Contemporary Canadian Film and Literature: Survival in Post/Modern Cities(Fall, 2001)

"The Street That Got Mislaid"
Patrick Waddington

Leading Questions about the Text

  1. How does Marc look at his filing job at City Hall?  Why is he so proud of it while others may look at him as a "lowly clerk"?
  2. Why is the misplaced file "dynamite" for Marc (p. 67)?  And later on when he visit the Greenbottle street, why is it considered by him a "grenade" (p. 69)?  
  3. What are the symbolic meanings of the Greenbottle street?

City Planning


 
  1. to improve and ensure the city's public services, spatial arrangement, appearance, security, etc.
  2. a way to regulate and discipline the city-dwellers, 
  3. an abstraction, sometimes ideal but never without errors or blindness to real-life activities.

  4. "The urban reformers imposed an interpretive grid on the city and reduced its social life to a number of human capacities, vices and virtues which allowed them to extrapolate a fixed pattern of statistical relationships.  In doing so, they subjected the population of the city to observation, amelioration and discipline.  But could all the activities of the populations of Manchester or London . .  . really be captured in this neat categorization?  " (source: 435)



Reference:
Donald, James.  “Metropolis: The City as Text.”  Social and Cultural Forms of Modernity.  Ed. Robert Bocock & Kenneth Thompson.  Cambridge: Polity, 1992.