This crystallized for me when I started thinking about one of Toronto’s grandest traditions, the Canadian National Exhibition – an annual monument to the vibrancy of impermanence. Though many of us immediately conjure rickety roller coasters when we picture the fair, the Ex, in fact, used to be a place where visions of the future were unveiled. ‘We’ve lost a bit of it, but if you think of what these great annual fairs were originally, they were really an opportunity for people to see what was new and exciting,’ says Ken Greenberg, former director of urban design and architecture for the City of Toronto, and author of Walking Home: The Life and Lessons of a City Builder. In the pre-internet age, the CNE was largely a technological and industrial innovation fair – the place where many people caught their first glimpses of televisions, washing machines and automobiles. ‘It was a chance to taste, touch and feel all these things,’ Greenberg says.
While the exhibits at the CNE are no longer especially forward-looking, the layout of the fair remains so. If tents and trailers lined up in close proximity can turn the vacant parking lots and roadways of Exhibition Place into a bustling streetscape, perhaps something similar is possible in the vast parking lots that dominate the suburbs, or the forsaken courtyards of highrise-tower housing projects. We tend to think of neighbourhood revitalization as a decades-long infrastructure project, but the CNE is revitalized and ‘de-vitalized’ every year in a matter of days.
Greenberg believes the transitory nature of the Ex may be a big part of the lesson it teaches. ‘We’re so bound by rules and regulations around making changes in cities,’ he says. ‘Zoning, official plans, environmental impact studies, environmental assessments – every time you want to change something, it takes years of study. We’re incredibly risk-averse; we’ve basically created these barriers that make it very hard to experiment. But cities are really about experimentation.’
Indeed, though the CNE itself is a centrally controlled and planned environment – the Exhibition Place board approves vendors and manages the layout of the grounds – it has evolved through more than a century of experience and experimentation. It’s a 134-year-old testing process; any element added or subtracted will be there only for a matter of weeks, and can easily be ditched the following year.
Greenberg points out that many of the celebrated changes to New York City over the past decade – the large-scale deployment of bike lanes, the pedestrianization of Times Square – have been implemented in a quick, provisional manner. Erect some temporary barriers, paint the pavement, drag out some patio furniture, and see how it works.
It’s an approach Greenberg has seen first-hand, turning many downtown-Mississauga parking lots into temporary farmers’ markets. ‘When people are looking at long-range transformations that can sometimes take decades, you want to show progress and give people a quick taste of what might come,’ he says. ‘This is a very valuable concept that has much broader applicability than just a fair.’
Local independent musician David Buchbinder of the Juno Award–nominated Flying Bulgar Klezmer Band has been working on a similar premise with his Diasporic Genius project. He and his colleagues envision the creation of permanent ‘21st Century Village Squares’ across Toronto, built and used by local residents for food, craft and other marketplaces, as well as arts and cultural performances. The group has been establishing a pilot project centred on arts events and community storytelling in Thorncliffe Park, a neighbourhood made up of concrete towers surrounded by parking lots and open courtyards. It kicked off with the Festival of Story during a Neighbours Night Out street festival in the summer of 2012. The idea behind Diasporic Genius is to create a village bazaar–style template that can be adjusted according to the desires, needs and cultural interests of different communities. The photos of the pilot project events and the examples of its vision on the Diasporic Genius website look a lot like the CNE, filled with tents, stalls and marching bands amid the crowds.
‘The thing about the Ex is that it [shows how quickly change can occur], but does so in a narrow, first-level kind of way,’ says Buchbinder. ‘It’s not embedded in the community. There are a number of ways you can make an incredible transformation in a space overnight. What we’re trying to do is make sure they’re part of some ongoing development in the community, that they have roots and resonance.’
Roger Keil, director of the City Institute at York University and head of the Global Suburbanisms project that studies how suburban areas are built, used and adapted to new uses, points out that when you join the involvement of local residents to the idea of experimentation, it can help point the way to revitalization that is more community-driven and lasting. In tower neighbourhoods, for example, ‘I’d look one step further and look for more semi-permanence, structures that can be flexible and modular, where the way the space is configured and used can be changed, to allow rapid turnover as neighbourhoods evolve.’ Less transitory than a shantytown, he says, and more so than a city.
Imagine the possibilities if such a zest for experimentation took hold in the city. The various perspectives in the transit debate might be informed, for example, by the short-term implementation of bus rapid transit – buses running frequently in dedicated lanes on the road, mimicking the behaviour of an LRT – for a limited period on the planned Sheppard and Finch LRT routes.
A proposal that Greenberg and councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam created for wider sidewalks and more pedestrian activity on Yonge Street was successfully tested during a month-long street festival in September 2012. Cars were restricted to two lanes between Gerrard and Queen (instead of the standard four), and patios, benches and street artists occupied the new, larger pedestrian zone. Such temporary projects, actually executed in the real world, have three virtues, Greenberg says. First, they allow us to study the effects of a change in a way no model can simulate. Second, pilot projects help overcome bureaucratic conservativism. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it takes possibilities out of the world of artist’s mock-ups and city plans, and puts them on the street, where citizens can experience them first-hand.
The CNE is gritty, ramshackle and cacophonous – there are the blinking lights of the Ferris wheel, the wailing sirens, that carny shouting, ‘Do you wanna go faster?’ and the overwhelming rural stench of the Horse Palace. Although it’s a far cry from any beautiful artist’s rendering, the CNE is vibrant and fun and its energy is derived from the components it brings together in close proximity, giving people something delightful to participate in. And that’s exactly what many of our most interesting neighbourhoods accomplish. No architect could have conceived of Kensington Market on a computer desktop. In neighbourhoods like that, the elements that create urban energy have evolved over generations. The annual transformation of the Ex suggests that with the right attitude toward impermanence and experimentation, we might be able to produce, in a similarly short period of time, that same kind of vibrancy in our desolate paved prairies.
And maybe that would be a more fitting approach for Toronto: instead of a single, unifying grand visionary plan, we could launch a thousand different neighbourhood-level projects (perhaps with funding directly controlled by neighbourhood councils!), each geared to the needs and tastes of the communities they serve. Successes could be shared and adopted by other neighbourhoods, failures would be recognized quickly and wouldn’t devour much time or money. Acting separately in different ways, the various parts of Toronto could make themselves stronger and, over time, make each other even stronger.
3
I keep talking about the many processes we might implement to make our democracy work better, even as the democratic process the city faces at the apparent conclusion of the Rob Ford story is a very specific one: selecting a mayor. If Ford loses his appeal and vacates his seat, the task will be at hand just as you read this book. If he somehow wins his appeal, we still face that same decision in an election that will kick off within a year. In either case, the candidates are already sizing up each other and their own chances. Perhap
s some of the ways to build communities and community engagement I’ve been discussing in this chapter will form part of our next leader’s platform. But what kind of person should that leader be?
I’m afraid I have no specific endorsement to offer from among the likely (and unlikely) candidates whose names have been tossed around. Ford has emphatically demonstrated he’s not up to the job, and that he should be defeated when (or if) he stands for re-election. There are lots of reasons, including late 2012 polls that show him with unfavourable ratings around 60 per cent or higher (even 34 per cent of those who voted for him in 2010 are not planning to vote for him again), to think voters have gotten that message, too. But beyond that, and simply put, the city would be best served by a vigorous election campaign featuring a lot of strong candidates. Such a campaign would give us a chance to see how our next mayor would approach the job and what attitude and ideas the successful candidate would bring to it. And those factors are perhaps more important than the particulars of any candidate’s biography.
Obviously, the experience of the Rob Ford clown show has made clear a few traits are desperately needed in our next mayor: someone intelligent and articulate enough to understand policy discussions and meaningfully participate in them; someone composed enough in his or her personal life to avoid providing a constant distraction from city business; someone with the political skills to respectfully, if vigorously, lead a debate among city councillors and find a consensus or make smart compromises to push forward an agenda. And, please, someone who won’t try to reverse all the decisions of the recent past and instead will begin talking about how to move forward from where we are.
Ford’s supporters – especially his former supporters who lament his personal failings – talk a lot about ‘fiscal responsibility,’ and clearly a big part of his appeal is the belief that we need to spend within our means. This is a fine message, and as far as cutting perks like staff parties go, it maybe bore emphasizing for symbolic reasons at the very least. But the emphasis on cutting waste and inefficiency is actually shared across the political spectrum. David Miller and Shelley Carroll’s final budget in 2010 cut about as much spending by finding efficiencies as Rob Ford and Mike Del Grande’s proposed 2013 budget does.
Meanwhile, it’s important that the next mayor be aware that fiscal responsibility includes not just parsimony but reality: the need to pay for things, and to raise the revenue to pay for things, is unavoidable. Toronto cannot continue to enjoy a level of services that are the envy of the province while paying tax rates that are among the lowest. There are more ways to raise the money we need than just property taxes. Sales taxes, parking fees, vehicle registration taxes, road tolls and even income taxes are all possibilities that either the city or the province could implement, and all or most are used in other large North American cities. In some cases, such as building regional transit and roads across the GTA, region-wide sources of revenue (such as sales taxes or an income-tax levy) are appropriate – and necessary. Our next mayor cannot claim to be fiscally responsible if he or she is unwilling to face the fiscal responsibilities that come with funding the growth of a booming metropolis.
Joe Pennachetti, the city manager who presided over Ford’s scaremongering about the $775 million budget gap in 2011 and who presented the controversial KPMG report, told a University of Toronto audience in May 2012 that while the city is financially very healthy and has an admirably low debt level, there is virtually no more further money that can be cut from the budget without slashing services. He talked about the need for new revenue to fund transit and affordable housing, advocating a sales tax. A close look at the budget leads to this conclusion.
Yet raising taxes or government revenues is always a tough sell, here and everywhere. But making a tough sell is what we need the next mayor to do, on many fronts. Here’s the thing, though: salespeople, since I’ve introduced that metaphor, don’t just shy away from the cost of things, they also emphasize the benefits and value the customers get for their dollars. And when it comes to our taxes and what they can and do buy, we need a mayoral candidate who isn’t afraid to talk about the ways investments in infrastructure, public services and smart planning will directly benefit residents. When I visited the mayor of Markham, the cost-cutting conservative Frank Scarpitti, in the honest-to-goodness outer-suburban 905, he talked about how the affluent executives who live in Markham scramble to pay premium fares whenever new rapid bus services or express go train lines are added. He spoke proudly of how he had recently installed the province’s largest free public skating rink as part of a new walkable downtown business and residential core he and his council were building around city hall. He bragged of the urbanist infrastructure and cultural amenities he was investing in, because the current residents of Markham, and the residents he hoped to attract as the city grows, recognized the value of those things in making their lives better. It called to mind R. C. Harris’s glorification of public-works projects as grand civic monuments. In Toronto, we’ve recently – and not just since the dawn of Ford – come to talk about public services and infrastructure as necessities grudgingly administered to the poor as cheaply as possible, or worse, as part of the ‘gravy train.’ It’s about time we saw candidates start talking about the things our tax dollars buy us as necessary elements of the good life. Because they are.
Ford sold inner-suburban residents a lot of snake oil, and it would be disastrous for the city if another candidate just rebottled that serum with a fancier label. But that doesn’t mean the symptoms those snake-oil customers hoped he could treat aren’t real. There are a lot of people in this city, especially in the inner suburbs, who can see that some neighbourhoods are more equal than others when it comes to good public parks and easy access to transit, services, and the vibrant arts and cultural landscape of city life. The principles of urbanism – as laid out by Jane Jacobs but adapted by other thinkers since, and being studied and expanded in a suburban context by such people as Roger Keil – have a lot to offer in addressing those concerns. But those benefits have to be put forward, because they are not always obvious. As the saying goes, if Henry Ford had asked people what they wanted, they would have asked him to design a faster horse. He offered a better solution, a more expensive one in the short term, but one that was transformative in ways his potential customers could not have envisioned.
Good politicians can convince people, rather than just packaging their existing opinions into slogans. We need that kind of politician as mayor, someone to lead public opinion rather than catering to popular, ignorant prejudices. And not just when it comes to the budget and taxes.
Because if the next mayor is going to be successful in curing what ails Toronto, he or she will need to speak to – and for – the city as a whole, rather than lining up on one side of the downtown-suburban divide that has come to define our politics since amalgamation. There, stark differences that exist among Toronto’s neighbourhoods right now encourage people to think about how the city serves them differently, and lead them into trumped-up divides: car drivers versus cyclists, and so on. But the way to escape those same old, antagonistic arguments is to recognize the city’s diversity, and beat a path forward by encouraging strength in that diversity.
The various areas of the city can all be made better, and stronger, and the recipe for strength might be different in each place, depending on the situation they’re in right now. And so while some things, like mass transit, need to be handled on a city-wide or even region-wide level, the needs of each neighbourhood are not universal, and there’s no one-size-fits-all recipe for improving livability. For a mayoral candidate, uniting the city through its diversity doesn’t mean finding a way to convince residents in Kensington Market or Woburn or Yonge and Eglinton or Rexdale that they need to sublimate their needs to the greater good; it means talking with residents of each of those neighbourhoods about what specific things will make the city they live in stronger, and making those residents a part of making it happen.
On Jarvis Street, say, residents might say making it safer and easier for them to bike to work is a priority. On Brown’s Line, making it easier to bike to reliable transit could be more viable. Meanwhile, in Kingston-Galloway, more frequent and reliable bus service might make the most noticeable transportation difference quickly. In some neighbourhoods, smart mid-rise development could make housing more affordable and create a population density that can make possible a more vibrant retail area. In other neighbourhoods, introducing more commercial and industrial development might do the same thing. And so on. Ultimately, the most livable parts of the city need to become more affordable and the most affordable neighbourhoods more livable.
A lot of people studying the situation in Toronto have called for ways to make the mayor’s office stronger – either by granting more power to the office or through the introduction of a formal party system, making city council function more like a parliament where a mayor with a majority government would function the way the prime minister does. I can see the appeal of both of those suggestions – and I can see how, in theory, a more powerful office would likely attract a better calibre of candidate. But I also think those ideas are mistaken. The relative weakness of the mayor, and his or her need to build a majority issue by issue with city councillors from every part of Toronto, is a feature of our system, not a bug. It certainly makes getting things done more difficult, but our system also means that the diversity of the city is expressed in our politics, and that democracy is more than a once-every-four-years thing: it’s a constant process played out at every council and committee meeting.
Some Great Idea Page 18
