Toronto, civic pride in transition...

Recent articles in the Globe & Mail (Margaret Wente, May 29th) and the Toronto Star (editorial, May 28th) comment on the perception that “Toronto the good” has somehow now lost its civic leadership, hope and optimism to places like New York and Chicago and they speculate how this could have happened.

Forgotten is Ontario’s election in 1995 of Premier Mike Harris who claimed he was going to run Ontario “like a business.” For Toronto it did not help that he neither understood nor even liked the city. Eight years later Toronto’s civic pride had been thoroughly browbeaten, traded in for tax breaks and an anti public, anti city attitude. Over a decade later his legacy still haunts Toronto proving you “never get tax breaks for free.”

Public space, the greatest enabler of civic pride, was seen by Harris as costly and not terribly important. Public infrastructure built during this period was often ascetically unappealing and seemed to apologize for its public role. Schools and community centres were starved of funds so making predicable our youth gun violence of today. Provincial service downloading robbed the city of its energy as suddenly there was a huge bill to pay all for these new services and no time to think about the future.

Yet despite this my perception is that the city is now in a transition period that will eventually see its political leaders of today make way for the new, bold, visionary leaders of tomorrow. Ironically, our problems (gridlock, crime, poverty, immigration integration, education issues and so on) are now provincial and federal problems too. As Toronto’s prosperity goes so too does the province’s prosperity (and the same can be said of other cities and their respective provinces). It is only a matter of time before each level of government truly recognizes that their fates are so completely entwined with each other that policy coordination between them on the matter of cities is not just a “nice to do” its a rather a matter of competitive necessity.

The Harris’ legacy proves that what we strive for today, good, bad or indifferent, the consequences will be with us for a very long to come. I am optimistic and look forward to Toronto (and other Canadian cites) taking their rightful place in Canada’s future success.

Toronto's future vision...

In a previous post I said that eventually our low density 905 residential sprawl developments will have to be torn down and replaced with higher density housing (not to be confused with overcrowding conditions) because eventually service delivery to these neighborhoods would become so costly to both municipality and homeowner that re-development would likely be the only way out.

Not so drastic in his views, Architect Jack Diamond recently coined the damaging effects of Ontario’s urban sprawl as “our inconvenient truth” (The Globe, May 18-07) and backed it up with some painful truths too numerous to recite here. His article was interesting in that in offering solutions to urban sprawl he was really articulating elements of a vision of the sustainable city of the future (referring to such elements as transit, environment, economy, people, etc.).

Following the damage done to Toronto by former Ontario Premier Mike Harris and now years of chronic under funding by our senior governments, Toronto has suffered a loss of confidence and pride which frustrates our ability to come up with a quintessential vision or idea of the city that can really bring all the elements Mr. Diamond spoke of and more into “one” coherent set of ideas about the city of the future. We see this played out in our problems in finding an enduring brand for the city and our lack of civic pride.

It is this future vision of Toronto that really interests me and reflecting on this is what prompted me to create Torontoperspectives.com