IsaacKhouzam
New Member
As readers of this forum know better than most, the first quarter of the twenty-first century has brought enormous change to Canada’s largest city. Toronto’s population has almost doubled in that time, putting it in fourth place in North America behind Mexico City, New York, and Los Angeles. It has become one of the most multicultural cities in the world, with a foreign-born population of over fifty percent. And this growth has driven a building boom on a scale that might have redefined the city’s urban fabric and has certainly transformed its skyline.
A great city can be a magical thing. Growing up in Toronto, I felt that magic. I felt it watching the Santa Claus parade march down Queens Park as the first snowflakes of the season started to fall above the towers of Victoria and Saint Mike's Colleges. I felt it flying along Queen Street with the window open on a 501 streetcar at midnight. Watching a late summer sunset over the skyline at Riverdale Park. Taking a buzzing ferry across the harbour on a hot day.
There was something else I often used to feel in Toronto: a buzz of excitement - the promise of a future city even better than the one I knew. But conversations about the city's future today seem coloured more by a resigned cynicism than the optimism I once felt. Ask a Torontonian about the future and they're more likely to tell you about the woes of traffic and endless construction that never seems to get anything built; slow zones on the subway or the cost of buying a house.
These are all real problems that come with the territory of being a big city—and, like it or not, Toronto is a big city. But a great city offers something in return. The calculus is supposed to work something like this: give up the house, the backyard, the car(s), and some square footage—in short, give up the private amenities of the suburbs—and gain vibrancy, proximity, culture, and the infrastructure necessary to support public amenities.
Somehow, in Toronto, the math isn’t adding up.
I now live in New York. There's a clichéd response I invariably get when this comes up back home: great city, "but I could never live there." I say it’s a cliché, but it gets at something true. Visiting friends are enamored with the city, yet I can tell that they don’t fully understand it. One friend told me that if only driving were easier here it would be perfect. Another, who raves about the number of bars and restaurants within a short walk of my apartment in Brooklyn, won’t move out of his parents’ place until he can afford to buy a house (you guessed it, in the suburbs). Yet another friend, whose dream it is to move to Manhattan, cancelled on dinner back in Toronto because they couldn’t get the car that night—taking the subway, apparently, was not an option.
What my friends don’t understand is that the things they love about New York are enabled by many of the very things they complain about and fight against back home. A New York where everyone drives and owns a house is an oxymoron. So here’s my theory: until Torontonians accept that a city can only be great by embracing the things that make it a city—density, busy-ness, friction, even chaos—Toronto is going to remain stuck. Put another way: a city can be wonderful, even magical, if it can harness these forces instead of fighting them. Toronto still has a chance. But it can’t keep pretending to be Toronto the good, second city of Canada.
That doesn't mean resigning ourselves to lower living standards. It is precisely the opposite: by coming to terms with what it means to be a big city, we can free ourselves to make life in our city better. I don't deny the downsides. My apartment is smaller than I’d like. Until recently, I didn’t have an elevator or a dishwasher. I don’t own a car, and my daily commute more often than not involves being squished from all sides on a busy subway train. Most Friday nights in the summer I’m woken by the sounds of the bar next door emptying out at about three in the morning. The streets smell bad on garbage day. But none of these outweigh the upsides—on the contrary, for every downside there is a direct positive corollary. Within one block of my small apartment are five restaurants, a bar, and two coffee shops, and the grocery store is on the next one. I am a fifteen-minute walk away from five hundred acres of beautiful parkland. That packed subway can get me anywhere. The stinky garbage—okay, that has no upside. But this city gives more back to me than it takes, and it isn’t even close.
There are already those in Toronto who understand this. But it looks to me like the city could use reminding of its potential to be magical.
Toronto is still growing up. I think it’s time to stop seeing this as a problem to be mitigated and start seeing it as an opportunity to be embraced. So that’s what I’ll be writing about. All the things, big and small, that make living in a big city special. I hope you'll tune in.
A great city can be a magical thing. Growing up in Toronto, I felt that magic. I felt it watching the Santa Claus parade march down Queens Park as the first snowflakes of the season started to fall above the towers of Victoria and Saint Mike's Colleges. I felt it flying along Queen Street with the window open on a 501 streetcar at midnight. Watching a late summer sunset over the skyline at Riverdale Park. Taking a buzzing ferry across the harbour on a hot day.
There was something else I often used to feel in Toronto: a buzz of excitement - the promise of a future city even better than the one I knew. But conversations about the city's future today seem coloured more by a resigned cynicism than the optimism I once felt. Ask a Torontonian about the future and they're more likely to tell you about the woes of traffic and endless construction that never seems to get anything built; slow zones on the subway or the cost of buying a house.
These are all real problems that come with the territory of being a big city—and, like it or not, Toronto is a big city. But a great city offers something in return. The calculus is supposed to work something like this: give up the house, the backyard, the car(s), and some square footage—in short, give up the private amenities of the suburbs—and gain vibrancy, proximity, culture, and the infrastructure necessary to support public amenities.
Somehow, in Toronto, the math isn’t adding up.
I now live in New York. There's a clichéd response I invariably get when this comes up back home: great city, "but I could never live there." I say it’s a cliché, but it gets at something true. Visiting friends are enamored with the city, yet I can tell that they don’t fully understand it. One friend told me that if only driving were easier here it would be perfect. Another, who raves about the number of bars and restaurants within a short walk of my apartment in Brooklyn, won’t move out of his parents’ place until he can afford to buy a house (you guessed it, in the suburbs). Yet another friend, whose dream it is to move to Manhattan, cancelled on dinner back in Toronto because they couldn’t get the car that night—taking the subway, apparently, was not an option.
What my friends don’t understand is that the things they love about New York are enabled by many of the very things they complain about and fight against back home. A New York where everyone drives and owns a house is an oxymoron. So here’s my theory: until Torontonians accept that a city can only be great by embracing the things that make it a city—density, busy-ness, friction, even chaos—Toronto is going to remain stuck. Put another way: a city can be wonderful, even magical, if it can harness these forces instead of fighting them. Toronto still has a chance. But it can’t keep pretending to be Toronto the good, second city of Canada.
That doesn't mean resigning ourselves to lower living standards. It is precisely the opposite: by coming to terms with what it means to be a big city, we can free ourselves to make life in our city better. I don't deny the downsides. My apartment is smaller than I’d like. Until recently, I didn’t have an elevator or a dishwasher. I don’t own a car, and my daily commute more often than not involves being squished from all sides on a busy subway train. Most Friday nights in the summer I’m woken by the sounds of the bar next door emptying out at about three in the morning. The streets smell bad on garbage day. But none of these outweigh the upsides—on the contrary, for every downside there is a direct positive corollary. Within one block of my small apartment are five restaurants, a bar, and two coffee shops, and the grocery store is on the next one. I am a fifteen-minute walk away from five hundred acres of beautiful parkland. That packed subway can get me anywhere. The stinky garbage—okay, that has no upside. But this city gives more back to me than it takes, and it isn’t even close.
There are already those in Toronto who understand this. But it looks to me like the city could use reminding of its potential to be magical.
Toronto is still growing up. I think it’s time to stop seeing this as a problem to be mitigated and start seeing it as an opportunity to be embraced. So that’s what I’ll be writing about. All the things, big and small, that make living in a big city special. I hope you'll tune in.
