From the Post:
Californians see Toronto the Good
Sarah Karlinsky, National Post
Published: Monday, August 18, 2008
The current issue of Urbanist, the monthly magazine of the San Francisco Planning + Urban Research Association, is themed ''Learning From Toronto,'' a mostly upbeat survey of our city. The package is introduced with the following column:
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At first glance, Toronto is not a beautiful city. As Toronto's former chief planner and current "urban mentor" Paul Bedford explained to us on our first night in Toronto, the city is about "business first, not about beauty first." But, he went on to say, it's a city that has "good bones."
Good bones, indeed. The bones are not just in the physical structure of the city -- a geographic form defined by Lake Ontario and a series of deep ravines that run through the city, inciting a comparison to an inverted San Francisco. The bones are also in the main streets that are the backbone of Toronto and in the transit infrastructure that the city and the region are now rapidly outgrowing.
As Jane Jacobs (who left New York City with her family to escape the draft, and settled in Toronto in 1968) explained in an essay in Places magazine, Toronto's main streets are "the most basic 'self ' of the city." Why? Because Toronto's main streets traverse its many neighbourhoods, they are a live part of the city: "They provide a congenial form for the city; if they hadn't they would have disintegrated." Walking along Spadina, one of Toronto's main streets, you get a strong sense of how it ties together many Torontos, from downtown to a bustling Chinatown and beyond.
Toronto's bones also are to be found its transit infrastructure-- a system that Toronto is in danger of rapidly outgrowing. Toronto's population is expanding at a rapid clip (boosted in part by tremendous immigration, both from inside and outside Canada), and the city expects to pass Chicago as the fourth-largest city in North America. The key to its successful growth will be a major reinvestment in its aging transit infrastructure. Metrolinx, a newly created regional transportation authority, is in the process of assessing what that level of investment will be, and what types of land use changes are required to make that investment worthwhile.
The good bones of Toronto extend beyond its physical infrastructure to its "human infrastructure" -- that is to say, its citizenry. There is a booming civic culture in Toronto, defined by such efforts as Spacing Magazine, a quarterly publication devoted to understanding Toronto and prodding it toward a better, more sustainable future, and [[[murmur]]], a project in which Torontonians' recorded stories about specific locations may be accessed by calling a telephone number found on sculptural signs that look like big green ears posted throughout the city. A new Toronto bicycle coalition is in the works. A project called "City Idol," in which ordinary Torontonians competed with one another a la American Idol for a shot at running for Toronto City Council, produced an amazing slate of potential candidates --one that in its gender, ethnic and racial diversity bore little resemblance to the current council, composed largely of white males.
There also are many ways in which Toronto is at risk of failing to capitalize on what it has. With the exception of an effort to channel development into its main streets and several key areas, for instance, the city appears to do no meaningful neighbourhood planning work. Toronto's ability to do this kind of planning is complicated by the fact that all land use decisions in Toronto can be appealed to the Ontario Municipal Board--an arm of the provincial government -- which is considerably more conservative than the city of Toronto. This means that all major land use fights in the city are punted to what is largely a judicial regional body, one that is not required to respect local land use concerns.
While concentrating more authority over land use decisions in the hands of state or regional bodies is critical to stopping sprawl, by almost all accounts the OMB is an extremely gross tool, one that may (or may not) direct growth to the right locations, but that cannot, by design, respond to the fine-grained needs of the neighbourhoods. The province also has not granted the city the authority necessary to pass its own inclusionary housing ordinance, meaning that any requirements to build affordable housing are negotiated project by project. While the region is trying to implement its smart growth vision, the city does not seem to be able to do the meaningful neighborhood planning work necessary to make that vision a success. - Sarah Karlinsky is policy director of the San Francisco Planning + Urban Research Association.
Download the full magazine at
http://www.spur.org/
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/canada/toronto/story.html?id=730520
AoD