According to a new survey, Toronto is the country’s least-liked city. This comes as no surprise. In The Walrus’s November cover story, “How Toronto Lost Its Groove,” John Lorinc shows Canada that its most mega metropolis indeed has a problem, but it ain’t Rob Ford. Lorinc wisely avoids the reductive “blame the mayor” argument by which many Torontonians (myself included) have been so easily seduced. Toronto’s plight comes from decades of narrow vision, relapses in policy tragedy, and the mass mediation of misinformation. So who’s to blame? Well, everyone. Lorinc reveals that what lies behind Toronto’s curtain is not a man but a mirror. That is, Torontonians past and present, urban and suburban, are responsible for the city’s current state. This is not a point of despair: if we have the power to hurt Toronto, we have the power to nurture it as well.
Implicit in Lorinc’s piece is that there exists a morally Good way to run this city, one guided by empathy, reason, and foresight, or as I call it, virtue. Intuitively, we know the city can be better; if we fostered and internalized this virtue, then Toronto would take care of itself. However, although we are bound by the knowledge that civic virtues exist, we rarely comport ourselves accordingly.
Frank Cunningham is the former director of the University of Toronto’s Centre for Ethics and a senior advisor at the school’s Cities Centre, a multi-disciplinary research institute with the mandate to network and embolden cities of the world; promoting civic virtues is his life. I met Cunningham as a second-year U of T student enrolled in his introductory philosophy course. The professor was forward: “If you don’t read any of the material,” he said, “you can still come out of this class with a solid B!” I later realized that this joke was an inverted lesson about reflection, the day-to-day thinking that drives us to do meaningful things. (“Reflection involves the always incomplete attempt to make sense of who we are, trying all the while to live better,” committed Torontonian Mark Kingwell has argued.) During the course’s last lecture, Cunningham encouraged us to visit him should we want to continue the discussion about virtue. Four years later, I took up his offer. (more…)
Gordon Graff’s planned SkyFarmGordon Graff’s SkyFarm, a fifty-eight-floor behemoth priced at $1.5 billion, was to be Toronto’s ticket to the future of urban agriculture. In 2007, the vertical farm was envisioned to occupy a block of downtown Toronto that has since become home to the Toronto International Film Festival. Even before the global food crisis hit in 2008 and the locavore movement picked up steam, the idea of urban farming was a provocative one. Science fiction and environmental geeks gushed. For green-aholics, the idea appealed to both the inner consumer (“raspberries in February!”) and the environmental conscience (“local, organic raspberries in February!”). The media ate it up. ”Sometimes,” the Huffington Post wrote, “the answer to a complex problem is so simple, so elegant that you wonder why you didn’t think of it yourself.” But four years later, Graff, who is now an intern architect at Toronto’s DIALOG, admits that his SkyFarm will never be built, and many in the media have begun rubbing the stars out of their eyes. The apparent retreat of the ivory-green tower raises the question: is vertical farming still the promised evolution of agriculture, or a case of the life and death of an idea?
Graff became interested in vertical farming at the University of Waterloo, where he wrote a master’s thesis on sustainable urban architecture. He began communicating with Dickson Despommier, a Columbia University professor of environmental health sciences and microbiology who is vertical farming’s biggest cheerleader. With urban population densities and a slew of attendant environmental problems increasing around the globe, the answer, Despommier and his students thought, was to grow farms up, instead of out. “All the water is recycled,” Despommier raves in this publicity video for his 2010 book, The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century. “All the nutrients are recycled. And the only thing that actually leaves the building is the produce.” (more…)
“How Toronto Lost Its Groove”In the wake of Pierre Trudeau’s landslide 1969 majority, several ambitious, activist policymakers began thinking about the relationship between Canada’s cities and the federal government. At the time, recounts Daniel Coates, then an advisor to Trudeau cabinet minister Robert Andras, a handful of influential federal bureaucrats had become increasingly preoccupied by urban growth, traffic, and housing. As they delved into the policy issues, they began to see that federal policy had a huge but largely uncoordinated impact on Canadian cities. “Nobody was thinking about it or talking about it,” Coates says. “But the dollar figures were stupendous. That was the compelling reason for [establishing] the Minister of State for Urban Affairs.”
With American cities facing dramatic upheavals, Coates recalls that his team began researching deeply, consulting prominent thinkers like Jay Forrester, a professor of computer engineering at MIT’s Sloan School of Management who had applied his work on dynamic systems to urban development. Inspired, Coates says his group started investigating the economic linkages between Canadian cities.
The bureaucrats pulled together an analysis and presented it to Trudeau’s cabinet. Their prediction: that Canada’s largest cities, especially Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, would soak up population growth, eventually becoming too large and too congested. Coates recalls showing the cabinet a map of Canada circa 2000, with “big red balls” indicating the population concentration in the large urban centres. The country, they predicted, would change dramatically. Time has proven them to be correct. (more…)
Mark PeckmezianThe Weston TowersI’d like to spend my five minutes sharing a few stories that have influenced the vision I want to put forward. One of the stories relates to a picture included in John Lorinc’s piece in this month’s Walrus. It begins inside the middle of the Weston Towers, the three monolithic buildings that are shown on page 28, where for ten years, my family built a home on the twenty-fourth floor after arriving from Ghana to Toronto in 1979. We joined a small but growing community of Ghanaians living there. It was an amazing childhood, and my brother, who is here today, will attest to that. At the time, whether we were part of the 25 percent of poor high-rise dwellers was certainly not a concern to me. My top priority was peering over our balcony to see if the neighbourhood kids were starting a game of soccer-baseball in the valley behind our buildings.
A decade later, something of a panic struck our community. All of a sudden, we were hearing about one family after another moving out of the building and into houses. Home ownership quickly became the line separating those who had “made it” and those who did not. And the pressure was not just local. We began receiving phone calls from family back home asking if we had made it, like so and so’s family had made it.
My family, though not entirely prepared to do so, succumbed to the pressure and bought a house in North Etobicoke, Rexdale. I began the seventh grade in Elmbank Middle School, located near Jamestown Crescent, a neighbourhood that had been in the media often because of violence and drug-related activities. In the summer before high school began, I secured my first job working in Jamestown’s community garden, part of an effort initiated by the Thistletown Community Services Unit. Pierrette Forgie, the executive director of The Unit, as it was known then, had been a mainstay of the Jamestown community for more than twenty years by that point. She had seen waves of immigrants settle and eventually leave the neighbourhood. I’ll never forget her orientation session with me. She walked me around Jamestown Crescent, and every few steps she would tell me the story of a community and leaders within that community who worked together to address a need. I remember her telling me about the Somali women who were working to get a portable trailer in the area where they could share food and information about employment opportunities and the like. That memory brings me to my vision for Toronto as a model of city-building that comes from collective leadership. (more…)
I’d like to start by naming three of my favorite things that are happening in Toronto right now: The Gibraltar Point art centre on Toronto Island, the new Feminist Art Gallery built and run by Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue, and the West Toronto Railpath. These are three things that perfectly embody the potential for excellence when stultifying bureaucracy is outwitted, community is fostered, and public spaces are made with vision and radical hope. These are “yes” places.
Imagine if Toronto was so proud and smart about promoting and celebrating its artists that people from Berlin got excited about our amazing scene and started moving here. Imagine if every wealthy educated person in this city found making the decision to spend money on art as easy as deciding to buy designer shoes. Imagine all new condos being legislated to not only include a percentage of subsidized units but also a few dedicated affordable artist studios — instead of commissioning a single, one-off public sculpture. Imagine a downtown art college with such a fantastic international reputation, facilities, and faculty that it was the first Canadian choice of application if you were an ambitious young artist. Imagine that the Toronto Now gallery off of the AGO’s Frank restaurant was turned into a space for grad students, and the serious artists of Toronto could always be found in major shows in the main spaces of the museum all months of the year. Imagine there were line-ups to see these local artists’ work at the AGO like there were during those first heady days of Frank Gehry’s redesign. Imagine Torontonians with so much confidence that instead of travelling internationally to buy culture, they stayed here, trusted their own judgment, and invested in something they decided for themselves was excellent.
As long as I have lived in Toronto I’ve had a push-pull relationship with it, constantly leaving and searching for a place I felt I truly belonged but always returning for pragmatic reasons. For many artists and creative people I know this is a common story. We want to be here — there are excellent people and resources, it makes a solid base to travel from, our friends and families are here, and compared to other cities in Canada, we have a better chance of creating and finding opportunity. Best of all, there is an old and strong culture of do-it-yourself here, pockets of radical thinkers and makers that keep a fire lit even when the politics of safety and small-think capitalism threaten to smother all those who live to take creative risks. (more…)
In supporting the motion “Be it resolved that Toronto will never be beautiful,” I want to make clear that we are not talking about its livability, but its beauty, or rather, its lack thereof. An old pair of worn slippers may be comfortable, but hardly beautiful. In many respects Toronto is a wonderful city in which to live, but it cannot be called beautiful.
So, let’s begin by defining “beautiful” as it applies to cities. There is, I believe, general consensus that Paris, Venice, St. Petersburg, and perhaps Dublin are among the most beautiful cities in the world. What characterizes their beauty is:
First, their man-made forms. Streets and avenues, parks and squares, that are planned and designed together with the buildings that define them; that terminate or provide gateways to attractive, sometimes dramatic vistas; that enhance the monuments contained by them; and that are embellished by the landscapes that are an intrinsic part of the whole.
Second, they not only have a relationship to their major geographical features, but they celebrate them, whether canals, rivers or oceans. (more…)
This past summer, ESPN The Magazine, in its annual ranking of sports franchises, identified Toronto as the worst city for sports in North America. Inevitably, the assessment provoked a fury of denial. Brian Burke, the Toronto Maple Leafs’ president and general manager (and probably the best executive in the NHL) called the ranking, “absurd and offensive” and went on to claim, “I don’t think ESPN knows squat about Canada. I don’t think they know squat about hockey.” I suppose Burke had to say that, being GM and all, but it was still an embarrassing comment. No sane person could disagree with that ranking. As Burke must know, the only problem with ESPN’s analysis is that it focused almost exclusively on quantitative matters, the “bang for the buck,” meaning the money gathered from tickets, concessions, and parking compared against the team’s wins. Being a Toronto fan is so much worse than any algorithm could ever express. A merely numerical measurement fails to capture the daily spiritual trauma of following sports in Toronto.
It’s a given that the true fan goes to games not for the necessarily occasional thrill of winning, but for the quotidian experience of losing — a truth articulated originally and beautifully by Nick Hornby in Fever Pitch. Losing in Toronto, however, is an unremitting condition. The CFL team, the Argonauts, is so bad that when I recently found a friend of mine betting on it, I immediately wondered if it was time for an intervention about his gambling addiction. As it stands, the Argonauts are 2 and 6 3 and 9 3 and 11. The Blue Jays this year aren’t completely terrible, but when you’ve said that, you’ve said everything. They may be a rising power in the East, as many claim, but they sure haven’t risen yet. The Raptors are still in their post-Bosh wilderness (not that the Bosh period was a golden age), and Toronto FC currently rests at the bottom of the Eastern Conference. The Leafs, who matter to Torontonians more than all the other teams combined, have not won the Stanley Cup since 1967, and they haven’t made the playoffs in a franchise-record six seasons. The only team with a longer dry spell is the Florida Panthers. The Leafs’ major source of hope seems to be Brian Burke himself, but when the major source of your dreams is a front-office guy, you are in a dark place. Cheering a GM, to me, is hitting rock bottom. (more…)
Dear Toronto,
I would like to take a moment today to say thanks.
I’ve spent most days this week in a sad state. At my job, I get a lot of news exposure, and as you can imagine, the world is often less than rosy. This particular week has been a hard test for my bounce-back personality. Between the underreported famine in Somalia, alarming information about income polarization in the US, and my new fascination with the revealing patterns of Google Trends, I’ve been walking around feeling somewhat bleak-eyed, as though someone painted everything greige.
Wednesday’s morning papers jolted the colour back into my world. As soon as I picked up the Globe and read the first headline, a little breeze kicked up, a little sun shone down, and I immediately felt better. Our mayor, Rob Ford, abandoned his alternate proposal for the local waterfront, and the Portlands revitalization project still belongs to Waterfront Toronto. (We can now breathe more easily knowing that the original, public space–friendly, triple-government-approved plan — nearly pushed aside by Rob and brother Doug Ford — will move forward without the ominous threat of waterfront megamalls, ferris wheels, or the “firesale” of public property to developers.) I gleefully snipped the article out of the paper, put a huge smiley face on a post-it note, and left both on my senior editor’s desk. I may have done a jig around the copy machine. (more…)
Luminato FestivalMurder, deception, sex, and violence all played out on the stage last month, and it wasn’t some cutting edge, contemporary play. Rather, one of the oldest collections of stories in existence — One Thousand and One Nights, better known in the West as Arabian Nights. At Toronto’s Luminato festival, the production stayed true to the source material. This was not Aladdin, Sinbad, and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves: Disney-fied childhood memories of magic carpets and vest-wearing, shoulder-riding monkeys quickly disappeared when confronted with these stories of rape, slaughter, orgies, and sexual objectification.
“I’ve always been interested in stories, especially those that gripped me as a child. But how I knew these stories as a child bares little relation to how they actually are,” says director Tim Supple of the Luminato production, which ran from June 11 to 19. “We receive these stories through a filter as Arabian Nights. More than any other stories that I can think of, a completely different version has been developed for these. [They have been] stripped of their violence and sexuality and given to children.”
The Arabian Nights’ Entertainment was the name imposed on English translations of One Thousand and One Nights in 1706, but the collection dates to the 9th century. It’s a gathering of tales from Persia, Arabia, and India, held together by the framing narrative of King Shahryar and Queen Scheherazade. When Shahryar learns that his first wife has been unfaithful, he murders her, then adopts the unseemly habit of marrying a virgin every night, bedding her, and then killing her in the morning — guaranteeing fidelity. Scheherazade, a daughter of the official who’s been tasked to find the king’s new consorts, offers herself up as the next bride, but with a clever plan. Once they have married, she tells her husband a long, enchanting story that lasts through the night. When morning comes, she leaves the plot at a Dan Brown-like cliffhanger, causing Shahryar to keep her alive to hear the rest. With that framework in place, Scheherazade’s stories within stories within stories follow, all to keep the debauched king’s attention. The entire tale is similar to Inception, but with less special effects and more nudity. (more…)
Tanisha Evans
Danielle ScottPortraits from “Spark”Can art bring strangers together? Perhaps in some situations, as acclaimed photographer (and friend of The Walrus) Nigel Dickson recently discovered while mentoring at-risk youths in Toronto.
“It was up at the Jane and Finch area, where, to be honest, I’d never been before,” says Dickson. “[The youth] were from three different high schools and different gang neighbourhoods. These people would never have met if they didn’t have this group to come to.”
The “group” is Shoot With This, a film mentorship collective that helps prospective imagemakers develop their creative talents and professional skills. Dickson, an eighteen-time winner of National Magazine Awards, has had such big names as Christopher Plummer, Michelle Obama, and Pierre Trudeau sit before his lens; working with the collective’s young charges was an altogether different project for him. Their collaborative result is “Spark,” a group exhibition that pairs Dickson’s portraits of such Canadian celebrities as Arlene Dickinson and Colin Mochrie with photographs made by teens shooting under his direction.
“We got some good results. A couple of them were already into it, but most of them knew nothing about it,” says Dickson. “We ended it with six photographs that I thought were quite good. Three people in the group showed extreme promise, so who knows, they may go on to develop that.”
“Spark” is on display at The Al Green Gallery in Toronto until June 9.
From Toronto to Torino, divergent takes on the common problem of the plastic bag
Plastic bags — normally one of the most ubiquitous and least noticeable members of the urban ecosystem — are enjoying an unusual bit of attention right now. As of the new year, the government of Italy has banned stores from buying nonbiodegradable plastic bags; meanwhile, Toronto mayor Rob Ford announced at the end of December that he wants to retire the city’s five-cent fee on plastic bags, less than two years after its introduction.
Some of the controversy surrounding Toronto’s fee is over the fact that it’s not quite a tax: it only legislates that stores charge a minimum of five cents for bags, with encouragement that the revenue be put to charitable uses. But despite that strange feature of the bylaw, it has already had its intended effect: according to Allen Langdom, vice-president for environmental issues at the Canadian Council of Grocery Distributors, the fee has already caused a 71-percent reduction in use of plastic bags among Toronto stores that belong to his group.
Toronto and Italy have joined a mounting number of other cities and countries that have taxed or banned plastic bags in recent years. Many have shown similarly speedy and dramatic effects: Ireland introduced a 15-euro cent tax in 2002 (since bumped to 22 euro cents) that reduced its use of plastic bags by 94 percent (and raised milions of euros in revenue); Washington DC instated a five-cent tax in 2009 which immediately cut its monthly bag usage from 22.5 million to three million; China outlawed giving plastic bags away for free in 2008, and despite widespread evasion of the law, consumption of them dropped by 50 percent, saving what is now estimated to total about 100 billion bags. (more…)
In Toronto, bird’s-eye photos of off-the-clock strippers raise questions of privacy
Recently on Twitter, writer Jen Selk made this request: “I want Jeet Heer to write about that Zanzibar/Torontoist thing next. You tell ’em, Jeet.”
Never let it be said that I don’t listen to readers.
First, some context. Zanzibar is a strip club in downtown Toronto. Torontoist is “a website about Toronto and everything in it.” And the “Zanzibar/Torontoist thing” was summarized by the Toronto Star in these terms: (more…)
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