kkgg7
Banned
Points taken. But again, I have some disagreements.
Urban vibrancy in Toronto, again, is only impressive in North America. I am not putting down Toronto just for the sake of argument, not only the vibrancy and pedestrian traffic in big and medium sized Asian cities beat Toronto by miles, if you have ever been there, but also many European cities have much more vibrant and busy streets than Toronto as well, and I am not talking about London and Paris. I am talking about much smaller cities such as Lyon, Nice or Barcelona. Toronto, to a large extent, is still a very car dependent city. There are way too many purely residential areas with nothing else except a Tim Hortons and a corner convenience store.
As to quality of life ... maybe so, I have reservations about this despite the rankings. For one thing, the weather drags it down a lot (although no rankings seem to consider that but it is really important); high housing prices in recent years coupled with low-ish income/high tax/high price on everything has led to reduced purchase power. Median house price stands at somewhere near $450K, when most people make $40-60K before tax. I can't imagine how high the quality of life these people can actually have, unless they have already bought a house 10 years ago, or they pretend buying products is not important at all.
Shanghai and Guangzhou are not my favorite cities. I have been to both and I consider life quality much lower than Toronto's in general, particularly for the lower income. However, I mentioned them because this post is about buildings, and in that aspect, they are a couple of leagues above Toronto. Additionally, it is naive to assume that most Shanghainese live a poor life, they don't. I have a friend in Shanghai, who has two condos totally $1m with no mortgage (yes, they bought earlier than the boom), two cars, the couple makes an after tax income of $60K per year. And they are by no means considered "rich" or "wealthy" in the city but are just middle class. In Shanghai nowadays, a $40-50K annual salary for someone well educated with 5-10 years of work experience is not surprising at all.
And speaking of "culture", Toronto may lead those smallish North American suburbs and towns, but it is silly to assume major Chinese cities have fewer cultural offering. Just because a country is poorer in general does mean it is inferior in every aspect. The country has more than a dozen different regional operas which are very popular among average folks (what music genre originated in Toronto/Canada?). Small theatres are everywhere. Those are Chinese heritage, not something borrowed from Italy or France. The Chinese watch adundant Chinese movies and TV shows, not just those made in a neiboughoring country. Art galaries are burgeoning on every corner of the city. No country can look down upon the cultural offerings of China, not even France or Italy, not to mention the Canadians.
Let's not mix things and give credit to others when they deserve. When we talk about buildings, don't do something like "so what? Quality of life is so much better in Toronto". It makes us provincial minded.
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I think he's done a good job in that respect! One flow I noticed he assumed that the board's members "situational awareness" is a bit too local in scope... My impression is that the opposite is true: many of us did travel and lived in other places outside of North America and do judge Toronto in the context of rapidly changing world... I grew up in St. Petersburg (another great and vibrant city), I happen to travel a lot (Europe, Middle East, South America, Australia) and the only place I still need to go to is China (hopefully next year!!). I think it is a mistake to judge the importance of Toronto by some superficial (albeit highly visible) attributes, such as number of new skyscrapers or length of subway lines. It reminds me one of visiting relatives who found Toronto "too provincial" to his taste. He pointed out to old wooden telegraph posts, narrow pedestrian walkways, some core streets with run-down two-storey buildings, inefficient subway system... I guess you need to spend more than a few weeks in Toronto to appreciate it for what it is... We already mentioned vibrancy, diversity, top-notch banking system, highly educated citizens, list goes on and on... I am in the R&D field and I know first hand that Toronto is cutting edge in that respect, definitely much more important than any Asian city (number of important discoveries, patents, high-impact scientific publications, medical breakthrough, etc.). Toronto is not London and it doesn't have to be one and it doesn't need to be ashamed of it.