What makes Toronto... Toronto?

[Second_in_pie]

Above ^^ Let it be known that the Bay Area may have a population of 7 million, but the Bay Area is over twice the size of the Golden Horesehoe, yet is about matched by population. The population growth of Toronto is around the same as that of the entire Bay Area, and if you're comparing metros, the GTA is growing much, much faster than the Bay Area, and it doesn't seem like the GTA is going to be slowing down anytime soon.
So I guess a big problem over the definition of "Metropolitan Area." For instance, Chicago's Metro area is twice as big as the Golden Horseshoe itself, but when we say "Toronto Metro Area," we just think of the GTA and anything bigger, you start going "How can you call all that Toronto's metro area?" Same with basically every other big US city, maybe even other non-US cities. So things are kinda against Toronto there. For instance, take the Bay Area. It's really the metropolitan region of 3 different cities, San Fran, Oakland and San Jose, but it's "the bay area" and as a result is massive, apparently beating out Toronto easily.

But I agree, we go "Oh, we're so obviously inferior to all these other Cities (*ahem* New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angles, London, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Hong Kong, Sydney, etc.) how can we hope to compete with them? I say that the time we stop thinking we're unworthy is the time that we really come out as a truly powerful global city, ready to take on the likes of New York, London and Paris (maybe we could start with Chicago and L.A.)

 

[adma]

At this point, my reckoning that for the Bay Area's equivalent (pre-recessionary, at least) of breakneck-growth 905, you'd have to go deep into places like Stockton or Placer County...

 

[jenny_zhang]

More troublingly, I don't like how this idea is based almost totally on Toronto's large percentage of foreign born residents. It ignores more pertinent, to urban character, factors like degree of cross-cultural communication. By the foreign born metric, Dubai is the most diverse city on earth, I'm sure most people can see why that makes no bloody sense.

Except it's not just about foreign born metrics and you know it. It's about the variety and range of different communities and cultures which exist in this one city. It's not just that there are a lot of foreign-born people, it's that there are a lot of people from all corners of the globe who coexist here and bring their own perspectives and ideas.

Of course, I'm the last one to say it's perfect, I think Toronto has a long way to go until it actually lives up to its reputation. But let's not go too far.

 

[Riverdale Rink Rat]

One of the most spectacular commutes around

My brother, driving across the continent from Boston to Calgary and then Vancouver, arrived in Toronto just before Thanksgiving one year with his then-girlfriend, driving a Jeep. They tooled down the DVP to come crash at our apartment on Ontario.

The afternoon they arrived was the peak of the autumnal colours, and the forest in the Don Valley were absolutely spectacular. As we head into the fall colours, I just thought I'd nominate the Don Valley as one of the most iconic parts of Toronto. (High Park gets a vote from the west-enders, I'm sure.) The valley, trees, bike path, Brickworks, Viaduct, DVP, train tracks... for me, the fact that the Don Valley is all of those things is a big part of my Toronto. Love the Don!

 

[Hipster Duck]

What a wonderful, beautiful and prosperous area San Francisco and the Bay area is. Relatively safe, innovative, creative and civic minded. And yet my impression of this city region (slightly larger than the GTA) is that despite being generally more wealthy than people here, they would kill to have 1/3 the dynamic construction, civic debate, city building, institutional development and cultural activity we are currently experiencing here.

I don't want to malign Toronto, but that's sort of an unfair assessment of the Bay Area. For starters, that city region is one of the most polycentric in North America. Oakland, San Jose and Berkeley are sub-centres within this region and, yet, they probably have more activity in them than all Ontario's cities except Toronto and Ottawa. Then, San Francisco itself (which only has 700,000 - or 10% of the regional population) is quite spread apart in terms of activity areas. For example, the Castro/Mission/Duboce Traingle are quite removed from downtown/Chinatown/North Beach or the Haight, the Marina district...to say nothing of far-flung neighborhoods like the Sunset, which are pretty vibrant. Toronto's activity is fairly concentrated to the area south of Bloor/Danforth between High Park and Victoria Park, with Yonge street and bits and pieces of St. Clair being sort of the odd bits out. There certainly isn't the regional Polycentrism of the Bay in the GTA, unless you count manufactured edge city downtowns like MCC, VCC or Pickering, or tiny village main streets like Streetsville or Markham.

That said, Toronto does have the most intense retail streets in North America outside of Manhattan. I just got back from Chicago, which outside of a one mile strip of Milwaukee Ave. in Wicker Park and a handful of blocks in Lincoln Park, had dead, vapid commercial streets. Despite the vast amounts of really tasteful residential infill that has been built in that city in the past 10 years (more, anecdotally, than Toronto) it still felt a bit like Los Angeles with New York's buildings. By contrast, Queen street is 14 km of vibrancy, with very few dead spaces. It seems much easier to fill Toronto's thin, narrow retail strips, and we have a culture that seems to make it conducive to open a business with very little upfront investment. I'm not sure whether that has to do with rents, the kind of spaces that are available or our DIY home reno culture, where you can just find some plywood and a couple of nails and go nuts over a weekend to build a business that people will visit. This sort of speaks to the "3rd world culture" thing I mentioned a few posts back that people took completely out of context.

So, Toronto's urban vibrancy is quite intense but it is also very concentrated and centralized. American cities are more spread apart, but you can (in older cities) find urban pockets relatively well spread across the region. There might be 3 million people living between the Humber River and Hamilton Harbour, but there are maybe 6 or 7 village-sized, pre-war, genuinely urban neighbourhoods in this gigantic area.

 

[Second_in_pie]

^^ I wouldn't say that all American cities are more spread apart than Toronto. San Francisco and New York (possibly Boston,) are really the only big US cities that have "decentralized vibrancy." New York's excuse is that it's incredibly dense and has the 2nd highest population of any North American city, while the Bay Area was really built on 3 different cities, which helped a lot to spread everything around. I actually think that Toronto/The GTA/The Golden Horseshoe has a really decentralized vibrancy, and is in the top 5 for Cities in North America.

Of course, we have a lot of culture and retail around the downtown area, but there's also a lot of vibrancy and cultural hotspots outside downtown, even outside Toronto. And as you said, there's these new mini/full sized downtowns of NYCC, MCC, VCC, STC, RHC, MTC, that are going to decentralize that retail and "vibrancy" even further away from the core.

 

[Hipster Duck]

^I would say Toronto is actually in the bottom 5. Of the sub-centres you mention, only NYCC is really vibrant. The others are either former villages that have been engulfed in sprawl, or manufactured centres like MCC, SCC or Pickering that are basically higher density office parks and disparate condo developments surrounding a mall.

By contrast, cities like Vancouver and the American cities I mention are actually polycentric, with mixed-use traditional downtowns away from the major centre. For example, Seattle has Tacoma, Everett and Bellevue; Chicago has Evanston, Oak Park and Joliet; cities like Detroit and Phoenix have subcentres that are probably more important, culturally and civically, than the central city downtown like Royal Oak and Ferndale in the case of Detroit, and Tempe and Scottsdale in the case of Phoenix. Vancouver is really the only Canadian example of a major metropolitan area with real polycentrism, with North Van, Richmond, and New West having real urban cores. Really, the only cities in the immediate GTA that have what I would call a real, functioning city core are Barrie, Hamilton, Oakville, Oshawa and, maybe, Brampton. You have to put these in context, however: Barrie is a 100 km away and Brampton has a population of 450,000 people.

 

[adma]

But at the same time, one might argue that if Toronto's monocentric, it's a distinctively un-cubbyholed monocentricity that extends far and wide compared to a lot of those American locales--a far cry from, say the Chicago situation where just a short stroll from the Loop takes you into no-go zone. (Thus, a lot of that American polycentricity is born more out of unfortunate urban circumstance than anything...)

 

[golodhendil]

I don't want to malign Toronto, but that's sort of an unfair assessment of the Bay Area. For starters, that city region is one of the most polycentric in North America. Oakland, San Jose and Berkeley are sub-centres within this region and, yet, they probably have more activity in them than all Ontario's cities except Toronto and Ottawa. Then, San Francisco itself (which only has 700,000 - or 10% of the regional population) is quite spread apart in terms of activity areas. For example, the Castro/Mission/Duboce Traingle are quite removed from downtown/Chinatown/North Beach or the Haight, the Marina district...to say nothing of far-flung neighborhoods like the Sunset, which are pretty vibrant. Toronto's activity is fairly concentrated to the area south of Bloor/Danforth between High Park and Victoria Park, with Yonge street and bits and pieces of St. Clair being sort of the odd bits out. There certainly isn't the regional Polycentrism of the Bay in the GTA, unless you count manufactured edge city downtowns like MCC, VCC or Pickering, or tiny village main streets like Streetsville or Markham.

...

So, Toronto's urban vibrancy is quite intense but it is also very concentrated and centralized. American cities are more spread apart, but you can (in older cities) find urban pockets relatively well spread across the region. There might be 3 million people living between the Humber River and Hamilton Harbour, but there are maybe 6 or 7 village-sized, pre-war, genuinely urban neighbourhoods in this gigantic area.

^I would say Toronto is actually in the bottom 5. Of the sub-centres you mention, only NYCC is really vibrant. The others are either former villages that have been engulfed in sprawl, or manufactured centres like MCC, SCC or Pickering that are basically higher density office parks and disparate condo developments surrounding a mall.

By contrast, cities like Vancouver and the American cities I mention are actually polycentric, with mixed-use traditional downtowns away from the major centre. For example, Seattle has Tacoma, Everett and Bellevue; Chicago has Evanston, Oak Park and Joliet; cities like Detroit and Phoenix have subcentres that are probably more important, culturally and civically, than the central city downtown like Royal Oak and Ferndale in the case of Detroit, and Tempe and Scottsdale in the case of Phoenix. Vancouver is really the only Canadian example of a major metropolitan area with real polycentrism, with North Van, Richmond, and New West having real urban cores. Really, the only cities in the immediate GTA that have what I would call a real, functioning city core are Barrie, Hamilton, Oakville, Oshawa and, maybe, Brampton. You have to put these in context, however: Barrie is a 100 km away and Brampton has a population of 450,000 people.

But the area bound by Mission - Sunset - north coast of the Peninsula (~60 squared km) is about the same as the area bound by BD - Vic Park - High Park - lakeshore (~45) plus the area bound by Bloor - Keele - St. Clair - Mt. Pleasant (~15). So the activity of Toronto is "concentrated" into an area where activity in SF is "spread out"? As for Vancouver's case, I would hardly consider Richmond city centre to be a better urban core than what we have / will be having in Markham or Vaughn.

And while their urban vibrancy may or may not be comparable to ours, Tacoma and Everett are 45 km each from Seattle in opposite directions, Joliet is 55 km from Chicago, and San Jose is 70 km from SF; surely it would not be unreasonable to include, other than the many urban centres you have already listed in the "Toronto area", other urban centres like Guelph (70 km), Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge (85 km) and Brantford (85 km) (Barrie is also only 85 km, not 100 km, from Toronto). And I'm not sure what your point is about Brampton's population. If you consider it too large to be counted as one of Toronto's centres, San Jose has a pop close to 1 million, Tacoma's pop is 1/3 that of Seattle, and yet both can be considered one of their centres? If it's too small, surely Evanston and Joliet's pop are even smaller.

 

[Hipster Duck]

Look, before this gets into a pissing match over something really inconsequential, I have to say that there is no subcentre in the GTA that really compares in activity and vibrancy to any number of US metropolitan subcentres like Tempe, Royal Oak, Pasadena, Berkeley, Boulder, Evanston...to say nothing of cities like New Haven or Oakland. I mean, people from Ajax won't drive into downtown Oshawa for a great night out the way that people from Southfield, MI might drive into Royal Oak, or people from Azusa, CA might drive into downtown Pasadena.

As adma said, and as I already alluded to in the part of my quote you deliberately cut out, this means that downtown Toronto and the urban neighbourhoods that immediately surround it are much more vibrant and intense than what one would find in practically any American city outside New York, so this isn't meant to slag Toronto in any way.

 

[golodhendil]

Don't get me wrong, I have no intention of turning this into a vicious debate either, nor am I really trying to defend Toronto (there are very good reasons why San Jose has more activity than Hamilton, and there are serious pros and cons to either model). I was just trying to get a few facts straight, and the part I "deliberately cut out" was because I have no disagreement with it so there's no reason to have it stuff up the post.

As for driving to a place to have a good time, perhaps not Oshawa, but I sure know a lot of people who would drive into Scarborough or Richmond Hill or Markham, places that might otherwise be considered antitheses of urbanity, for wonderful nights out. Does that make or not make them "centres of activity"? Must a vibrant centre of activity necessarily be a walkable "urban" neighbourhood?

 

[Hipster Duck]

The urban geographer Joel Garreau once asked whether shopping malls or suburban office parks were downtown replacements, because many of them contain as many jobs or retail as the downtown core and, in many cases, even more. My answer to that is 'no'. A downtown is more than just a concentration of jobs and shops - it's also a public space where people have the right to assemble and conduct themselves in a relatively free manner. I'm sure you can eat very well and go to a great karaoke bar inside Times Square on Hwy 7 (in fact, I know that you can), but you cannot conceivably go to these malls after hours and wander freely around like you can on a city street. The fact that a mall is also owned by a single property manager and the stores that go into it are at the owner's discretion is also a huge difference, as is the fact that a street musician or any other spontaneous public act would have to clear managerial approval first, and that people may be thrown out or disallowed by private security guards, as opposed to a public police force.

Now, certainly many downtown properties are owned by a single, large property owner, but the difference is that they don't (unless something is really wrong) have a monopoly on all of the properties in a downtown, nor do they have any jurisdiction over what kind of conduct to allow on city streets.

The walkability and the relatively seamless integration of commercial, residential and public spaces into a unified whole is certainly another plus that you can't really get in the suburbs.

 

[TrickyRicky]

I actually largely agree with Hipster Duck's assessment of the Bay Area comment I made. I had the chance to visit and spend some brief amount of time in surrounding areas including Marin County, Berkley and Oakland. The positive aspect of the Bay Area is there seems to be a "there" there. What I mean is a real reason to go to the various regional centres. I think this promotes a healthy and diverse living standard throughout the region. To my surprise however, and perhaps this is one of the benefits of centralization, the sum of all the parts did not SEEM to support the same level of activity as we enjoy here in the GTA, a region of slightly lesser size. So, say for example for culture and entertainment younger people in the Bay Area may go to San Francisco to bars, Lower cost Oakland for arty and cutting edge music, San Jose for Mega Dance-clubs and Berkley for inexpensive top notch restaurants. But in the end check out a what's on magazine for all these centres and compare it to something like NOW magazine here in Toronto. The sum of the content in the Bay Area is surprisingly less deep and extensive.

As for development and growth, well the Bay area is certainly growing at a healthly clip. However, urban intensification and infrastructure development are practically non-existent on the ground. Basically they are just sprawling inland and over the mountains towards the Coastal communities to the North and South. Mind you many of the existing urban and near urban and hillside residential areas are gorgeous and generally better maintained than our own.

 

[Long Island Mike]

My thoughts on what makes Toronto...TORONTO!

Everyone: This is my 1000th(!!!) post since I joined Urban Toronto. I found this site from a link from the Transit Toronto web page after asking some TTC questions and getting no reply whatsoever. I decided to answer the question on why I really like Toronto...

It began in the 70s in my teens when I became interested in North American rail transit systems. I sent a letter addressed to the "Toronto Metro" that got delivered to the Government of Metropolitan Toronto who sent me a detailed map plus the address of the TTC. The TTC later sent me a detailed package on the TTC in the 70s era also.

When I started to travel by train in the late 70s I planned a Toronto trip in the mid-Summer of 1979 traveling from NYC to Buffalo and then Toronto. I am very interested in NY State geography so this was the way to go for me.

I enjoyed Toronto-as described by a person I dealt with back in those days
"Just Like NYC Without the crime" seeing that is was an orderly,clean and relatively safe Canadian city-different from the "urban jungles" many US cities were becoming. I enjoyed it so much I returned again later that year,twice more in 1980,a long trip in 1981 and averaged one week per year visiting until the Spring of 1990.

I was at the prime age listening to rock stations like Q107,CHUM FM and CFNY for its modern rock format-similar to Long Island's WLIR-FM. I found out about local bands like Saga and Goddo along with Toronto's good 80s rock scene. I spent time searching at Sam's and A&A for Canadian Rock albums I could not get back on LI...

I wanted to know Toronto for more then just the spots that tourists know-I wanted to explore and get to know things about its infrastructure-especially its good transit system-and understand somewhat the City's Neighborhoods.
A good example was Toronto's Metro Government and the Six Boroughs of the City - Toronto,Etobicoke,York,East York,North York and Scarborough.
The Unification of 1998 is still an interesting subject on how the current City of Toronto was formed from the Metro Government.

Over time I kept track of Toronto when I could - the Internet and good web sites like this one made it very easy in recent years. I remember after I first joined that I was accidentally bumping up numerous picture threads after posting comments - the City and World Photos section are arguably the best features of the urban Toronto site!

I kept coming back after reading the many topics and opinions noting the good dialogue posted and it was always interesting reading points of view from a Canadian standpoint-which always interested me anyway.

I will remember Toronto best as "The People City" as it was described in the 80s being the second largest Great Lakes city after Chicago.

These are some thoughts and observations from Long Island Mike
September 23,2009 - Post #1000-over and out!

 

[golodhendil]

The 03/09 GFCI already took into account the brunt of the financial crisis in late 2008 - hence the significant drop in ranking for places like Tokyo and Sydney. But other than the obvious fact that London and NY are still the two hubs, none of the major Swiss banks went under, and while HK and Singapore's economies were affected they were relatively unscathed compared to the West, so the top 6 positions are already stable and accounted for. The past half a year has not seen significant worsening of conditions in these places, so it's doubtful that Toronto would have any chance of climbing to the top 5, even if we do surpass cities like Boston and Frankfurt. The 09/09 GFCI should be coming out in a couple of weeks, so we will see who's right.

Not particularly trying to dredge up an old debate, but GFCI 6 from September has been out for a while. Toronto dropped to 13th (from 11th in GFCI 5) despite an increased score, largely owing to the rebound of Tokyo and dramatic increase in the ratings of Shenzhen and Shanghai. However Toronto did surpass Boston to become the third financial centre of North America.

http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/4A05FE0F-4CD1-46EB-ADB5-84672ACC05FE/0/GFCI6.pdf