In Italy, as my trip and some voluminous reading about it revealed, people don’t see themselves as Italian. Nor do they see themselves that much as Tuscan or Umbrian or Piedmontese.
Instead, their first loyalty is to their city. That’s a legacy of the hundreds of years when Italy was not a country at all, but a collection of powerful city-states that grouped together in shifting coalitions.
Italy, like Canada, is a country that was created in the burst of mid-19th-century nationalism that temporarily reigned. While Canada was created out of a bunch of colonial politicians bargaining for a railroad here, a chunk of money or land there, to cobble together a kind of not-the-U.S. nation, Italy also was pulled together out of a heap of separate states that found themselves almost by accident tied up as a single country.
As a result, there are many in Italy who think the south — a place closer to Africa than central Europe — should really be a separate nation (Quebec, anyone?) and a tendency still to cling to their city identity rather than any “Italian” one. They are Sienese or Florentines or Romans first. The place they want to come back to always is the town or village where their family is from originally. (It’s one of the reasons real-estate prices in even relatively minor Italian towns are so crazy: all the kids want to buy apartments or houses close to where their parents are, which creates huge pressure on prices as they bid against each other plus bands of roving ex-pats who are eager to buy up a crumbling villa or cool apartment in some medieval city.)
Which, of course, makes me think about the mental maps we have in Canada and whether we identify more with our cities than our provinces or country.
Certainly we see our mayors as the embodiment of our cities’ personalities in a way we don’t with our premiers or prime ministers. No one thinks of Stephen Harper as representing the essence of Canadianness. He’s simply a politician who’s who the skill to manoeuvre his way to the top of the political system. And I doubt that people see (or saw) Gordon Campbell or Christy Clark as representing some kind of distilled BC’ness.
But mayors are seen as representing the collective personality of their residents: Gregor, young, good-looking and green, is the embodiment to pop psychologists and media types of hip, Lululemon-wearing Vancouver. Naheed Nenshi’s election in Calgary instantly broadcast a new image for that city: multicultural and cool. Rob Ford turned our picture of Toronto into one of angry, tax-hating suburbanites. Dianne Watts succeeds in Surrey because she epitomizes what Surrey longs to be: somewhat conservative but compassionate; attractive but business-focused, urban but not Vancouver.
Mayors who do reflect their city’s particular demographics can win huge loyalty from people who see themselves reflected in a way they like. But that attempt to mirror the city can also be a tricky trap, because voters may not match the stereotype in the end. Or, because they judge the mayor on such a personal basis, because she or he is judged so strongly on being a good symbol of the city, perceived failings are hugely magnified.
It’s all part of our city-state thinking, where we are constantly trying to understand our own, very local identity and find the person who will broadcast it to the world for us.
9 responses so far ↓
1 Sean N. // Jul 19, 2011 at 8:41 am
You need a strong, popular politician to project his constituency onto your mental map – think Trudeau or WAC Bennett.
As far as my own “sense of place” goes I think I’m about equally split between calling “Vancouver” and “Canada” home. When I’m traveling elsewhere in Canada I think I’m glad to live in Vancouver, and when I’m outside the country I think I’m glad to live in Canada.
Mostly, I just plain think of how fortunate I am, and that Vancouver is in Canada!
2 Roger Kemble // Jul 19, 2011 at 8:54 am
Soy un altermondialiste . . .
Amo a mi familia
Las Banderas habla muerte
3 spartikus // Jul 19, 2011 at 9:17 am
Whenever someone asks me where I’m from, I say “Vancouver”.
But I do think there are 2 forces at work here in Canada:
1, The aforementioned “city state” dynamic.
2. I believe “Anglo Canada” is undergoing a sort of Quiet Revolution of it’s own, where by we are no longer using a laundry list of “how we aren’t like Americans” as our way of self-identification. #2 is what Harper is latching on to and/or encouraging – you saw it in Tory campaign commercials like “Our Country”. It’s a bit at odds with the multiculturalism past governments have encouraged.
There was a documentary on CBC about the Canadian accent – “Talking Canadian”. It sounds dry, but it was actually really fascinating. It focused mostly on it’s history, but it also looked at it’s future. And one of the things linguists are detecting – as has long been the case in the UK – is the emergence of “civic accents”. Anglo-Montrealers speak with the rhythms and cadences of French, for example. Edmonton was also quite recognizable. When they showed an example I was like “Yep, that’s everyone I know from Edmonton speaking”.
4 Dan Cooper // Jul 19, 2011 at 9:45 am
I would estimate only about 2% of the people I know here in Vancouver were born in Vancouver. Maybe 20-25 percent were born in BC. A majority of the rest were born in Ontario or the Prairie Provinces, with the remainder born all over the planet. I know any number of people who move back and forth between Vancouver, other BC cities, and other provinces, particularly Ontario, all the time.
So no, Vancouver is just a place people live, not a homeland. Likewise with everyplace else I’ve lived, as far as I’ve ever been able to tell, from various parts of the US to China and Japan to Russia.
I will admit, I haven’t been to Italy, and the more I hear about the place the less I want to go! *heh*
5 Bill Lee // Jul 19, 2011 at 12:18 pm
You mean the idea of Campanilismo (the Italian term explained from Italian link to the English word http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parochialism )
“Tra i campanilismi contemporanei, anch’essi spesso non privi di radici storiche, rientrano le rivalità tra città vicine, soprattutto legate a competizioni sportive. I derby calcistici in particolare sono a rischio e perciò presidiati dalle forze dell’ordine che tengono a bada le tifoserie.”
But consider the internal wars and such that put many cities as walled fortresses on top of hills, which you noticed throughout rural Italy.
You’ve seen/read UofT’s Kenneth R. Bartlett’s talk on the history of this habitude.
Referring to a city is a way of countering the 5000 km wide nation.
I remember a Paris gendarme asking if I knew someone in Toronto, when clearly I had been talking about being from Vancouver.
And then some people have a $250,000 cross designating their EastVan ghetto into a further subdivision.
Do people from PEI say they come from Cavendish, Prince County or PEI?
I think that you are mis-reading the local officials images as a general image for people from away.
Italy had barely the telegraph and national railroads (see the 1861 map at http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storia_delle_ferrovie_in_Italia ) at its founding. People didn’t leave their village and being illiterate, couldn’t read about other places other than by legend.
Vancouverites regularly take the transcontinental trains to Montreal and the boat to Europe, waiting for the day when intercontinenttal passenger rockets will get us to Italy in a few hours rather than days.
Vancouverites are more cosmpolitan than to consider their present town the be-all and end-all, other than the parochial Kerrisdale villagers.
We know that there is another world, we do move jobs and places. 40 percent were born elsewhere.
And our history is not built up on one city’s very short history. See Bruce Macdonald’s “Vancouver, a visual history” to see how much of Vancouver was empty until the 1960s.
6 Lewis N. Villegas // Jul 19, 2011 at 3:24 pm
Somewhat tangential to the post question, we are seeing here in Canada as elsewhere, the need for direct communication, coordination and plan of action between cities and the Federal Government—bypassing the Provincial level as necessary. In this sense, having Canadian cities be an act of provincial legislatures is not serving us well.
The example that is foremost in my mind, but by no means the only one, is social housing and the problem of homelessness. As the City Manger’s report to Council of 1 february 2011 showed, the homeless on Vancouver streets are typically ‘graduates’ from Federal and Provincial programs. That suggests that rearranging the pecking order may be helpful.
The force of history seems to suggest that human beings are territorial creatures. We shape the places we live in as surely as that place shapes us. And the marks made are not forgotten. Freud speaks about it eloquently in the introduction to Civilization and its Discontents:
http://wp.me/P1yj4U-2K
7 keith // Jul 24, 2011 at 1:47 pm
Italian birth certificates are registered with the city of birth, not the state.
8 MB // Jul 25, 2011 at 11:20 am
@ Lewis #6: “…having Canadian cities be an act of provincial legislatures is not serving us well.”
Couldn’t agree more.
Federal leadership is past due on not just a National Housing Plan, but on national plans for energy and food security and transportation.
There is a distinct lack of a domestic urban agenda at the federal level under the Conservatives. This is not only sad, but is foolish because cities are the engines of the economy and will be the primary loci for things like reducing emissions and increasing productivity, tar sands notwithstanding.
I do agree that most Canadians identify first with their cities, then with their country and province. In Quebec, country + province are often the same. Sometimes BC feels like a separate country to me, especially after a trip to Alberta.
9 IanS // Jul 27, 2011 at 3:09 pm
In my experience, where I am from depends on where I am.
When I am elsewhere in BC, I am from Vancouver.
When I am elsewhere in Canada, I am from BC and then Vancouver.
When I am traveling abroad, I am from Canada and then Vancouver.
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