge regional consumer base into actual sales. [3.133.131.168...

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