News   Mar 28, 2024
 469     0 
News   Mar 28, 2024
 390     1 
News   Mar 28, 2024
 740     0 

Rita Davies - Toronto Cultural "Czar"

A

AlvinofDiaspar

Guest
Rita Davies - Toronto Cultural "Czar"

From the Star:

The renaissance woman
Feb. 20, 2006. 01:00 AM
MARTIN KNELMAN


All the great capitals of the future will be creative cities, living off ideas, the arts and the knowledge industry. Can Toronto land a franchise in the cultural major league?

If this city succeeds it will largely be through an act of will on the part of a true visionary at city hall — Rita Davies.

Toronto's executive director of culture may not be well-known to the public, but she's a genuine star in the world of arts, politics and civic planning.

A 58-year-old veteran of the culture wars, Davies has a gentle style but an unyielding determination to earn respect and recognition for this city's artists and cultural industries.

Davies has big plans for making Toronto one of the world's top creative capitals. And she has developed a brilliant detailed strategy to help the city reach that goal.

"These big cultural projects are going to have a tremendous impact, and they're already creating a lot of buzz," says Davies. "Our objective is to take the potential of that buzz and amplify it. We want to put the spotlight on Toronto, finding ways to engage Torontonians in the excitement and also to direct the attention of the world to the thrilling things that are happening here."

And according to Davies, this is just the beginning.

"Toronto is already a creative city," states the gospel according to Rita. "Its competitors are such metropolises as Chicago, Milan, Barcelona, Montreal and San Francisco."

Here's what those cities have in common: great cultural diversity, high percentages of adults with post-secondary education, and high proportions of economic activity in the knowledge industry.

"Creating and executing a culture plan is akin to piloting an iceberg," Davies quips. "It's exhilarating of course but you never know when you're going to run into the Titanic. The part most focus on is the tip visible above the waterline, glinting in the sunlight. But the bulk and power lie beneath the surface in the dark."

And now after years of wandering in that metaphoric darkness, Davies is beginning to see the light. Her magnum opus, a city hall bible called Culture Plan for the Creative City (published in 2003) is winning Davies overdue recognition.

"One of Toronto's greatest attractions is its vibrant arts and culture life," says Mayor David Miller. "Rita Davies is the key force behind it. She is a wonderful public asset."

Gail Dexter Lord, president of the consulting firm Lord Cultural Resources, says: "I've worked with many cities and their cultural departments around the world. Rita Davies is a brilliant advocate — and that's rare. Despite all the difficulties of working for a financially challenged city, she always keeps her eye on the main goal. and she understands the potential of culture in Toronto."

Born in Shanghai, Davies was the product of an exotic mixed marriage. Her father was an Iraqi Jew, her mother a Catholic who had spent her life in China.

After doing an apprenticeship in book and magazine publishing, Davies did pioneer work for the Toronto Arts Council in the 1980s, developing a report to provide evidence that Toronto City Council should give more money to the arts. She started as a part-time worker; at the time, the organization had a budget of $250,000. By the time she left, she was running the Toronto Arts Council, and its budget had climbed to $8 million.

On her current turf at city hall, the budget for culture is about $30 million — but it's not nearly enough to cover the aspirations she has for Toronto.

The Culture Plan articulates Toronto's destiny as one of the world's creative capitals, where people work with ideas, are intensely mobile, and insist on a high quality of life. The plan not only demonstrates that Toronto's arts, culture and heritage assets are essential to its future but shows how important it is for Toronto not to lag behind its competitors on these fronts.

The biggest factor holding Toronto back is the city's inability to spend enough money on cultural development. Compared with, say, San Francisco or Berlin, Toronto's budget for the arts is perilously slim. (In 2003, Toronto spent $13 per capita on the arts compared to $86 per capita for San Francisco.)

The problem, according to Davies, is that Toronto is asset-rich but cash poor. The city owns museums, cultural centres, heritage sites and theatres, but the budget for culture has not grown with the economy. Property tax is virtually the city's only source of revenue.

A hotel tax has proved the solution for many cities, but instead of having a legislated hotel tax with revenue flowing to the city, Toronto has a voluntary tax with revenue going to Tourism Toronto (whose objectives are marketing and promotion only).

Nevertheless, Toronto has inherent strengths. Its combination of high educational attainment and great ethnocultural diversity is unique in the world. "We used to think of London, New York, Paris, Rome and San Francisco as places that existed in another realm. But now Toronto is much like the cities we once envied — cities that work with their minds."

Whatever disadvantages it has in competing with other capitals for cultural supremacy and prestige, Toronto has one big plus in the person of Davies. She already has growing reputation among "creative city" advocates around the world.

Consider her performance last fall at an international conference in Toronto on culture and cities called Creative Spaces + Places. One session had slipped into a sleep-inducing melange of statistics and academic clichés. After a deadly boring presentation on recent advances in London, England, the brilliant British architect Will Alsop made a few acerbic and hilarious remarks about the pitfalls of participating in events like this one, where rhetoric can seem like the enemy of creativity.

Then Davies came to the podium and quietly stole the show, engaging the room with her insights and convictions, delivered in a humorous and matter-of-fact style. Delegates left the session with their faith restored in the future of cities and their destiny as creative engines.

One point became clear. Whatever disadvantages it has in competing with other capitals for cultural supremacy and prestige, Toronto has one big plus in the person of Davies.

AoD
 

Back
Top