August 25th, 2010
You don’t have to wander too far from Shanghai to find interesting small towns, that is, ones that have not converted into tourist villages of Disneyland proportions.
An hour-long bus ride from Longyang metro stop on Line 2, deep into Pudong, we found ourselves in the town of Dayuan in Nanhui.
Towns in China have developed with a banal similarity common in suburban America. The same fading welcome signboards, the same layout of buildings, shops and houses populate next to the highway – all of it, engulfed in swirling road dust. There is nothing particularly outstanding about Dayuan town but there was plenty to explore once you push into the interior.
The dynamic of urban and suburban sprawl applies aptly when you compare metropolitan Shanghai and suburban towns like Dayuan. In the town’s older neighborhoods, you see a mix of elderly and children with a conspicuous absence of the robust working age group of 18 to 25 year olds. The young and mobile have migrated to the cities in search of more interesting work and that bit of excitement.
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February 17th, 2010
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February 2nd, 2009
Groundhog Day, one of the more bizarre American holidays, is a major industry in the town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. This is where the legendary Punxsutawney Phil makes his annual prediction on how much longer winter will last. Every year, ten to forty thousand people crowd the inappropriately named “Gobbler’s Knob” to see men in top hats yank a rodent from a tree stump and share its predictions with the crowd. This scene will be familiar to anyone who has seen the movie Groundhog Day. Although allegedly set in Punxsutawney, most of it was actually filmed in the quaint town of Woodstock, Illinois.
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October 7th, 2008
An Obama sign in Plymouth…
…and a McCain rejoinder
Several days ago, American presidential candidate John McCain announced that he was suspending his campaign in the state of Michigan, and I breathed a sigh of relief. But he also announced that he was canceling a planned event in Plymouth, my hometown, and I was a little disappointed; I’ve been working, on and off, on the Obama campaign here since mid-July, and it would have been very interesting to see the opposition candidate stumping on what I think of as my turf, perhaps only a few blocks from my family’s home.
I grew up in Plymouth, so I think of the town as my turf without a second of hesitation, though I’m constantly reminded that, politically at least, it really isn’t. My neighbors, whose great grandparents actually built the house in which I live, recently picked up a McCain sign (pictured) and stumped it right along the property line, as if it were thumbing its nose at the Obama sign I put in our front yard three weeks ago.
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July 24th, 2008
Ugly building on the main street of Saint Georges de Beauce
Many of Quebec’s smaller cities are grim, depressing places. Like most cities in North America, they witnessed a period of downtown decline during the suburban explosion of the fifties and sixties. People moved out, shops closed, and buildings were razed and replaced by parking lots. Many places reached their nadir of ugliness in the seventies and eighties with the proliferation of cheap corrugated cladding and other experimental building materials.
Since then, cities like Quebec, Montreal, and Trois-Rivières took stock of the situation and invested in revitalization. But many smaller cities have continued to deteriorate. They’re fascinating to walk through-they feel like a time-warp-but I wouldn’t want to live there.
In some cities, like Dolbeau-Mistassini on Lac Saint-Jean, the decay is the result of the general industrial decline in the area. Other cases are harder to explain, like Sherbrooke, Saint-Georges de Beauce, Alma, and Gatineau – growing regional cities with unemployment rates that are considerably lower than the provincial average. Why are they so ugly?
Main Street, Saint Georges de Beauce
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July 7th, 2008
La Rochelle, France
Montreal, Quebec
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July 6th, 2008
My roommate ML and I decided to accompany our other roommate to her hometown of St. Jean for the weekend. Fully decked out in summer apparel, flip flops notwithstanding, we were on our way to pick strawberries but found ourselves delayed by two hours. Having only been away from Montreal for less than 24 hours, we felt the need to infuse our day with some urban grit, and how better to do that than to take a walk around Usine Croydon, otherwise known as the former home of the Singer sewing machine factory. The gates surrounding the abandoned compound were wide open and welcoming. What followed was a tour through an art gallery of sorts — countless graffiti and paintings, mangled metal objects hanging from the ceiling, and perfect lighting.
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March 6th, 2008
Posted
in
Canada by
Karl Leung
Motel
Canmore’s on the grow. In this small Alberta town on the edge of the Rocky Mountains, there’s one tea boutique, a handful of internet cafés, and a good number of places for tasty dishes. Lifestyle amenities are targeted not only at tourists, but the nouveau riche who enjoy their life away from Calgary and can’t do without a sharp espresso. Interestingly enough, it still has that small town charm.
Local artisan carving walking sticks
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November 5th, 2007
In Quebec, the question of how to “reasonably accommodate” religious minorities has morphed, over the past year, into an all-consuming debate over immigration. It has tangled together every conceivable strand of Quebec’s identity issues: language, religion, ethnicity, sovereignty and geography.
Many people, myself included, have become frustrated with the xenophobic tenor of the discussion and the lack of strong voices in support of immigrants and ethnic minorities. While politicians like Pauline Marois cynically exploit (and obfuscate) the issue with appeals to linguistic nationalism, and old-stock Quebeckers in homogeneous villages fret about the threat posed to their culture by immigrants who reside hundreds of kilometres away in Montreal, the real problems faced by immigrants — barriers to employment and discrimination, notably — have gone largely ignored.
Still, as painful as this whole process as been, it has remained abstract. Some might say that this is because the people most fearful about immigration are those who live in the most homogeneous settings. I certainly haven’t experienced any tension on the streets of Montreal or in the day-to-day interactions of its culturally diverse citizens.
That isn’t quite the case in Prince William County, Virginia. Over the past several months, this exurban area on the fringes of metropolitan Washington, DC, where one-fifth of the population is foreign-born and nearly half is non-white, has been the setting for a sometimes vicious quarrel over immigration and, more specifically, Latino immigration. More specifically, the debate has revolved around a resolution that would force police officers to verify the immigration status of anyone suspected of being in the United States illegally.
In response, two filmmakers have taken it upon themselves to document the conflict. Annabel Park and Eric Byler, Asian-Americans who grew up in Prince William County, have launched 9500Liberty, an interactive documentary that straightforwardly explores all facets of the debate. Park and Byler are editing their footage as they shoot it and uploading it to YouTube as quickly as possible, giving viewers the chance to shape its direction and engage with it in a way that would not be possible with a traditional film.
So far, the filmmakers have documented county meetings, interviewed key players in the debate and shot confrontations between supporters of the crackdown on illegal immigration and its opponents. The most-viewed video, which you can watch above, deals with the so-called Liberty Wall, a large banner that urges Prince William County residents to “stop your racism to Hispanics!” After it was erected, several attempts were made to destroy it.
Byler and Park’s project has been widely viewed and discussed. Like any documentary, it creates an opportunity for reflection. That’s something we could use here in Quebec. Unlike the proposed resolution in Prince William County, or even the larger debate over illegal immigration, the question of reasonable accommodation is astoundingly vague. That, in large part, is the reason why it has veered so drastically off course. What we need, most of all, to explore, as honestly as possible, the ground-level reality of immigration and multiculturalism in Montreal and Quebec.
January 24th, 2007
Lewiston, Maine. Photos by Samantha Appleton from the New Yorker.
“‘Who authorized this?’ Lewiston officials say that this is the question they heard most often when the Somalis began showing up in town. The answer was: Nobody did. The Somalis had simply decided to come.” So writes William Finnegan in the December 11th edition of the New Yorker. (The article is not available online, but a portion of it can be read here.) Since 2001, about two thousand Somali refugees have left Atlanta and other large cities for Lewiston, a small Maine mill town of 35,000 whose population is almost entirely white and French-Canadian. Their sudden arrival, and the resulting emergence of a large, multifaceted and highly visible Somali community, might seem odd in such an out-of-a-way place. Increasingly, though, many immigrants and refugees in the United States are choosing to settle in small towns, where their presence has been greeted with a mixture of bemusement, wariness and, sometimes, hostility.
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