[CN Tower]

"I think you could see a marked decrease in the amount of postering if you spent a little money on a small ad campaign letting business owners and residents know that they are fully encouraged to tear down posters in their neighbourhoods. I think people right now tend not to touch them because they're not sure what constitutes an illegal poster."

I don't really care whether it's legal or not, if I see an ad and I can take it down, it comes down. In any given week during my neighbourhood walks I take down at least 200-300 posters, virtually all of them of the .com spam variety, such as junk haulers, language schools, driving schools, contractors, and all other sorts of businesses. Amazing how much one can get done with a box cutter and a plastic bag. The problem really is that bad, and most of these are placed along residential streets, not main streets like Yonge or Mount Pleasant, which makes it even more disgusting in my mind. Lost cat ads, or garage sale signs, those I leave up, anything else is gone.

And without exception, every time someone sees me doing this, they thank me. Not once has someone said I'm depriving someone of their livelihood or freedom of expression or whatever other bullshit excuse postering apologists use. There really is no excuse for this behaviour, and when you see the sheer mounds of paper that go into the trash, you realize not only what an affront this activity is on an aesthetic level and from the perspective of maintaining a respectable public realm, but what an environmental atrocity this is: I would estimate that, just on my own, about a garbage bag worths' of paper goes right to landfill every week. That's one small section of town, over one week. Take all of the thousands of ads plastered along Queen, King, Bathurst, etc. (to say nothing of plastic signs and such) and there are easily hundreds of tonnes of this junk going to landfill every year. In a digital age this is inexcusable. Only pure, base, naked greed motivates companies to engage in this behaviour, and no one, not the city, not individuals or BIAs, should apologize for doing whatever it takes to remove this material.

Postering cheapens whatever it touches, and if Rob Ford imposes Draconian fines for this practice, he will have an easy time of it. I really do think people have reached an end point, as more and more people go to other cities, see the complete lack of postering that occurs, and then come back and are assaulted by the wallpaper of shit placed everywhere. It's commercial vandalism, full stop.

And as to the question of how to pay for ad cleaners, we have an excellent model in the Downtown Yonge BIA, where a private company sends workers everyday out to clean ads off of street furniture. If that model can be replicated across every BIA (perhaps even legally required to do so) then postering will disappear within a year. Coupled with fines, name-and-shame campaigns, and people like myself doing what I do, then I think this practice can finally be broken.

This site is enlightening, and depressing:

http://www.causs-canada.org/index.html

What are you thoughts on the selectively placed sandwich boards for condos?

Personally I don't mind postering. It adds to the urban fabric and it's easily removable. I think it would be a great source of revenue to charge for them somehow. Creative thinking. I am pro-business and not easily offended by signs and billboards. I like them and find them modern cultural expressions. It would be great to offset ads with arts through taxes and diverting funding.

 

[nfitz]

Now, I know I'm a left-wing kook and all, but using a transit agency's surplus to essentially give motorists a break is kind of a shitty policy, isn't it?

More likely just the way the numbers fall out ...

... but the fall-out might be fun to watch. And would make it even tougher for another ultra-right-wing Tory like Ford, Hudak, or Harris to win anything in Toronto for another generation.

 

[fiendishlibrarian]

"It adds to the urban fabric and it's easily removable"

No, it doesn't, and it isn't. A perfect example that illustrates the utter vandalism that postering is can be found at Yonge and St. Clair. The new poles that were installed as part of the St. Clair streetscape project were already postered over literally within hours of them being placed there. Over time, as company after company placed layer upon layer of glued ads on those poles, the city workers cleaning them had no choice but to use small spatulas to grind away at the ads. Now, barely three years after those poles were put in, the poles at that corner, at Avenue Road, and all the way over to Bathurst are all scratched out and blighted because of what postering has done to them. Same thing happened on Spadina (except for that small stretch that falls under the Chinatown BIA). Millions of dollars in an attempt to improve the appearance of the city utterly wasted due to the need of companies to place as many ads as they can in some pathetic attempt to make a name for themselves. All for profit, all on our dime, as these poles and mailboxes are all ultimately paid for by us, and yet the city never recoups the cost for cleaning them. Why?

Again, as I've said before, this just does not happen in other cities. I don't know how, I don't know why, but in Toronto we seem content to see the public realm degraded and commercialized in a manner that is unthinkable in cities larger than ours. It's infuriating and baffling, and my guess is that we've brainwashed ourselves into thinking that this is an acceptable and inevitable part of civic life (see NYC and graffiti on subways, c. 1977) and that this has been used by lowlife companies who piggybacked onto specious legal argumentation and misplaced tolerance to foist all this garbage on us with absolutely no pushback by the city at all. A fatal combination of indulgence, lack of civic pride, and indifference seems to have led us to where we are now. It's not only ahistorical in terms of Toronto itself (look at old archive pictures of the financial district for example, even into the early 1990s you see no postering at all) but is put to the lie when you look at how other cities just do not tolerate this, cities as vibrant, varied, and significant as ours. Where is New York's equivalent of the Guvernment? Chicago's Booty Camp Fitness? Paris' Think in Spanish? Madrid's Essay Experts? Go to SSP, look at the city pics, you don't see this kind of thing *anywhere*, especially not in their showcase, central districts. I'll never forget the first time I visited NYU: not a single ad placed anywhere, then I come back to U of T and see the poles along St. George bloated to triple their width due to the endless spam placed on them.

Is this right? Is it right for private companies to hijack and wreck public spaces? Billboards are one thing, as they are relatively infrequent in their placement, and their position, height, content, and other features are regulated as a means of balancing the needs of commerce with the need to preserve non-commercial public spaces, to make civic life somewhat bearable and not reduced to base consumerism. But postering, at least as it's practiced in Toronto, is another beast. What's worse? The odd billboard on top of a building, or thousands of ads only feet apart, at eye level, everywhere you go? Which is more insidious, more degrading to the public realm, to civic life itself? Would we tolerate this amount of advertising in our private lives? How many of us willingly encourage thousands of spam e-mails sent to our inboxes, or junk mail at our doors, or telemarketing calls to our phones? Why then do we look the other way when the same phenomenon occurs all over our city, our parks, historic districts, and universities? I don't know, again, other cities have tackled this, their streets aren't cluttered and vulgarized by this garbage and somehow they survive and thrive. Are we that indifferent, that lacking in civic pride? Is this all Toronto is now? We can't even bother trying to improve ourselves, our sidewalks, our architecture without some asshole with a bucket of glue and a brush to come along and shit all over what we try to build? Why can't we see the contradiction?

Now, again, we need to ask a fundamental question: who does the public realm belong to? If you think that every square inch of public space, be it poles, mail boxes, pretty much any surface that can have an ad placed on them shold be used in this manner, then more power to you, because greed being what it is, that's exactly what you'll get. If you think a city is more than a collection of ads then we need to ask different questions. Postering, given its logic of commercialism and greed, tears the urban fabric, it doesn't thread it. I realize I sound like a zealot when I get on these postering rants, but my memory of the city goes back more then twenty years. I remember when Toronto was well-kept, was vigilant of its public spaces, and where there was a clear demonstration of civic pride that made the place *pleasant*, and respectable-looking and where you didn’t feel like you were being treated simply as a pair of eyeballs endlessly given a sales pitch. Archaic virtues, I realize, but I’ll be damned if not seeing an ad in my face every few goddamn feet was a hell of a lot better than the mess we have now. I hate coming back here from other cities and feeling that others have it right, and we don’t. And we don’t.

 

[GraphicMatt]

Yeah, but does the postering bother you?

 

[W. K. Lis]

In a bid to cut down on posters slapped up on hydro poles and other locations, neighbourhood ads for garage sales and other events will be permitted on 500 bulletin boards attached to some of the bus shelters and 2,000 other, self-standing kiosks.

 

[MetroMan]

^ Will? Those have been rolled out for quite some time now. The problem is that every single one of them is postered with 50 of the same commercial ads.

The essence of a Ford postering cleanup has to be in by law enforcement. Prohibit any ads on street furniture and poles and provide places for them on these boards. Charge prolific posterers a fee. Less than 10 posters found in a community are free. Hire by law officers to walk the streets and document posters on city property not designated for postering. Follow them back via their phone number and/or address advertised and send them an invoice.

From my experience, I'm willing to bet that regular posterers are well below 100 individuals/companies and that's being generous. It shouldn't be too complex to identity them and follow their activities. Create a small team dedicated to enforcing advertising laws in the city and suddenly we'll have a lot less visual pollution.

 

[MetroMan]

What will change about Toronto?

To steer this thread back on to Mayor Ford's Toronto -- of which the conversation about clean streets is perfectly legitimate, but not the only issue -- besides cleaner streets, what else can we expect Toronto to look like in the next 4 years?

- Will some of our festivals die from lack of funding and/or city support?

- Will cycling culture receive a death blow now that it is unlikely that bike lanes will continue to sprout like in the Miller years? What's going to happen to existing bike lanes?

- Will the Waterfront wave decks and bridges continue to be built? Will the Queens Queen West8/DTAH project go ahead?

Discuss and pose other questions...

 

[BobBob]

I hope that, years from now, we don't look back at 2010 as the high water mark for the kind of civic enthusiasm this forum represents. The cultural tradition that Ford embodies certainly seems hostile to that spirit, so we'll have to be tough and hopefully come out stronger as a constructive force at the end of it.

 

[golodhendil]

Again, as I've said before, this just does not happen in other cities.

Not that I necessarily condone (over-)postering, but:

Hong Kong:

Montreal: (whose anti-postering law just got struck down by a Quebec court as against the Charter)

New York: (not sure what you're talking about there being no posters)

Madrid:

Seoul:

Or we could do like Vancouver and have wraparound casts around lampposts for legal postering:

 

[Prometheus The Supremo]

i've got a solution to the paper plague, let loose on the streets a bunch of kids with OCD who enjoy ripping things down. when i was a kid, i loved ripping down posters. unknown to me was the fact that i was providing a valuable community service!

 

[fiendishlibrarian]

"Yeah, but does the postering bother you? "

If postering bothers me then useless, vacuous glibness does so even more, but that can be said of more or less 85% of your posts, so no surprise there.

And that New York picture just proves my point, as with the exception of parts of the LES and Alphabet City and maybe parts of Soho you don't see crap plastered everywhere, and where it is, it's taken down frequently. Wall Street, NYU, most of Midtown, Central Park, Gramercy, Fordham, Brooklyn Heights, UE and UW sides, Columbia, and many others I've visited are much better-kept than King West or Bloor is here. Again, with the exception of Montreal, the other pictures just show that postering is an anomaly, and not the norm as it is here otherwise I doubt you would have found such pictures in the first place.

 

[MisterF]

golodhendil, of the cities you've mentioned the one I've been in most recently is Madrid. There's hardly any postering there as far as I could tell, both in the centre of the city and in more outlying areas. It's definitely not overrun with posters the way Toronto is. What struck me is how immaculate everything is. It's not just the postering but the complete lack of overhead power lines, higher quality sidewalks, and the little things like newspaper kiosks. Compare Yonge Street, Queen West or Nathan Phillips Square with Gran Via or Plaza Mayor - the difference is like night and day.

Or we could do like Vancouver and have wraparound casts around lampposts for legal postering:

Toronto has these as part of the new street furniture. Ottawa also has them, as do smaller cities in Ontario. That's step one. Toronto hasn't taken the second step yet.

 

[spaced]

Here's an article from the Montreal Gazette that some of you might like:
Don Cherry is nothing but a phoney

The lingo is a half-century old and mostly American, left over from political battles now in the history books. "Pinkos." "Tree huggers." "Left-wing kooks." But the hatred, and the ugliness it fosters, is very much alive.
The problem is not so much what Cherry says (we're accustomed to the bile he spews every time he opens his mouth), it's where he says it.
Like his appearance at the coronation of Ford, whose first act as mayor was to flush down the toilet the $130 million Toronto has already spent to modernize and upgrade its transit system.

Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Cherry+nothing+phoney/3967855/story.html#ixzz183EeR3cu​

Best Comment:​

I think Cherry is nothing more than a "character" who spouts his BS for publicity and recognition which generates press and ratings and thus money. Lots of money. He, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter et al are of the same ilk. Brash, unreasonable, blowhard charlatans.

 

[Morgan Edge]

Hi

Long time reader first time poster.

I just wanted to post a link to a Ford T-shirt that I thought suited this thread. What with this city heading for a disaster of biblical proportions and all.

http://www.zazzle.ca/JvH2011

 

[GraphicMatt]

"Yeah, but does the postering bother you? "

If postering bothers me then useless, vacuous glibness does so even more, but that can be said of more or less 85% of your posts, so no surprise there.

Hey. I resent the vacuous comment.