Challenges in Moving from a Rural Place to an Urban Space

By Riley Bertoncini

April 24th, 2025

It is hard, moving from the countryside to the metropolis. It isn’t just a new town or province, but a new place. You trade the trees for lampposts and suddenly everything is unfamiliar. Notice that I used the word place and not space. The difference between the two is at the heart of what I want to say here.

Place can be traced back to the latin platea meaning ‘courtyard, open space’ and from there to the Greek plateia meaning ‘broad (way)’ and finally to the root plat- signifying ‘to spread’. An expansive, public word that in the end goes back to a verb, a way of doing. Space, on the other hand, goes back to the latin spatium meaning ‘room, area, distance, stretch of time’. How apt that we call space space, since it is at once a stretch of distance and time. Less apt, perhaps, that we refer to our classrooms and streets as spaces. It is a more restricting, measuring, dictating word.

When I first arrived in Montreal I saw nothing but spaces. The roads and buildings and blocks and fences, I had never been somewhere so divided up into ‘rooms, areas, and distances’. Then my classes started, I moved near an old church, and suddenly the world around me was divided into ‘stretches of time’, too. It would be lazy to say it was alienating, better to say it was lonely. How could anyone live in a space so administered, regimented, hard.

The contrast was especially severe coming from the forest. The forest is always doing. It grows, lives, dies. It ‘spreads’, too. The saplings take up a little more of the clearing every year, the side of a hill gives way and spreads itself out into the river, necessary forest fire spreads from tree to tree cleansing as it goes. How could I, a person coming from so much place, make a place for myself in all the city space?

The thing is I was wrong. There is place in the city. At first through photography, then through simply walking, I started to notice all the ‘spreading’ happening between the concrete and the hour marks on the clock. The large rocks that hold in the canal became a place to marvel at the tenacity of weeds, the angle of two buildings is brought to life by the passing sun whose shadows dance on the windows and walls, rats, wonderful rats, play and spread chaos between the stores and restaurants of narrow streets.

I need to move out of the space inside my head and into the place around me to see what I’d been arrogantly missing.

It is a little bit like Deleuze’s exploration of the ‘Point of View’ in Le Pli. For him a point of view is not an opinion or argument that we gain through study or experience, it is a place from which to view the events of the world.

Before, I had no place to stand and witness, I was alone. Now I know where I am, I have a point of view, one that connects me to so many other places.

References

Etymologies from https://www.etymonline.com/

Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Le Pli: Leibniz et Le Baroque. Collection “Critique.” Paris: Editions de Minuit.

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Riley Bertoncini is an PhD candidate in anthropology at McGill University. He is currently in the fieldwork phase of his research. For his project he works with urbanites to find out more about their experiences with natural spaces in the city. Away from academia he likes laughing with friends and music.