unimaginative2
Senior Member
Final thought: The perfect slogan for Toronto, coined by a citizen genius
May 27, 2007 04:30 AM
John Lorinc
Special to the Star
In the course of Toronto's tortured search for a catchy brand, documented in these pages last Sunday by Leah Sandals, the perfect slogan has been hidden in plain view.
Ever since city officials and destination marketing experts began building the inevitable camel, I've wondered why we didn't scrap the consultants' reports and simply nominate Marshall McLuhan's prescient expression, "the global village" – an organic but universally recognized phrase that succinctly acknowledges Toronto's best features.
The case for "Toronto: The Global Village" works on several levels:
With apologies to fans of Northrop Frye and Harold Innis, McLuhan is arguably Toronto's greatest intellectual export – an iconoclast who anticipated the future of communications and the media. His axiom described how "hot" media, like television – or, in our era, the Internet – collapse the distances between nations, peoples, cultures.
How much of McLuhan's thinking was influenced by this city I can't say. But "global village" comes as close to capturing the essential Toronto as anything I've read.
First, we are a city of urban villages. Toronto may not be especially adroit at commissioning great buildings or revitalizing its waterfront. But the city has evolved into a magnificent tapestry of livable, diverse neighbourhoods, each with its own nuances and inflections, one melding effortlessly, but distinctively, into the next.
Toronto is also a city that has given itself over to a kind of recombinant cosmopolitanism unseen anywhere else in the world. About 44 per cent of Torontonians were born abroad, a statistic that makes us the most ethnically diverse city on Earth. In New York and London, by comparison, foreign-born residents account for only a quarter of their respective populations. Our civic identity is thoroughly, unflinchingly, global.
But there's an additional, less literal, layer of meaning. McLuhan concerned himself with the new media universe. Perhaps not coincidentally, Toronto since his day has become a city steeped in the art, science and business of communication. Combined, Toronto's film/TV, culture/arts, information and communications technology sectors generate over $40 billion in annual revenues and employ 300,000 people.
Much of Canada's media is headquartered here, and the city's most famous icon, the CN Tower, was originally built as a radio communications beacon. Indeed, as recently as last week, amidst all the media genuflecting about foreign takeovers, Toronto's Thomson Corp., one of the world's information giants, acquired Reuters, a global communications brand if ever there was one.
What's the link between this multicultural city of urban villages and Toronto's powerful knowledge economy? I'd argue that a metropolis like ours simply couldn't function without a collective compulsion to communicate with one another as a means of reducing social distance and tearing away linguistic barriers. McLuhan's global village was an academic abstraction that has found physical expression in this city, at this time.
City brands, of course, shouldn't be over-interpreted – that's not their role. But unlike all those clunky predecessor slogans, "Toronto: The Global Village" is not a square cliché being jammed into this round hole. Rather, these words work because they resonate with the ring of truth. Quite simply, McLuhan's phrase tells our story.
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Journalist John Lorinc is the author of The New City (Penguin Canada, 2006).
May 27, 2007 04:30 AM
John Lorinc
Special to the Star
In the course of Toronto's tortured search for a catchy brand, documented in these pages last Sunday by Leah Sandals, the perfect slogan has been hidden in plain view.
Ever since city officials and destination marketing experts began building the inevitable camel, I've wondered why we didn't scrap the consultants' reports and simply nominate Marshall McLuhan's prescient expression, "the global village" – an organic but universally recognized phrase that succinctly acknowledges Toronto's best features.
The case for "Toronto: The Global Village" works on several levels:
With apologies to fans of Northrop Frye and Harold Innis, McLuhan is arguably Toronto's greatest intellectual export – an iconoclast who anticipated the future of communications and the media. His axiom described how "hot" media, like television – or, in our era, the Internet – collapse the distances between nations, peoples, cultures.
How much of McLuhan's thinking was influenced by this city I can't say. But "global village" comes as close to capturing the essential Toronto as anything I've read.
First, we are a city of urban villages. Toronto may not be especially adroit at commissioning great buildings or revitalizing its waterfront. But the city has evolved into a magnificent tapestry of livable, diverse neighbourhoods, each with its own nuances and inflections, one melding effortlessly, but distinctively, into the next.
Toronto is also a city that has given itself over to a kind of recombinant cosmopolitanism unseen anywhere else in the world. About 44 per cent of Torontonians were born abroad, a statistic that makes us the most ethnically diverse city on Earth. In New York and London, by comparison, foreign-born residents account for only a quarter of their respective populations. Our civic identity is thoroughly, unflinchingly, global.
But there's an additional, less literal, layer of meaning. McLuhan concerned himself with the new media universe. Perhaps not coincidentally, Toronto since his day has become a city steeped in the art, science and business of communication. Combined, Toronto's film/TV, culture/arts, information and communications technology sectors generate over $40 billion in annual revenues and employ 300,000 people.
Much of Canada's media is headquartered here, and the city's most famous icon, the CN Tower, was originally built as a radio communications beacon. Indeed, as recently as last week, amidst all the media genuflecting about foreign takeovers, Toronto's Thomson Corp., one of the world's information giants, acquired Reuters, a global communications brand if ever there was one.
What's the link between this multicultural city of urban villages and Toronto's powerful knowledge economy? I'd argue that a metropolis like ours simply couldn't function without a collective compulsion to communicate with one another as a means of reducing social distance and tearing away linguistic barriers. McLuhan's global village was an academic abstraction that has found physical expression in this city, at this time.
City brands, of course, shouldn't be over-interpreted – that's not their role. But unlike all those clunky predecessor slogans, "Toronto: The Global Village" is not a square cliché being jammed into this round hole. Rather, these words work because they resonate with the ring of truth. Quite simply, McLuhan's phrase tells our story.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Journalist John Lorinc is the author of The New City (Penguin Canada, 2006).
