Toronto's sprawl, while lamentable, is still at a point of return because we have built a quasi-transit city where people might live in suburban houses ringed with strip malls, but a large number of those residents still rely on public transit to get around.
I'm not a guru of third world planning, but it seems that Toronto is beginning to resemble places like Sao Paulo and Istanbul where the city was laid out for the car, but the majority of people do not own one. In those cities, wealth versus poverty dictate land use, and in our city dinosaur politicians, vision-less developers, and rigid planning laws force us to build a city that answers to fewer and fewer people.
This city will change, but only through private investment that is as far removed from the interference of politics as possible. Masterplanning neighbourhoods and dreaming up transit corridors is far too bureaucratic and lumbering. Instead, a parking lot at a Chinese mall will get turned into a night market; private jitneys will start operating more frequently between Brampton and Little India; the useless lawn in front of a tower slab will get dug up for townhouses; a sports bar owner in a strip mall buys out a few parking spaces and nails down a patio. I think that this is how we will transform our sprawly city.
