Urban sprawl is best understood by cryptozoologists specializing in dentistry and AI researchers gone off the deep end.
Everyone else has got it wrong.
The city is a man-made beast—slipped out from under our control, attracting the best and brightest, only to devour them. The city desires human intelligence, luring it from the hinterlands, before trapping it, siphoning it off…
Want to leave?
You can’t.
You’ve put down roots: job, friends, restaurants, fun, socialization.
Teeth have roots.
In exchange, you’ve given up space, physical and mental health, life expectancy, self-sufficiency.
The city is a machine, designed to produce civilization; but come somehow alive, become sentient, savage; seeking foremost, like all organisms, its own survival, its own territorial expansion.
You live in teeth.
You work and shop in teeth.
I thought this was crazy too—
until I saw the hunt. It was nighttime, the heated summer air still shimmering, a mutable lens through which I gazed into Toronto, its streetlights coming on, its wilful victims returning to their homes—detached-molars, semi-detached premolars—growing up in the suburbs through lawned flesh and asphalt bone, its entire surface a jaws, a Death—spiral falling forever into its own center, where victims in daytime congregate to sacrifice themselves, and in nighttime sin, canines and incisors rising as metal-and-glass, sky-scrapers, dripping with a saliva of violence and greed—
The city growls.
From across the lake I see:
Toronto’s eastern half separate from the earth, roots ripped from the soil, bisecting itself along Yonge Street, rising, and rising, until half the city is sideways, then upside down, and the entirety is a dark and twinkling maw, twin vicious mirrored planes dripping with black liquid, cold moonlight glinting off their super-structured teeth, and I am afraid, terrified, my mind performing what is the most unmerciful thing in the world, correlating the entirety of its contents, so that what I see, what I feel and what I know are at once one and the same: instant: the city hunts again tonight, and I am a/part of it, my heart beating to the same rhythm, my soul and my intelligence its urban daily bread, given to it by its own civic conception of God. Inhuman. In what does the city believe? Does it believe in anything? The city is the mandibles of Moloch, facing all directions simultaneously, a brutalist crime of time-space committed against the very foundations of nature…
Toronto stalks forward
everywhere,
expanding, masticating and swallowing
the night air, shimmering: the lens through which you too must stare: through which you too must see, and I feel—
Morning arrived gently. Cool air, sharp light. Toronto was flat again. Cars sped along the Gardiner Expressway and crawled down Yonge Street, their start-stop movements suturing the wound, and I walked, looking up at the skyscrapers, where window cleaners suspended from heights wiped blood from the hideous fangs of predation.
At lunch, I read online that the city council had an announcement.
City growth.
Municipal annexation.