Honestly, the reaction does smack of elitism IMO. "My aesthetic sensibility is morally and intellectually superior to yours!" This is exactly the flip side to Ford's ignorant populism which is driving a wedge in our city. As someone said in the EIFS thread, the suburbs are a "lost cause" anyway. Well, people who grew up in the suburbs would've been influenced by the architecture they grew up with, and maybe they would find it hard to identify with people who grew up in the city with beautiful heritage architecture.
Actually, I wouldn't broad-brush the suburbs quite that way--in fact, all too often these days it's a matter of people who grew up in the suburbs or adopted them as their home being profoundly *disengaged* from their architectural/historical environments; or at least, they view it as a history-free, story-free, value-free tabula rasa.*** And I'm speaking from a POV that recognizes how today's latent ledger of historicity/heritage/cherishability/whatever is actually
encompassing a great deal of this suburban Scarborough fabric--and, in fact, with that in mind, as per the thread the "lost cause" has more to with all too many present-day suburbanites being their own worst enemy. Thus the matter of "architecture they grew up with" might have less to do w/50s/60s/70s bungalows, than with the 90s/noughts teardowns and disfigurements that constitute today's vulgarized version of "keeping up with the Joneses". And I'm sorry--except on novelty/ironic/camp grounds, I *cannot* see that sort of fare benefiting from heritage-esque fashion swings; largely because the dispensible "fashion swing" mentality behind it is so contrary to what's fueled "future heritage" in the past--in fact, as I see it, it was somewhere around the 80s/90s juncture that a "Big Sort" terminal cleavage in architectural taste and attitude took place, perhaps related to the breakdown of the "mass middle" concept in other media, the end of the days when daily newspapers, newsweeklies, the Big 3 networks, mainstream Top 40 etc were rite-of-passage cultural fulcrums. One result being that the notion of "heritage sensitivity" relative to something like postwar Scarborough has tended to be cubbyholed as the pursuit/fantasy of weirdo hipster crackpots (cf. the Portlandia episode of the Simpsons). Perhaps there's also an art-world corollary: we went from an era defined by "Pop" a la Warhol to one defined by "Mass" a la Kinkade.
Being suburban and in his mid-20s, it's conceivable that HaveLove has only known one side (and, unfortunately, the "low" side) of that divide.
Then, esp. re the demographic evolution of Scarborough in recent decades, there's the cultural-divide matter to consider, as per the quote
What seems sophisticated and classic to North Americans may be ugly and tasteless to Asians.
It may be no coincidence that a lot of this "value-free" attitude is held by "new Canadians", a lot of whom came here exactly in pursuit of a tabula rasa new start that they couldn't pursue in their homelands; or else, simply arriving with a looser native-culture attitude t/w "heritage" and "context" (whose racially-charged controversiality in Canada dates back at least to Vancouver's "monster home" crisis of the 1980s--and perhaps, in a milder form, to the postwar Italo-Portuguese-izing of many of Toronto's older neighbourhoods)
It's certainly worth noting that some of UT's most insufferably vehement critics of the persistence of Toronto's humble lowrise Victoriana along streets like Yonge appear to be/have been of Asiatic background. (And much like the present-day "weirdo Simpsons Portlandia hipster" cubbyhole re suburban gentrifiers, to them campaigns on behalf of, say, Beijing's hutongs might seem a little too much of a Euro-American "Lonely Planet" elite conceit for their own good.)
***Which, subliminally, may explain why their relationship to their own environments all too often seems pathological, and in a manner Rob Ford makes hay out of. When you choose to live a basically utilitarian existence within such an apparently "story-free" environment, and you have no impulse, or nobody to spark an impulse to seek such stories, you're living a life of entropic poverty. A tabula rasa Scarberia is an environment of misery, not joy. Pathology, not passion.
