Hamlets to Villages To Towns to Cities

Across the known world, there is no universal literal definition of a village, town, or city. It is most often a designation assigned by the people of a place, and often has little to no bearing on population, geographic size, or facilities. For example, Sherwood Park is still classified as a hamlet, the same as the 600 person locale my mother taught band class in, and it counts 50 000 individuals inside its borders. Historically, the presence of a chapel transformed one's humble hamlet or village into a town, and a cathedral elevated one to city status. But, such definitions fall short as communities increasingly stop defining themselves around a common faith, so one finds oneself needing a new paradigm to benchmark these characteristics, or even begin to discard them completely. Edmonton can, with reasonable faith, call itself a city, a city of champions even, but what defines that? Hopefully, not just numbers or the presence of a hospital.

The Disease of Nostalgia

Going against my instincts here, I'm going to use this first post to relate a highly personal story pertaining to Edmonton, hopefully not losing you in so many mundane details like these diatribes always seem to end up in. Ok, commencing...I was a mere whelp, one of a litter of four in my family unit, growing up on my parents' farm just south of Beaumont, and one of our favorite activities was to explore the massive forest behind our house. Once one passed through the forest, a large, steep hill greeted you, and after one climbed that, the greatest spot to horse around for a small child presented itself, giving me and my siblings countless hours of youthful joy. Where this rambling narrative becomes relevant is a particular of the view; namely, the shiny, far-off monolith that is downtown Edmonton. Rising out of the flat, green farmland like some kind of Camelot, it represented a world completely different from my far too rural roots, a conception only heightened to my impressionable child brain by the occasional trip into the Coliseum to experience a hockey game. And so it remained, ideal and wonderfully foreign, until the magic dulled, from both age and gradual habituation to its effects. Hopefully, this class can bring some of that back. End emotional trainwreck monologue.