Locative Media & The City

Listening to Shawn Micaleff talk about Murmur as, among other things, an attempt to help Toronto “build its own mythology” (I believe I’m quoting him almost verbatim), made me think about urban mythologies, and how they influence our ways of moving through and perceiving cities. That our first encounters with new places are strongly influenced by our expectations is no news: the way in which our experience of a place is affected by what we know about it, and sometimes by the mere sound of its name, has been explored many times in literature and elsewhere (two entire sections of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past are dedicated precisely to the painstaking exploration of this psychological phenomenon: “Towns’ names: the name” at the end of Swann's Way, and “Towns’ names: the town” in Within a Budding Grove). Having said that, my question is: What kind of enduring influence (if any) does the “mythology” of a city have on our way of perceiving and navigating through that city ONCE WE KNOW IT? Can our way of looking at (and moving through) cities that we know be influenced by their mythologies? And if so, how? Are New Yorkers or Parisian influenced by the mythologies that surround their cities? I’m sure the answers to these questions are different in relation to different cities and, more significantly, different people. People are inclined to fantasize about places to different extents and in different ways, and there’s no doubt that these differences have an impact on how they react to those places. This is so clearly true that I even wonder where any useful generalization can be made in relation to this issue, or if the only appropriate answer to any of the questions above is: “It depends”. I need to think more about this.
A further point, partly related to the previous one, has to do with a feature of the processes by which urban mythologies are created and sustained. It seems to me that in order to mythologize a place one needs to perceive it as an “elsewhere” – either literally (that is to say, in spatial terms) or metaphorically, e.g. in temporal or literary terms. I can mythologize Tokyo because I’ve never been there; or I can mythologize the Paris of the Twenties or Ulysees’ Dublin. At the same time, it seems that a Parisian’s perception (and her navigation through) her actual present-day surroundings can be influenced by her “attachment” to the mythology of “Paris in the Twenties”. So perhaps an urban mythology, even though generated from the perspective of a spatial or temporal elsewhere, can still be sustained and continue to have an influence when the mythologized “other space/ other time” collapses into one’s present surroundings. Now, back to Murmur. What sort of mythology can a project of that kind help build, and how? Most of the stories seem to have to do with an “other” Toronto, a Toronto of the past, different (both socially and, to a certain extent, physically, or even topographically) from the contemporary one. Is the idea to build a mythology of the “old Toronto”? If so – what kind of influence would a mythology of this kind have on one’s perception (and navigation through) the present-day city? Nostalgia, longing, disillusionment with the present? Do we really want to go there? Uhm – I have the feeling that to talk about “mythology” in relation to our ways of looking at (and moving through) our geographical surroundings might bring us on rather treacherous ground.