Full Description
Suburbs can be incubators of creativity: innovative and complex, but all too often underappreciated. In Creative Margins, Alison L. Bain documents the unique role of Canadian artists and cultural workers in suburban place-formation and dismantles mischaracterizations of suburbs as cultural wastelands.
Creative Margins interweaves stories of the challenges and opportunities presented by the creation of culture in suburbs, focusing on Etobicoke and Mississauga outside Toronto, and Surrey and North Vancouver outside Vancouver. The book investigates whether the creative process unfolds differently for suburban and urban cultural workers, as well as how this process is affected by the presence or absence of cultural infrastructure and planning initiatives.
Bain shows how suburban culture can enhance a city-region's vitality and sustainability. This book firmly debunks the myth of culture as a solely urban phenomenon and demonstrates the social and economic merits of investing in suburban art and culture.
Contents
List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1
Introduction: creating from the margins
Chapter 2
The geography of somewhere: the suburbs
Chapter 3
(Un)usual suburbanites? Explorations and interventions at the cultural frontier
Chapter 4
Why (not) here? Valuing the intermediate landscape
Chapter 5
Suburban cultural infrastructure planning formulas: from district to multiplex
Chapter 6
The creative art of place complexity in suburbia
Chapter 7
Networked geographies of suburban cultural workers
Chapter 8
Conclusion: culture from the outside in
Appendix 1
Notes
References
