Contrary to the standard Machiavellian objection, justice of this sort is not antithetical to civic glory. Though a city in pursuit of glory may neglect justice, the opposite does not hold: a truly just city is always a glorious one, because it allows greatness even as it looks to the conditions of strangeness posed by the other. It does not oppose development, including grandiose development, for the sake of some cramped sense of its own modesty; but it does demand, over and over, that all development be, at some level, in the service of everyone. Such a city starts with you, on the street, lifting your gaze and looking, for once, into the face of that person passing. This urban gaze is not male, or female; it is not casual or demeaning; it is not totalizing; it is liberating. It’s the gaze that recognizes, in the other, a fellow citizen, which is to say one who has vulnerabilities, desires, and ideas, just as you do.
These thoughts have been themselves a deliberate exercise in conceptual flânerie. Sometimes you have to walk before you can run. Sometimes, too, walking, not getting there, is the real point. We have a choice before us. We can continue to congratulate ourselves on how interesting and vibrant and creative we — some of us — are. Or we can bend some of that intellectual energy to the hard task of asking what we — all of us — could be. The just city is a process, an emergent property of complexity, not a steady state or final outcome. Like the elusive object of the flâneur’s desire, it is always slipping around the next corner. Toronto, like any potentially great city, is always on the verge of it. That’s why we keep walking, looking, glancing, noticing — and talking, to one another, about what matters to us.
