Toronto: Justice Denied

At the same time, through no fault of her own, the neighbourhoods Jacobs celebrates as exemplary in The Death and Life of Great American Cities — the West Village in New York, the North End in Boston — have been annexed by “inauthentic” moneyed types as surely as our own King Street West, or, indeed, the Bloor Street Annex, where Jacobs spent the last years of her life. This is probably inevitable. The very things that make these good places to live make them targeted places for the super-rich to live. The West Village, for all its charm, might as well be a gated community when it comes to housing costs. Success breeds success, and then failure.

Behind these charges lurk some bigger questions. Is a vibrant city even available to all those who live there? Who benefits from, for example, Daniel Libeskind’s vaunted renovation of the Royal Ontario Museum? Who gets value from the art world makeovers of the Drake and Gladstone hotels? In one obvious sense, merely the few thousand (or even hundred) people who regularly visit and enjoy those amenities. In a subtler assessment of urban value, though, we all derive benefit from these changes in our urban fabric. The museum is a monument as well as a house of artifacts, there to feast the eyes. The culture centre is a destination we need not visit in order to like the fact that it is there in case we want to. Toronto has, in the two decades since I was on the city beat, finally become a city where, as E. B. White said of New York, one has the freedom not to attend.

In addition to these subtleties, which only partly mitigate objections to creative-class prosperity, the notion of an idea city is afflicted by a peculiar conceptual blind spot. Suppose we are an idea city. Suppose being so means everyone is somehow better off. We could go on chasing our own tails as a leading creative city, but where would that get us? Where, in all the so-called creativity, is our idea of the idea that matters most in an idea economy? Again I ask, where is our idea of justice?

Surprisingly, given otherwise good intentions, we don’t talk about this. We talk about growth, about wealth, about real estate. We talk about sprawl, that great destroyer of common civic feeling, that anti-glue. From a combination of policy and economics, 5 million of us are now flung, barely coherent, across nearly 6,000 square kilometres of territory. We talk about cultural diversity and its challenges, whipsawing from self-congratulation to recrimination. We talk, sometimes, about beauty, or the sore lack of it on almost every corner of this vast, disorganized place. We talk about activism now and then, our utopian ideals aired in jaunty collections of optimistic diy culture. We even talk about a subject close to justice, namely civility. This is, we might say, the symptomatic presentation of a deeper disease. How, despite a reputation for politeness, we are getting ruder and rougher by the day. How we never look at one another on the street. How we are all wrapped up in ourselves, 5 million small packages shunting along, back and forth, in the vast spiderweb of highways, subway lines, streetcar routes, and sidewalks. Symptom noticed. But what then?

Toronto is not a city in the modern sense of a unified whole. I suspect it never will be, and probably need not try. Toronto is, instead, a linked series of towns loosely held together by the gravitational force of its downtown core and the pinned-in-place effect of the surveillance rod we call the CN Tower. Like Canada in general, that triumph of communications technology in defiance of all nationalist sense, Toronto is postmodern in both its geography and its psychogeography. There is a physical centre, in the sense of a summing of vectors like a centre of gravity, but there is no normative or mythic one, no single agora or narrative. This much is obvious, and often said. But we continue to fail in grasping its political significance. The modern justice idea, to paraphrase liberal eminence John Rawls, is that in a given population everyone should enjoy as much liberty as possible, consistent with the least well off being as well off as possible. You are free to exploit your talents and advantages to your benefit, as long as doing so generates no deficit, and ideally a benefit, for those less talented or advantaged. (Rawls says we would all favour this idea, if we did not know which talents or advantages we might have — the so-called “veil of ignorance.”) Thus, for example, your increases in wealth may be taxed, and the resulting revenue channelled back to those who share the social space with you, your fellow citizens.

The crippling fiction of modern justice is not so much that of the veil of ignorance, which is more a device of representation than the background assumption of a coherent population. Nations offer such stable populations, at least to a greater degree than cities, and that is one reason why important tax bases are typically national, not civic. But cities are characterized by movement, not only internal — the essential hustle of the city’s life, its coursing blood, moving at every speed from languorous flânerie to harried commute — but also over its thresholds. Even if we attempted a sort of rationalist solution to the problem, such as a general justice rule that all those affected by a decision must be party to it, we are still left with a fistful of prior unsolved questions. Who is part of a city’s population? Who are my fellow citizens? What do I owe them — not in distribution of goods and services, but in distributions of care and, especially, power?

For a threshold city, on the brink of something that might be greatness, here is an appropriately liminal suggestion: justice in the city means a radical openness to the other. Not just an appreciation of the other as a fellow-traveller, or worse a competitor for scarce goods and prizes; but a sense of the other as capable of prompting a displacement of self, a loosening of the stable ropes of identity.

Modern distributive models of justice rightly place emphasis on the fate of the least well off; in a non-distributive idea of justice, we can update and expand this idea: a city, like a people, shall be judged by how it treats its most vulnerable members. These may not necessarily be the poorest: consider the systematic disadvantage, in an idea economy, of truncated education, learning disability, and low access to the technologies of success. Torontonians talk about the value of otherness, celebrating cultural diversity in word, but they do not walk that walk. The smug inwardness of our de facto stealth neighbourhoods, the vertical gated communities of condo developments, the lifetime preoccupation with the averted gaze — all this shows city not confident enough to engage with itself. The gravity of downtown is reduced, as so often, to the cash nexus of shopping, democracy soured into a form of narcissistic pathology and sense of entitlement for a few, invisibility for the many. Race and class, poverty and hatred cannot find a point of intervention when the discursive space of the city is limited to surfaces.

The desires of the city’s existing life are real. We all want a chance at identity, at joy even. But those desires are too often deflected, or perverted. We have spectacle without engagement, growth without hope. Busy trying to convince ourselves we are trending in the right direction, we don’t stop to ask of ourselves, what is a city for? The oldest answer we know is also the best: a city is an opportunity for justice, for realizing something greater than the sum of individual desires, where we judge ourselves by how we treat the least well off. Because justice is not a static condition, but instead an ongoing achievement, it concerns not just the present and proximate but also the distant and future. Cities, like persons, are neither entirely material nor entirely spectral; they are reducible neither to their built forms nor their inhabitants at any given time. They are self-replicating entities, layered systems of movement and intercourse that never settle, even for a moment, creating what Hannah Arendt calls the political “space of appearances,” which both predates and outlasts you or me. Libeskind himself has said, with truth, that cities exist not only in space but also in time. In the built-environment city, inhabited by citizens, space becomes time, and vice versa. The justice of a city can never be confined to the interests of the “small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about,” as G. K. Chesterton labelled it. It is always guided by the Such a city starts with you, on the street, lifting your gaze and looking, for once, into the face of that person passing. 65 oppressions of the past as well as the interests of the future.

Justice is thus the constant pursuit of the possible, the idea of what is to come. It is not a steady state, nor a fixed outcome; still less a institutionalized plan or centrally directed program. This last point merits special emphasis, because the idea of a just city is often misunderstood as the vision of a Just City, a City on the Hill. Here, for example, is Kingsley Amis weighing in on the point with typical bullying pseudo-logic. Defending his opposition to communism and decline into conservative complacency, Amis noted that he had “seen how many of the evils of life — failure, loneliness, fear, boredom, inability to communicate — are ineradicable by political means, and that attempts so to eradicate them are disastrous.” He continued: “The ideal of the brotherhood of man, the building of the Just City is one that cannot be discarded without lifelong feelings of disappointment and loss. But if we are to live in the real world, discard it we must.” The telltale false dichotomy of “real world” and something else — the world of theory, perhaps, or Theory — gives away the fallacy in play. Failure, loneliness, boredom, and the rest may well be ineradicable, simply because they are part of the human condition, but political means must be among the ways we address them. I don’t say they are the only way, and we can agree that some attempts at authoritarian eradication have proven dangerous. But what is equally true, in the one and only world there is, is that all those conditions are, among other things, political. We don’t seek a Just City where they are absent, only a just city where we can.