|
|
Learning from Toronto
The problem of affordability |
Dual identity |
Can a city be a poem?
When SPUR came to town
What outsiders taught an insider about his own city
Shawn Micallef is a writer living in Toronto. He is also associate editor at Spacing Magazine (spacing.ca), a publication about all things public space, and co-founder of [murmur], the location-based mobile phone documentary project (murmurtoronto.ca).
This article appears in the August 2008 issue of Urbanist
When the SPUR city trip rolls into town, the
San Franciscans who participate get a crash course
on everything they ever wanted to know about
a particular city, and then some. It’s sort of like
compressing a semester’s worth of learning — and
some of the extracurricular socializing that comes
with it — into four days. Seeing a new city from
the perspectives of both a tourist and an insider,
with the aid of a local guide, is an urbanist’s dream.
However, that local guide might get as much out of
it as do the trippers.
When I was asked if I could, and wanted to
be, the local contact person on the Toronto trip,
it sounded like a good fit. A large chunk of what I
do — writing, making a city-centric magazine and
various art projects — involves the City of Toronto
somehow. Hooking up SPUR with the people in
charge, from the mayor on down, seemed easy
enough. Toronto’s city hall is a fairly accessible
place and our various projects here generally
have not run up against any notable political or
bureaucratic walls in the past, so we managed to
book the folks we needed to book with relative ease.
I’m used to hearing quite a few of the politicians
and top bureaucrats speak, but it’s usually around
an issue or a particular project. Most amazing about
tagging along with SPUR on this trip was getting
to see these folks give “the whole story” of their
slice of Toronto. It is one of those things we might
assume we know, but have never actually heard
it articulated wholly. It’s useful to have occasion
to back up sometimes and revisit the city from the
top down, rather than just at the usual granular
level. For instance, we are generally supportive
of our current mayor, David Miller, and think that
he’s good for the city, but I hadn't realized how
personable an ambassador he is for Toronto. So too
were some of the councilors and civil servants we
met. It’s a side we as Torontonians don’t get to see.
None of this kind of activity will get votes or address
a constituent’s specific grievance, but this unsung
work goes on all the time, just outside of our view.
Of course, there were some people SPUR met
who presented the straight party line for whatever
agency they represented, or perhaps weren’t as
frank as others were and gave a rather Pollyannaish
view of Toronto. There were times I wanted to speak up and push them off message a bit, or at
least audibly groan in that particularly Canadian
passive-aggressive way, but did not. However, as
SPUR met folks outside of government and in the
media, those speakers presented alternative views
that contradicted the official versions. In my mind,
the trip became a journey through the editorial and
op-ed page of some imaginary Toronto journal, and
it was up to SPUR members themselves to sort
through all the information and opinions to decide
who was on the right track.
Apart from policy and politics, experiencing
the streets and sidewalks of Toronto with SPUR
was by far the most valuable part of the trip. As a
writer — and Toronto is often what I write about
— I try very hard to imagine I’m seeing the city for
the first time, pushing out whatever I know about
that street, forgetting personal memories and bits
I’ve previously researched about various locations,
in order to look at the city through new eyes. It’s
a nearly impossible task, and likely could never
replicate the dream-like feeling that walking around
a city for the first few hours affords, but overhearing
the SPUR chatter came as close as I have ever
come to capturing this feeling in Toronto. I started
taking a second look at things I hadn’t noticed
since I first moved here, like where fire hydrants
are located, how street signs are placed and the
way restaurants operate. I realized that we in
Toronto take for granted a lot of things, such as how
continuous our active and crowded streetscapes
are, even late into the night, and that residential
neighborhoods lie just off the main streets, and that
there might be a condo tower or two thrown into
the mix.
From a wider perspective, I also started to
appreciate some of the new landmark buildings we
have here. Torontonians are notorious for having
an inferiority complex, thinking good stuff only
gets built elsewhere. It could be a result of Toronto
being, for so many years, simply a provincial
colonial town, a sort of dumpy field office for
London. Perhaps more recently this complex is
connected with the Canadian relationship to the
United States (a traditional, but friendly, Davidand-
Goliath tale). I overheard surprise and awe
that buildings such as the Royal Ontario Museum “crystal” by Daniel Liebskind brought a heritage
building and contemporary architecture together in
such an audacious way, or that Will Alsop’s Ontario
College of Art and Design building — sitting on
colorful stilts high above the city streets — was
allowed to happen at all, and as quickly as it did.
We tend to think we are mired in regulation here,
but perhaps Toronto is freer than we think.
As far as showing SPUR members around the
city, I thought about how to show off the city. My
first concern was the journey to the city center from
the airport. Toronto is not a particularly beautiful
city, certainly not at first glance, but the city seen
on the ride to and from the airport is truly an
aesthetically horrendous experience — though
it’s rare for any city to have a nice ride to the
airport. In drawing up a “where to go, where to
eat” document, I began to think about directions
of travel, and I had an urge to micromanage walks
so that places such as Dundas Square or City Hall
were approached from exactly the right angle, so
as to experience exactly the right kind of Toronto
moment. I also made efforts (and maybe by doing
so I revealed a bit of that inferiority complex) to
link Toronto locations with those in San Francisco:
“This place is like Alamo Square,” or, “It’s kind of
like North Beach.” A lot of that was unnecessary.
By virtue of being members in an organization such
as SPUR, the Toronto trippers were an inherently
curious bunch and discovered more of Toronto’s
good and bad on their own than I ever could have
shown them.
One area that SPUR folks observed and
commented on, in the most polite way, got to
the heart of the Torontonian — and Canadian
— identity: our multiculturalism. Whether it
manifests itself as much as we think it does, it’s
a fundamental and mainstream belief that we are
diverse city and nation state. Toronto’s motto is,
in fact, “Diversity is our strength.” Because we are
too close to the matter, or perhaps too polite, we
need outsiders to point out when the reality is not
meeting our ideal vision of who we are. Why is it
that in a city where more than half of all residents
are newcomers, the City Council still looks rather
white? Is our great and mythic multiculturalism
celebrated by most people only because it simply
means a greater variety of restaurants to choose
from on a Saturday night? These are questions we
are only beginning to address, and the sharp-eyed
SPUR members reminded me that we should
address them more often.
|
|
