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John Lorinc¡¦s "The New City" from the Town Crier
www.towncrieronline.ca/ma...oryid=5575
John Lorinc¡¦s book makes a passionate argument for how to revitalize big cities
(Posted Date: Thursday, July 20, 2006)
By Kris Scheuer
SELF-DESCRIBED "CITY BOY" John Lorinc says his hometown of Toronto could learn alot from Vancouver about creating affordable housing.
Fighting to protect neighbourhoods is vital to ensuring a vibrant Toronto, says local author John Lorinc, who explores Canadian urban centres in depth in his recently published book The New City.
¡§Toronto is quite a unique place in terms of its neighbourhoods,¡¨ he tells the Town Crier in an interview at Queen¡¦s Dairy, a breakfast joint in his neighbourhood near St. Clair Ave. West and Christie Street.
From a visit to Chicago five years ago he remembers, ¡§There¡¦s a cool area and then a bombed out area and then another interesting area and another bombed out area.¡¨
To be sure, Toronto has its rough patches, but he challenges anyone to walk from the Kingsway in Etobicoke to the Beaches in the east end to find any bombed-out areas.
¡§We are a nation that watched the emptying out of U.S. cities and decided we didn¡¦t want to abandon our downtown neighbourhoods,¡¨ he writes in a chapter called Divided Cities.
While strong neighbourhoods are important, he says, some issues call for decisions to be made on a regional level.
¡§Toronto has great neighbourhoods because neighbourhoods have a voice and can express that voice creatively. You need that, but you also need some entity that looks at the bigger picture and what is needed (regionally),¡¨ he said.
¡§Transit is a spectacular example of that,¡¨ As suburbs with more affordable housing grow ¡X cities like Brampton and Markham ¡X we need to link them to each other through a strong transit system. It¡¦s the only way to cut down on the long commute, smog and congestion on our highways.
That won¡¦t happen if we don¡¦t plan and fund transit across the GTA, he argues.
We also have to start looking at sacrificing some sacred cows for the greater good. One example he uses is the hotly contested, dedicated streetcar lanes along St. Clair Ave. ¡V which he supports.
Lorinc, who was born in North Toronto¡¦s Lawrence Park neighbourhood, has always lived downtown. He, along with his wife Victoria Foote and sons Jacob and Sammy, now resides in Hillcrest Village.
¡§I am a city boy. I consider wilderness to be anything that is more than a mile from a subway stop,¡¨ jokes the award-winning journalist, who is featured regularly in Toronto Life and the Globe and Mail.
When his parents fled Budapest during the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, they were bound for the U.S. then decided on Montreal, but a snowstorm re-routed them here.
While it was not easy for immigrants back then, in many ways, it is even harder for them now because we don¡¦t help immigrants to get jobs in the careers they were trained in, ¡§the word is getting out: Think twice before you come to Canada.¡¨
Deepening poverty, immigration, lack of cohesive planning, increasing pollution, the under-funding of education and transit, and above all the failure of federal and provincial governments¡¦ to understand the dynamics of big cities are the issues he addresses in great detail in The New City.
In some ways, this book is a study of which cities get what issues right. ¡§I think Toronto and Ontario could learn a lot from Vancouver around growth and development,¡¨ he said.
Vancouver made it a policy to continue funding social housing in the 1990s, a decade that left Toronto with a condo boom, but no new affordable housing.
Also, he notes that the west-coast city has managed to revitalize its waterfront unlike Toronto.
Lorinc, is an advocate of giving cities, like Toronto, more power to make decisions and more money to fund programs.
In the 1970s and ¡¥80s most Canadian cities were doing so well that, ¡§Canada¡¦s federal and provincial leaders weren¡¦t thinking about the health of the country¡¦s cities at the time; that was taken for granted,¡¨ he writes.
Throughout The New City he traces the current municipal funding crisis, especially in Toronto and points to the fact the federal government paid down the country¡¦s debt by slashing transfer payments to the provinces.
As a result, provincial governments ¡§began reining in their own budgets and downloading programs ¡X from housing to welfare to transit ¡X to municipalities,¡¨ he writes.
And now cities don¡¦t have the money to pay for everything from welfare and community centres to transit and parks.
While the book often focuses on the factors that plague big cities, Lorinc doesn¡¦t leave readers with visions of doom and gloom.
¡§I am an optimist,¡¨ he said.
Because Canadians aren¡¦t afraid to live downtown this leads to the revitalization and growth of neighbourhoods.
Once the waterfront is completely built up, condo-wise, it will be the residents who will be pushing for tangible revitalization, he argues, because it is their neighbourhood and they will want it to work.
¡§In many ways, our intensely diverse cities have come to resemble grand orchestras, with countless performers playing a breathtaking array of instruments,¡¨ he concludes in his book.
¡§But unless we all find a way to agree on the score and then develop a vision of how to collaborate down there in the pit, there can only be noise.¡¨
The New City, published by the Penguin Group, retails for $26 and can be found in bookstores across the city.
www.towncrieronline.ca/ma...oryid=5575
John Lorinc¡¦s book makes a passionate argument for how to revitalize big cities
(Posted Date: Thursday, July 20, 2006)
By Kris Scheuer
SELF-DESCRIBED "CITY BOY" John Lorinc says his hometown of Toronto could learn alot from Vancouver about creating affordable housing.
Fighting to protect neighbourhoods is vital to ensuring a vibrant Toronto, says local author John Lorinc, who explores Canadian urban centres in depth in his recently published book The New City.
¡§Toronto is quite a unique place in terms of its neighbourhoods,¡¨ he tells the Town Crier in an interview at Queen¡¦s Dairy, a breakfast joint in his neighbourhood near St. Clair Ave. West and Christie Street.
From a visit to Chicago five years ago he remembers, ¡§There¡¦s a cool area and then a bombed out area and then another interesting area and another bombed out area.¡¨
To be sure, Toronto has its rough patches, but he challenges anyone to walk from the Kingsway in Etobicoke to the Beaches in the east end to find any bombed-out areas.
¡§We are a nation that watched the emptying out of U.S. cities and decided we didn¡¦t want to abandon our downtown neighbourhoods,¡¨ he writes in a chapter called Divided Cities.
While strong neighbourhoods are important, he says, some issues call for decisions to be made on a regional level.
¡§Toronto has great neighbourhoods because neighbourhoods have a voice and can express that voice creatively. You need that, but you also need some entity that looks at the bigger picture and what is needed (regionally),¡¨ he said.
¡§Transit is a spectacular example of that,¡¨ As suburbs with more affordable housing grow ¡X cities like Brampton and Markham ¡X we need to link them to each other through a strong transit system. It¡¦s the only way to cut down on the long commute, smog and congestion on our highways.
That won¡¦t happen if we don¡¦t plan and fund transit across the GTA, he argues.
We also have to start looking at sacrificing some sacred cows for the greater good. One example he uses is the hotly contested, dedicated streetcar lanes along St. Clair Ave. ¡V which he supports.
Lorinc, who was born in North Toronto¡¦s Lawrence Park neighbourhood, has always lived downtown. He, along with his wife Victoria Foote and sons Jacob and Sammy, now resides in Hillcrest Village.
¡§I am a city boy. I consider wilderness to be anything that is more than a mile from a subway stop,¡¨ jokes the award-winning journalist, who is featured regularly in Toronto Life and the Globe and Mail.
When his parents fled Budapest during the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, they were bound for the U.S. then decided on Montreal, but a snowstorm re-routed them here.
While it was not easy for immigrants back then, in many ways, it is even harder for them now because we don¡¦t help immigrants to get jobs in the careers they were trained in, ¡§the word is getting out: Think twice before you come to Canada.¡¨
Deepening poverty, immigration, lack of cohesive planning, increasing pollution, the under-funding of education and transit, and above all the failure of federal and provincial governments¡¦ to understand the dynamics of big cities are the issues he addresses in great detail in The New City.
In some ways, this book is a study of which cities get what issues right. ¡§I think Toronto and Ontario could learn a lot from Vancouver around growth and development,¡¨ he said.
Vancouver made it a policy to continue funding social housing in the 1990s, a decade that left Toronto with a condo boom, but no new affordable housing.
Also, he notes that the west-coast city has managed to revitalize its waterfront unlike Toronto.
Lorinc, is an advocate of giving cities, like Toronto, more power to make decisions and more money to fund programs.
In the 1970s and ¡¥80s most Canadian cities were doing so well that, ¡§Canada¡¦s federal and provincial leaders weren¡¦t thinking about the health of the country¡¦s cities at the time; that was taken for granted,¡¨ he writes.
Throughout The New City he traces the current municipal funding crisis, especially in Toronto and points to the fact the federal government paid down the country¡¦s debt by slashing transfer payments to the provinces.
As a result, provincial governments ¡§began reining in their own budgets and downloading programs ¡X from housing to welfare to transit ¡X to municipalities,¡¨ he writes.
And now cities don¡¦t have the money to pay for everything from welfare and community centres to transit and parks.
While the book often focuses on the factors that plague big cities, Lorinc doesn¡¦t leave readers with visions of doom and gloom.
¡§I am an optimist,¡¨ he said.
Because Canadians aren¡¦t afraid to live downtown this leads to the revitalization and growth of neighbourhoods.
Once the waterfront is completely built up, condo-wise, it will be the residents who will be pushing for tangible revitalization, he argues, because it is their neighbourhood and they will want it to work.
¡§In many ways, our intensely diverse cities have come to resemble grand orchestras, with countless performers playing a breathtaking array of instruments,¡¨ he concludes in his book.
¡§But unless we all find a way to agree on the score and then develop a vision of how to collaborate down there in the pit, there can only be noise.¡¨
The New City, published by the Penguin Group, retails for $26 and can be found in bookstores across the city.