junctionist
Senior Member
There are cities out there where the kind of discussion that happens about architecture, urban design, and transit on UT actually happens among city officials, transit planners, and developers all the time.
|
|
|
How Unique is UrbanToronto?
- Thread starter TrickyRicky
- Start date
TrickyRicky
Senior Member
I was going through some episodes of the Life Size City on TV
rg. For the Toronto episode the host was I believe suggesting that this City has an impressive amount of grassroots and bottom-up civic engagement and organization filling essentially a vacuum created by an absence of top down solutions.
I had never thought about Toronto that way but it actually makes sense. Our society is actually incredibly reliant on self-service, self-advocacy etc. This paradigm explains so much about our culture and the development of the City. It also may help to explain why so many people care about the issues they care about here on the forum.
While design, planning, architecture, transportation etc. are issues people care about everywhere maybe we have an abundance of civic interest in these matters because their is a top down leadership and cultural vacuum that needs to be filled with something.
In some ways we admire and envy that top down approach when it works well in other places around the world with smart infrastructure or maybe a culturally rigid aesthetic but then again it has it’s limitations and there are more top down bad actors than good.
rg. For the Toronto episode the host was I believe suggesting that this City has an impressive amount of grassroots and bottom-up civic engagement and organization filling essentially a vacuum created by an absence of top down solutions.I had never thought about Toronto that way but it actually makes sense. Our society is actually incredibly reliant on self-service, self-advocacy etc. This paradigm explains so much about our culture and the development of the City. It also may help to explain why so many people care about the issues they care about here on the forum.
While design, planning, architecture, transportation etc. are issues people care about everywhere maybe we have an abundance of civic interest in these matters because their is a top down leadership and cultural vacuum that needs to be filled with something.
In some ways we admire and envy that top down approach when it works well in other places around the world with smart infrastructure or maybe a culturally rigid aesthetic but then again it has it’s limitations and there are more top down bad actors than good.