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What will put Toronto on radar?
Jul. 11, 2006. 06:07 AM
CHRISTOPHER HUME
Nice place to live, but you wouldn't want to visit.
That's how many people — non-Torontonians — increasingly feel about this city. There's nothing wrong with being a good place to live, of course, it's just that Torontonians themselves want more. They want to be loved, admired, envied, or at least recognized, certainly not always ignored.
Even Montreal, with its separatists, its arrogance and language police, gets world attention. So what's wrong with Toronto, poor old Toronto, the city that never quite shows up on the radar?
Apparently, diversity, our strength, or so we're endlessly told, just isn't enough. Indeed, multiculturalism has been done to death. As the recent round of soccer madness made clear, Toronto is really a city of distinct ethnicities as much as neighbourhoods; it seems every nationality is its own enclave. Yet despite this sudden interest in the "beautiful game," Canada was once again a spectator, not a participant.
Though it's undoubtedly true that we're better at tolerance than many European and American cities, that still doesn't mean you'd want to be a young male Muslim or black man in Toronto.
Besides, most major world cities are every bit as multiracial as Toronto, if not as tolerant. But when was the last time anyone visited, say, New York or London, to enjoy their diversity?
We go to those cities for the culture, the architecture, the history, the entertainment, the beauty, the mythology, to see for ourselves the places that we have read about, seen in movies and heard about for as long as we can remember.
Now our city fathers (and mothers) want to pursue a world fair, thinking that it will finally put us on the world map. The press has obligingly turned itself into a cheering section and Dudley Do-Right, aka Toronto mayor David Miller, flew to Paris to make his pitch. (Mind you, he only spent 27 hours in the City of Light lest those of us stuck back in Toronto think he had gone to enjoy himself.)
Hate to tell you, Your Worship, but it's going to take a lot more than Expo 2015 to make Toronto sexy in the eyes of the world. Besides, we already have plenty of events, many of which attract millions; Gay Pride, the Toronto International Film Festival, Caribana (or whatever it's called), all of these are wildly successful. They are not the problem.
The problem is the city itself, its architecture, its cultural life, street life, its public realm, and so on. Tourists wander around Paris gawking at the countless eight-storey apartment buildings that create one of the most exquisite cityscapes in the world. The tree-lined streets leave North Americans wide-eyed.
By contrast, in Toronto, where we have built literally hundreds of residential buildings during the last 10 to 15 years — they're called condos — the result is widely viewed as a failure, definitely not something people would travel here to see.
They add up to little beyond themselves; they create no critical mass, except on Queen's Quay where they block the city's one great natural asset, the waterfront. With the odd exception, they were not designed to be part of anything larger.
Yet it is exactly this sort of thing that constitutes the stuff of the city, especially for visitors. What they see is what they get; and what they see in Toronto is less than overwhelming. Even the landmarks — the CN Tower, Casa Loma — are disappointing up close. The latter has grown so tired it could put a tourist to sleep at 20 paces. The success of Vancouver, which has also been condo-ized in recent years, is another instance of how the most prosaic building types can make a city compelling.
What is a city, after all, but an inhabitable infrastructure? Torontonians must stop looking for the quick fix — the Olympics, the World's Fair, whatever. They are not the answer. In fact, given the way we approach development, they would likely lead to even more damage.
It's time to think small, one building, one park, one garden, one schoolyard, one corner, one streetscape at a time, not to drown the city in what Jane Jacobs termed "cataclysmic money." That we don't need.
It would be better to start with something simple. Say, planting trees on our main streets and actually looking after them so they grow to more than the sad stunted things they are.
That would be something worth visiting.
I could not agree with him more. I just wish he would stop saying the myth that a bunch of condos block our waterfront (from where? if the condos were not there, the Gardiner would block the waterfront, and if not the Gardiner, Union Station and all the buildings on the south side of Front St. etc.).
Jul. 11, 2006. 06:07 AM
CHRISTOPHER HUME
Nice place to live, but you wouldn't want to visit.
That's how many people — non-Torontonians — increasingly feel about this city. There's nothing wrong with being a good place to live, of course, it's just that Torontonians themselves want more. They want to be loved, admired, envied, or at least recognized, certainly not always ignored.
Even Montreal, with its separatists, its arrogance and language police, gets world attention. So what's wrong with Toronto, poor old Toronto, the city that never quite shows up on the radar?
Apparently, diversity, our strength, or so we're endlessly told, just isn't enough. Indeed, multiculturalism has been done to death. As the recent round of soccer madness made clear, Toronto is really a city of distinct ethnicities as much as neighbourhoods; it seems every nationality is its own enclave. Yet despite this sudden interest in the "beautiful game," Canada was once again a spectator, not a participant.
Though it's undoubtedly true that we're better at tolerance than many European and American cities, that still doesn't mean you'd want to be a young male Muslim or black man in Toronto.
Besides, most major world cities are every bit as multiracial as Toronto, if not as tolerant. But when was the last time anyone visited, say, New York or London, to enjoy their diversity?
We go to those cities for the culture, the architecture, the history, the entertainment, the beauty, the mythology, to see for ourselves the places that we have read about, seen in movies and heard about for as long as we can remember.
Now our city fathers (and mothers) want to pursue a world fair, thinking that it will finally put us on the world map. The press has obligingly turned itself into a cheering section and Dudley Do-Right, aka Toronto mayor David Miller, flew to Paris to make his pitch. (Mind you, he only spent 27 hours in the City of Light lest those of us stuck back in Toronto think he had gone to enjoy himself.)
Hate to tell you, Your Worship, but it's going to take a lot more than Expo 2015 to make Toronto sexy in the eyes of the world. Besides, we already have plenty of events, many of which attract millions; Gay Pride, the Toronto International Film Festival, Caribana (or whatever it's called), all of these are wildly successful. They are not the problem.
The problem is the city itself, its architecture, its cultural life, street life, its public realm, and so on. Tourists wander around Paris gawking at the countless eight-storey apartment buildings that create one of the most exquisite cityscapes in the world. The tree-lined streets leave North Americans wide-eyed.
By contrast, in Toronto, where we have built literally hundreds of residential buildings during the last 10 to 15 years — they're called condos — the result is widely viewed as a failure, definitely not something people would travel here to see.
They add up to little beyond themselves; they create no critical mass, except on Queen's Quay where they block the city's one great natural asset, the waterfront. With the odd exception, they were not designed to be part of anything larger.
Yet it is exactly this sort of thing that constitutes the stuff of the city, especially for visitors. What they see is what they get; and what they see in Toronto is less than overwhelming. Even the landmarks — the CN Tower, Casa Loma — are disappointing up close. The latter has grown so tired it could put a tourist to sleep at 20 paces. The success of Vancouver, which has also been condo-ized in recent years, is another instance of how the most prosaic building types can make a city compelling.
What is a city, after all, but an inhabitable infrastructure? Torontonians must stop looking for the quick fix — the Olympics, the World's Fair, whatever. They are not the answer. In fact, given the way we approach development, they would likely lead to even more damage.
It's time to think small, one building, one park, one garden, one schoolyard, one corner, one streetscape at a time, not to drown the city in what Jane Jacobs termed "cataclysmic money." That we don't need.
It would be better to start with something simple. Say, planting trees on our main streets and actually looking after them so they grow to more than the sad stunted things they are.
That would be something worth visiting.
I could not agree with him more. I just wish he would stop saying the myth that a bunch of condos block our waterfront (from where? if the condos were not there, the Gardiner would block the waterfront, and if not the Gardiner, Union Station and all the buildings on the south side of Front St. etc.).