A re-awakening of Toronto?
I've been mulling over this post for a while now mainly because I hadn't given myself the impetus to write it. Oddly enough, my thoughts took shape during a job interview with a planner for the City of Toronto when he asked what the biggest problem Toronto was facing currently.
To me, it was that Toronto could be such a great city, and be better than what it is. It had such potential. But it was faced with a lot of problems: financial, politicial, perception, etc.
But that seems to be changing.
Things once talked about are finally taking shape. On the cultural front, The Royal Ontario Museum renovations are being completed. The Art Gallery of Ontario designs are being finalized, to name a few.
Regent Park is being revitalized, re-integrated back into the city fabric, de-segregating that community while perhaps building one of the few true "sustainable" communities (environmentally, socially, economically) in Canada. The West Don Lands project, talked about for so long, are finally starting to take shape.
Architects were invited to tour our waterfront on behalf of the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation to get an idea of the context for their designs. Bring Back the Don has been trying to repair the ecological damage wrought on it by the planning of its day for many years now. The environment has slowly, but finally been pushed further forward in our priorities.
Finally, apparently there have been buzz in the Toronto blogging circles about the Toronto Star's (whose Sunday section have been putting out very interesting articles lately) What If series, asking its writers how they envisioned Toronto in the future and asking its readers to put their ideas, any ideas, forward.
So it just seems that, the forces are finally coming together for the city, and people are finally excited about what Toronto MIGHT be, if we can keep the enthusiasm up.
2 comments:
The waterfront is definitely a problem, and mainly it's because the TWRC had been given a mandate, but not the powers to see it through. Too much politicking wasted a lot of time. But the fact that they've invited world-renowned architects to Toronto to get them thinking about their proposals shows promise.
The ROM renovations are almost complete, and Phase 1 of the Regent Park are underway, so at least SOME of the talk has been translated into action.
I don't know if the condo boom will ruin the waterfront. Certainly, mistakes have been made, but the waterfront isn't completely a lost cause. I know a lot of condos are being built downtown, but I'm not so certain that a lot of them are south of Gardiners. Plus, the Gardiner's itself is a major barrier for pedestrians to access the waterfront, so there are challenges still to tackle.
It seems like that money's finally trickling into these projects. And they should given the large profiles that they have. Whether this will mask more important but lower profile social issues remains to be seen. But that's something people will have to be vigilant about.
I'm still making my way through John Lorinc's book on Canadian cities, but I still have a couple of opinions all the same.
When I left for Vancouver almost two years ago (has it been that long?), I imagined a cleaner, newer version of Toronto. To put it bluntly, I was an idiot. Sometime I'll have to tell you my "first day in Vancouver" story, if I haven't already. But after spending some time there I noticed what was wrong with Vancouver. There seemed to be a distinct lack of talk about the city itself. City politics were a mess, dominated by infighting between the parties (yeah, there are political parties in Vancouver's city council). The hot button topic was the Downtown Eastside and safe injection sites, which are important issues but very focused on a small problem area in the city.
Meanwhile development proceeds at a rapid pace, the majority of it condos going up in newly established yuppie communities like Yaletown and Coal Harbour, and rapidly gentrifying neighbourhoods like Main and Commercial. Then there's the unrestrained growth of the suburbs like Richmond, New Westminster, etc. Aside from the occasional uproar over the closing of yet another dingy bar (hello Cobalt Hotel) or another article about the sad state of Granville, there seemed to be little civic discussion: what the city could be, and what needed to be done to get there. In contrast, it seems like anyone our age who lives in downtown Toronto has an opinion about what's wrong with the city and what's going well. Many of the same problems exist in both cities, but it feels like people in Toronto talk about it more.
That said, the reason why Toronto is such a bitter pill to swallow these days—aside from the usual bollocks about how we think we're the center of the universe and steal from the poor rural communities, when in fact the opposite is true—is because it's so obviously a city on the decline. A couple of new buildings and a small subsidized housing miracle do not a city make. And while we don't have the wholesale creation of a faux community like Yaletown to deal with in Toronto, we do have other phenomena that are just as bad. Slowly but surely, living anywhere in the city's core is becoming far too expensive a proposition. Of course, living in the outer suburbs is expensive too. It's just that buying fuel and car insurance, making up for lost time spent on the DVP, and all the other hidden costs of suburban life is easier to take because the upfront cost is low.
And then you have the TTC, a public system perpetually in crisis, versus Vancouver's Translink, a fantastic model of a working public transit system whose biggest problem is trying to expand as fast as its users want it to. Can you imagine the idea of increased surface route service flying in Toronto today, let alone a project the size of the Canada and Evergreen light rail lines (to be finished by the 2010 Olympics)? And then you have civic services dealing with reduced budgets, a lack of new schools in the downtown core, new condos that aren't really taking advantage of already existing public transit infrastructure, and an ever-present sense that if you're not rich in Toronto, Toronto doesn't want you.
Toronto has become a city wracked with self-doubt and hesitation. We can't even get a fucking waterfront project off the ground. Meanwhile Vancouver has less than Toronto does now, but is obviously a city that improves with every passing year—this despite being home to the poorest postal code in all of Canada (ha ha, stat stolen from Lorinc!). Another handy book I need to lend you is Dream City, a half-pictorial book published last year about Vancouver's urban history. It really put my thoughts about Vancouver into perspective in a way that made me like the place a lot more than I did in those first few months. Above all it seemed hopeful—a word I cannot in good faith ascribe wholeheartedly to Toronto these days.
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