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Toronto is a city that loves its parks. When the weather gets warm and the leaves begin to unfurl, it can seem like the entire city is out lounging on the various grassy lawns and park benches and splashing in the wading pools. But not all parks are created equal, and getting a dynamite neighbourhood park takes a lot of work.

That’s where Park People comes in.

Park People works to engage Torontonians with their parks, providing support and guidance to neighbourhood groups, and advocating for better parks. The organization is the brain child of David Harvey, author of “Fertile Ground for New Thinking,” a report on the state of Toronto’s parks that’s well worth a read. As it finishes up its first year, Park People has acquired Anna Hill, who will be acting as Park People’s community outreach coordinator. We spoke to both as the organization gears up for its second annual Park Summit, taking place this Saturday at the Evergreen Brickworks.

A Friend in Need

“Parks aren’t as good as they can be,” Harvey says. “We’ve been taking our parks for granted.” But, he adds, “there’s this appetite in communities to get involved in parks and there’s been people doing great things in their parks for decades. It’s about building that network up into a higher level and getting better parks.”

One of the ways that Park People sees this happening is by fostering the creation of “Friends Of” groups, which are created by community members who are interested in taking stewardship of their local park. These groups do a variety of different work from organizing farmers markets and community gardens to small festivals and pizza nights. Some of them, like the Friends of Trinity Bellwoods or Friends of Dufferin Grove have been very successful in activating their parks and serve as models for other groups.

“There’s 1,600 parks in Toronto and just over 50 Friends Of groups,” Hill says, “So there’s more work to be done.”

“But,” Harvey says, “That’s 10 more than there were last year.” Harvey says that Park People has lent a helping hand in the creation of these new groups and expects even more to crop up in the next year.

Park People encourages these new groups by connecting them with other groups and sharing information, but also through a handy do-it-yourself guidebook that explains everything from the organizational structure of a Friends Of group to working with City staff to fundraising tips. Hill is particularly proud of the guidebook. “It’s a consolidated resource book of information, stories, tips, and a list of the different types of development you can do in parks that makes it a lot easier for new groups to get off the ground.”

“Generally,” she says, “the parks that have the Friends Of groups are much more activated and tend to be more developed as well, so it’s really important for people to take ownership of public spaces and help to shape them.”

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Financing the Parks We Want

One of the most pressing concerns Harvey identified for Toronto’s parks was maintenance. “By and large as a city we’re very well served by the number of parks. The big issue now is that the parks are fraying around the edges, and there’s this capital backlog and the backlog is getting bigger.”

Concerns over maintenance also affects the design of new parks, Harvey says. “With increasingly limited funds for park maintenance and support, the City is going to this concept of building the easiest-to-maintain park, so it’s just a little bit of grass a couple of benches and a tree and that’s not serving the community’s needs.”

As often happens with municipal issues, the conversation shifts to one of funding. “I think there needs to be a thoughtful consideration of how to find new funding sources for maintenance in parks,” Hill says. She mentions an idea to use Section 37 money, the funds the City gets from developers who are going through a re-zoning, to fund future park maintenance. (Currently, Section 37 money is only available for capital projects.)

Park People has also previously advocated, in one of their park solutions papers, the idea of mobilizing private capital for park funding, an idea that may make some Torontonians uncomfortable, but which is used in many U.S. cities. “I think there are ways that we can bring in private sector funding that don’t involve major advertising in parks,” Harvey says. However, he says, “we can’t let the City off the hook for being the core funder, the core responsibility for new parks and park maintenance across the city. This can’t be about bringing in private sector funding for parks because the City is cutting back funding for parks.” Any private sector funding, he says, should be above and beyond the City’s own funding, allowing parks to be more animated and have better programming and amenities.

Investment in our city’s public spaces can improve private residences and neighbourhoods, Hill adds. “It’s really worth nurturing our parks for many reasons beyond having a nice park,” she says, “A great way to develop a neighbourhood is to develop a park.”

“Or,” Harvey adds, “conversely, a great way to ruin a neighbourhood is to have a horrible park. It can really make it a place you don’t want to live.”

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Diverse City, Diverse Parks

Toronto is an incredibly culturally diverse city, but do our parks reflect and provide opportunities for that diversity? “No,” Harvey says, “I think there’s still a lot of work to be done on that.” Park People hopes to work more in new immigrant and diverse communities “to help form citizens’ groups or Friends Of groups in neighbourhoods that don’t have them so that these communities can really articulate what it is they need in a park to fully activate that park for the community.”

Having good parks is especially important for new immigrants, as they provide a space to socialize and meet people in their community. Parks “really are the areas of the city that are great democratic areas that anybody can get into and anybody can use,” Harvey says. “They’re these real mixing areas.”

Hill, who is originally from the United States, knew no one when she arrived in Toronto. “Everyone I met in my first year in Toronto I met in my park,” she says. “And if it wasn’t for my local park, I’m not quite sure how I would have met people, so I think that parks are critical places for new immigrants. Especially new immigrants that have young children. You need these public spaces, the places where new immigrants can go to kindle the beginnings of a first relationship.”

There is also a disparity between more and less affluent neighbourhoods and their parks. “Often the more affluent areas are in more dense neighbourhoods so people use their park more actively,” Harvey says. “Where you are in inner suburbs, there’s a lot of green space, but it’s not set up to be all that activated.” There’s also the issue of funds, of course. “In the more affluent neighbourhoods the Friends Of groups can do some fundraising or they’ve got that capacity to make a difference with their councillor because they’re politically connected or they’ve got people who can write grant applications and know where to submit for grants.”

The vast majority of the Friends Of groups in Toronto are located in downtown parks, Hill says, but she is hoping to change that as she works on building connections in the city’s priority neighbourhoods and new-immigrant communities. She mentions Dallington Park as an example, where mothers from Albania and Pakistan sit on the steering committee for their local park group.

Both Hill and Harvey are excited about rolling out some new programs in the coming year, while continuing to spread information and connect park groups across the city. It’s great to see so many people engaged in their communities and working to make their public spaces the kind of places that work for them. Because in the city within a park, we’re all park people.

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Let’s all check our language, Gillian Mason told the room of planners, students, and community members last night. The director of the Centre for City Ecology, she instructed us to expunge any jargon from our speech and to raise a hand if something wasn’t making sense to us. This was going to prove difficult, as the topic of the evening’s discussion was the often murky, you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours dealings of Section 37 of the Planning Act—the one which allows the City to barter extra density or height on a development site in return for agreed upon community benefits.

To help matters, the CCE brought in two speakers—urban planner John Gladki and property development lawyer Patrick Devine—to help explain what Section 37 allows, how it’s used, and how it can be improved to better serve Toronto.

To attempt to read the Planning Act, one of the pieces of provincial legislation that guides the planning and development of Ontario cities, is to submit oneself to the sometimes frustrating, often dry, and always dizzying world of legalese. You can do A, but not B, except if you do C, subject to D, excluded when E is involved, which it only is if you do A and B together and then stand on your head and spit three times. Simply put, it’s not the type of document you curl up with at night with a glass of wine.

Understanding the implications of this document, however, is crucial to anyone interested in grasping how planning decisions are made in the City of Toronto, what decisions the City is actually allowed to make, and what tools are available to build the kind of city we want and need. Section 37 is one of those tools.

To quote directly from the Act, Section 37 says: “The council of a local municipality may, in a by-law passed under section 34, authorize increases in the height and density of development otherwise permitted by the by-law that will be permitted in return for the provision of such facilities, services or matters as are set out in the by-law.” Essentially, the developers get to extract more value from their land in exchange for providing community benefits; they do this by providing capital facilities or cash that go to capital facilities: they install public art, provide daycare space, do heritage preservation work, and so on.

Section 37 is predicated on the idea that the community should share in the economic uplift a developer gets when the City allows them extra density or height (and thereby higher profits), but also that negative effects of a higher density development should be mitigated. These benefits are negotiated by the councillor in the ward in which the development is situated. Some of these negotiated benefits, such as Wychwood Barns, are probably seen as a good use of Section 37 money, while others, like the instance of a $70,000 dog drinking fountain mentioned by Devine…not so much.

And that is where Patrick Devine sees a problem. “The fundamental problem with Section 37 is the governance issue,” he said, calling each ward councillor the “kings and queens” of their areas. He recounted one story of a time he had brought suggestions for community benefits, based on community consultation, to the councillor in question. This councillor’s response: “Why are you even talking to me about this? There’s only one person who can decide where that money’s spent. Me.” While this reaction is hopefully atypically dramatic, the point is that there needs to be more community involvement and oversight in these decisions.

Devine argued that we’d do better with a different model of government, which would see half the current number of councillors elected in wards that matched the Provincial and Federal ridings (right now there are 44 councillors, each of which have roughly half of one federal/provincial riding), with another 22 councillors elected at-large among four districts. This, Devine said, would allow decisions to be made by councillors not beholden to a narrow geographic area.

John Gladki was also concerned with the lack of community consultation on how to spend Section 37 funds, and argued that the public needs to be involved earlier in the process. He also raised another persistent problem: the greatest needs are often in areas where development isn’t as robust. He suggested that we need to find a way to distribute some of the funds to areas across the city rather than keep each development’s Section 37 funds in its surrounding neighbourhood. Gladki also suggested opening up Section 37 to funding maintenance as well as capital expenditure, which would allow for things like ongoing park upkeep.

The audience’s response in the discussion afterwards highlighted the importance in reforming Section 37 in another way—to demystify a process that often feels a bit too back-room-dealy for some. People argued that it allowed councillors to sprinkle benefits around their ward, currying favour to those groups that may help them win re-election, rather than going toward the projects that are best for the community at large.

Whether this is always the case, one thing that everyone in the room agreed on: Section 37 could benefit from a little tweaking to become more transparent and better involve the community.

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It’s difficult to read Montreal-based writer Taras Grescoe’s new book on public transit around the world, Straphanger, without feeling more than a few pangs of some serious transit envy. Written as a public-transit travelogue, it’s a fascinating look at the intense relationship between a city’s growth and its transit system.

Reading Grescoe’s book, one comes to the inescapable confirmation of an idea that has been bandied about a lot recently: that the state of transit in Toronto is, to put it politely, tragic. While other cities have moved full steam ahead on transit expansions—even cities as freeway-drunk as Los Angeles—Toronto has become mired in tired debates over technology and ideology. While other cities come up with innovative methods for funding their transit systems, we are systematically starving ours.

So how can a Torontonian read Grescoe’s account of New York’s subway system or Tokyo’s bullet trains or Paris’ suburban commuter railway without feeling a little bit like we’ve missed the party? Indeed, Grescoe’s chapter on our city is entitled “The Toronto Tragedy.” But while Straphanger is a commentary on the harm the car has done to our cities’ form and vitality, it’s also a hopeful book. A book that, through examples from around the world, shows a way forward.

Torontoist sat down with Grescoe yesterday to talk about how the way we get around affects the structure of our cities, the myth of the car, and the future of transit in Toronto.

Form Follows Function Follows Form

Whether he is writing about the far-flung suburban sprawl of Phoenix or the tightly wrapped core of Paris that gives way to outer layers formed by tramways and, eventually, the car, Grescoe makes the point that the way we move is more than just getting from point A to point B. “City form is largely, but not inevitably,” he says, “influenced by its transportation modes of choice.” In other words, the way we move around our city matters.

Subways and streetcars, in their own way, fostered the first sprawl, as people were able to move farther out from the city’s core. Many cities, like Los Angeles and Vancouver, had their initial neighbourhoods formed along the spine of these early streetcar routes. But it was when the car came along, combined with cheap and easy home mortgages, that suburban sprawl took on the more menacing form that we see today. Grescoe relays the history of each city he visits through the expansion of its transit system, and, as he shows time and again, the two are inextricably linked.

But, Grescoe says, “transit can also change the existing form of a city.” Many cities are attempting to retrofit their suburban sprawl by creating denser centres around transit nodes, creating more walkable, transit-oriented development. Some of this, like the concentration of development around SkyTrain stations in Vancouver, works well, Grescoe points out, while others, like Portland’s Orenco Station neighbourhood, are really transit-adjacent developments where people still use their cars as their primary mode of transportation.

And if we pin our hopes on the car as our form of mass transportation, we’re going to have some serious problems.

The Mythology of the Car

The car was a really useful, ingenious invention, Grescoe says, “but it’s stopped working as a viable form of transport in our cities and we’re still living with the illusion that it can be one. We’re going to hit the wall soon in a lot of cities, and the biggest, most mature cities on the continent have already hit that. Toronto being one of them.”

In his chapter on Phoenix, Grescoe makes the argument that “every time you choose to drive you are, in a tiny way, opting out of, and diminishing, the public realm.” When asked if he views transit as a way to then engage with the public realm, he agrees. “Some people will look at me askance when I say that because you have images of Toyko commuters jammed together avoiding each others eyes,” but riding transit is a “reminder of the fact that we’re all in this thing together and this thing is the city.”

“We all slam our door on the world by getting in the car, by buying the ad line that this is bringing us freedom, by listening to Bruce Springsteen, falling in love with Jack Kerouac. Pining for escape. We’re getting sucked in. It’s a marketed legend now, the legend of freedom. For me, what you actually get is being stuck in gridlock on some freeway in an irrational transportation system.”

If a lesson can be drawn from Straphanger, it’s that an irrational transportation system begets an irrational urban form. “The calculus behind exurbs and office parks and long commutes was all predicated on gas being cheap,” Grescoe says. By structuring our cities around cheap, plentiful gas and the private car, we have painted ourselves into a bit of a corner. Now many cities are attempting to figure out how to graft light-rail transit lines and subways onto a city form that grew out of an entirely different mode of transportation. One only needs to read about Grescoe’s ride on Phoenix’s new light-rail line, which glides mostly empty past suburban subdivisions and parking lots, to understand how great this challenge will be.

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Where is Toronto in all of this? Grescoe writes that the Toronto-Hamilton region loses $6 billion a year in productivity due to congestion, has seen rush-hour traffic speeds decline by 24 per cent between 1986 and 2006, and ranks ahead of New York and Los Angeles on IBM’s annual commuter pain index. Ouch.

“Toronto, yeah, it’s uh,” Grescoe laughs, “It’s a horrible story.”

In his book, Grescoe makes the argument for public agencies with regional authority as a way to plan and implement well-run transit systems. “The TTC is doing a heroic job of running transit to the suburbs—it’s considered a model by a lot of transit scholars—but it’s too much for a city agency.”

“Metrolinx really needs to step up,” Grescoe says. “The TTC is incredibly frustrated with what they’re being called upon to do. They’re a small city transit agency that is called upon to do the work that TransLink is doing in the Vancouver area, that TriMet is doing in the Portland area. Those are transit systems that work because there is regional planning. Metrolinx doesn’t have the money or the resources to oversee these things. And the TTC doesn’t. I think there needs to be, at the Metrolinx level, good regional oversight. And that’s what I found in every city I went to: the cities where transit actually worked there is a planning agency overseeing this.”

A good transit system costs money, but recent polls have suggested that Torontonians are warming up to the idea of using alternative funding methods to get the city moving again, whether that takes the form of a Los Angeles–style regional sales tax, road tolls, London-style congestion charges, or some combination. Funding has to be both reliable and consistent, Grescoe says. “You can’t hope for a little money from the federal government here so a politician can come and cut the ribbon and gain some points among his constituency.”

“If you want to keep your city moving, you have to make that investment and it can’t come in dribs and drabs. That’s the lesson you see from cities around the world. We tend to have in Canada this big mega project thing: Oh, there’s an Olympics happening or a World’s Fair happening. That’s how the Montreal Metro got built; that’s how the SkyTrain got built. We just need to bite the bullet and face reality like they have in Asia and many European cities. Transit is what makes a city work and we’re falling behind in North American right now.”

However, Grescoe also says that the TTC “has been fighting against incredible odds to provide pretty good service to a very large area.”

So, what could the TTC do better right now? “I think that the single best thing that the TTC could do would be to do what Metro has done in Los Angeles, what Montreal’s STM is doing, and spend a little money on public relations. Cast themselves as underdogs and heroes and saviours of the city. Because they are. People love to hate the TTC. Everyone has their horror stories about snoozing guys in the booth, but in a lot of ways this is a system that has kept the city running.”

One hopes that with Toronto’s recent return to Transit City, Grescoe will have a bit of rewriting to do on his Toronto chapter when the paperback edition comes out. In the meantime, it probably wouldn’t hurt to send the mayor a copy.

Correction: April 26, 12:40PM – The word Phoenix was previously misspelled throughout the article above and has now been corrected.

The newest Urban Forest Demonstration Garden at the Walmer entrance to Spadina Station.

It used to be just a median of trampled grass between the road and the Walmer Street entrance to the Spadina subway station, but a not-for-profit organization called LEAF, with help from the TTC, has turned the strip into one of their Urban Forest Demonstration Gardens.

There are now five such gardens at TTC Stations around the city. The first two, planted in the spring of 2010, are located at Old Mill Station and the Markham Street entrance to Bathurst Station. There are also gardens at St. Clair Station and High Park Station. The newest garden is at the Walmer Street entrance to Spadina Station.

They may not look like much now, but come spring these gardens will add a bit more green to the city.

Jessica Piskorowski, the Education and Stewardship Coordinator at LEAF, says that a number of different factors go into deciding which TTC stations get a garden. Visibility is important: these are “demonstration” gardens, so viewing by the public is essential. LEAF also factors in access to water, soil condition, and the volunteer base in the area.

There are multiple partners in the project, but the TTC plays a large role. Aside from providing the land, the TTC prepares the soil for planting, does some landscaping, and provides signage and a small shed to keep tools.

A total of 319 plants—consisting of 60 different kinds of native species of trees, shrubs, and perennials—have been put in the ground to date. Piskorowski says that LEAF tries to “gear species to support wildlife and song birds,” so there is an element of habitat to the gardens as well.

With these gardens, Piskorowski says, LEAF hopes to show how “you can transform a regular lawn into an attractive natural space.” She says that not only do the demonstration gardens provide an aesthetic boost to the surrounding neighbourhoods but they help reduce storm water run-off, filter out pollutants in the air, and help to absorb carbon.

The garden located at the Markham entrance to Bathurst Station.

Don’t expect any hand-crafted topiaries, though—part of the point of the project is to inject a little bit of wildness into the city, Piskorowski says. That doesn’t mean letting the sites grow out of control, however. Volunteers from the surrounding neighbourhoods who are graduates of LEAF’s Tree Tender Training Program make sure the plants are well-watered and pruned.

Danette Steele, a graduate of the program—which educates volunteers on everything from tree identification and maintenance to understanding City by-laws related to the urban forest—is a steward for the garden located at the Walmer Street entrance to Spadina Station. She says she got involved with LEAF beacuse she “wanted to have a practical experience, something really tangible.”

Community feedback has, by all accounts, been positive. “People would just stop and say thank you,” Steele says.

The gardens show off the potential of smaller, sometimes forgotten spaces. Before LEAF got its hands on the small strip of land on Walmer, the area was a median of grass, often muddy. “The gardens demonstrate possibility,” Steele says.

These gardens will soon, no doubt, be covered in a thick blanket of snow for several months, leaving only the sheds and signs poking out to let the world know they exist. But wait, Piskorowski says, “and good things will come.”

Rendering of the Keating Channel Precinct plan done by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates Inc.; image courtesy of {a href=”http://www.waterfrontoronto.ca/image_galleries/lower_don_lands/?9631#9635”}Waterfront Toronto{/a}

It’s not every day that there’s a line up to get into a public consultation. But it’s not every day that there’s a consultation on such a contentious issue as the future development of a major chunk of Toronto’s waterfront. Hosted by Lura Consulting (listen, understand, relate, advance) and SWERHUN, the event was an introduction to the forthcoming public consultation process about accelerating development in the Port Lands, as well as a chance for residents to express their goals and ideas for the area.

The consultation is a result of a consensus deal reached by city council back in September after several weeks of handwringing over the fate of these waterfront lands. Said handwringing was the result of Councillor Doug Ford’s (Ward 2, Etobicoke North) attempt to wrest control of the project from Waterfront Toronto and promote an alternate “vision” of the waterfront. This vision included, among other things, the world’s largest Ferris wheel and a megamall.

The consensus plan kept the development in the hands of Waterfront Toronto, but urged the organization to look at ways in which development could be be sped up, and as well as at alternate funding models. It also directed a round of public consultations be convened to discuss these matters.

Hence, on a Monday night during the busy holiday season, several hundred people packed themselves around tables in the Appel Salon at the Toronto Reference Library, ready to discuss plans for the waterfront.

There already is, however, a plan for these lands [PDF]. The result of a 2007 international design competition, that plan comes courtesy of the New York–based architecture firm Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates Inc., responsible for such stunning projects as Brooklyn Bridge Park. Their plan focused on connecting the area to the surrounding city with a mixed-use community with plenty of public access, and, crucially, re-naturalizing the mouth of the Don River. As the consensus plan reports, these plans, among other council-adopted plans for the area, “will be used as a base line in the financial analysis of the impacts of any additional density and/or mix of uses for the remainder of the Port Land” [PDF].

As a consultation process involving hundreds of people, the night was well-designed. After initial presentations by John Campbell, president and CEO of Waterfront Toronto, and John Livey, deputy city manager at the City of Toronto, participants—who were broken up across discussion tables—were given 15 minutes to come up with some questions of clarification, which were then asked directly to “the Johns” (as a member of Lura Consulting awkwardly put it). This was followed by a further round of brainstorming on ideas for the Port Lands, and an opportunity to share them with them room.

The 988-acre Port Lands area, a former wetlands infilled in the early 20th century to create industrial lands, presents both major opportunities and major challenges. It needs extensive soil remediation and infrastructure to support development. But it is also mostly publicly owned, close to the downtown, and allows for what could be amazing waterfront amenities for a city sorely in need of amazing waterfront amenities.

Among the concerns most often expressed last night was the fate of a re-naturalized mouth of the Don River, a key component in the current plans for the area. John Campbell assured the crowd that a re-naturalized Don River was very much a part of any new, accelerated plans for the area as this is contained in the terms of reference for the Environmental Assessment, within which any new plans will work.

One woman prefaced her comment by saying that this was under the assumption that plans should be accelerated at all, which, she said, “should be its own conversation.” Many expressed similar trepidation over what an acceleration might mean for the quality of development in the lands, arguing against hastily made decisions based on the current economic climate.

Campbell responded that the current rethink was “not to lower quality or demean results” and was “not a tradeoff exercise between doing something cheaper,” but instead “tweaking” the project. Such tweaking could include a different phasing of development and market absorption model, as well as reconfigured blocks to allow for more private-sector investment.

A few people also came up with some financial ideas, such as issuing bonds to pay for the development (which would allow Waterfront Toronto to borrow money), and tax increment financing, a tool that is used extensively in the United States that sees property taxes from raised land values plugged back into further revitalization efforts in that same area.

Also on the public’s mind: the need for transit access, affordable housing, sustainable building practices, and the importance of parklands, as well as the future of specific sites like the potential adaptive reuse of the Hearn generating station.

One woman near the end of the night spoke about having “idea fatigue,” noting that extensive public consultations had already taken place for these lands. Whether or not others in the audience, or those following the online webcast and Twitter conversation, also had idea fatigue, it’s clear that Torontonians are committed to ensuring they get the best waterfront they can, even if that means coming to an almost three-hour public consultation on a mid-December Monday evening.

The next round of public consultations will take place in February and March of 2012.

CORRECTION: December 13, 3:55 p.m. This article originally stated that the consultation was hosted by Lura Consulting, but omitted the fact that it was co-hosted by SWERHUN. We regret the error.

Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains—the very best and very worst people, places, things, and ideas that have influenced the city over the past 12 months. From December 12–23, the candidates for Mightiest and Meanest—and new this year, a reader’s write-in option! From December 26–29 you’ll be able to vote for Toronto’s Superhero and Supervillain of the year, and we’ll reveal the results December 30.

Hell hath no fury like Toronto waterfront lovers scorned. This is something Councillor Doug Ford learned the hard way when he expressed a desire to wrestle control of the Port Lands from Waterfront Toronto, the tri-governmental agency set up to develop the waterfront. He also publicly mused about his own visions for the area, which would replace the mixed-use community and Michael Van Valkenburgh Inc.’s existing plan to re-naturalize the mouth of the Don River.

What did the rookie councillor envision instead? A megamall, monorail, and a giant Ferris wheel. Oh, and a hotel where you can drive a boat right into the lobby. All that was missing was the space-shuttle launch pad.

Many people were, to put it mildly, pissed. But often outraged citizens need something or someone who is able to focus all that emotion like a magnifying glass, to keep the issue hot. Without that focus, the frustration people feel begins to dissipate—exactly what certain politicians hope for. Eventually, another news item enters the media cycle and people move on.

Enter CodeBlueTO, a collection of businesses, neighbourhood groups, and concerned citizens devoted to saving, as they called it, the people’s plans for the waterfront, “the ones developed over the past several years through extensive consultation with the community and input from planners, architects, environmentalists, economists, and developers.” Turns out, backroom discussions with mall developers don’t sit well with most people.

CodeBlueTO quickly grew into a loud, vocal campaign. (Disclosure: Torontoist contributor Laurence Lui was involved in CodeBlueTO; he was not involved in the development of this year’s Heroes and Villains feature in any way.) They launched a website and started a petition that grew to more than 6,000 signatures. Their dexterity in using social media to get the word out was apparent in their Twitter-ready name: #CodeBlueTO.

By being the magnifying glass, CodeBlueTO was able to not only keep the issue hot, but to intensify it. All of this work culminated in the announcement of a consensus deal struck by city councillors working across the usual political lines, with Ford backing down. The consensus deal kept development in the hands of Waterfront Toronto, but urged them to speed up development.

CodeBlueTO understood the passion and engagement of the people of Toronto and provided the city with a united voice speaking against the SimCity-ization of the waterfront. The Fords apparently underestimated that passion—a sore mistake.

Riverdale Park. Photo by {a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/dtstuff9/5846944879/”}dtstuff9{/a} from the {a href=”http://www.flickr.com/groups/torontoist/”}Torontoist Flickr Pool{/a}

On a Thursday night last week, park-loving Torontonians found themselves gathered around a collection of tables in the gymnasium at Wellesley Community Centre for the last of four public consultation sessions the City conducted to develop its new Parks Plan. The five-year strategic plan will touch on everything from park acquisition to management to the operations of Toronto’s 1,600 parks. After the presenter breezed through a PowerPoint presentation [PDF] on seven council-approved guiding principles, the discussion passed hands to the citizens sitting at tables waiting to tell City employees what they thought of Toronto’s parks.

One of the first questions that arose was how the City advertised the public consultations. “Someone sent me a link on Facebook,” said one woman. “Was this information posted in any actual parks?” asked someone else. Indeed, the poor publicizing of these consultations is a problem for a process that purports to engage a wide range of citizens. Many in the city who would want to provide input into the Parks Plan likely have no idea when consultations are happening, or that there is an accompanying online survey.

Dave Harvey is not one of those people. Harvey is executive director of Park People, an advocacy organization that brings together people from all over the city through their love of Toronto’s parks. The organization recently released the first of their solutions papers, Pathway for Parks [PDF], which outlines several ideas that could improve Toronto’s parks. The focus on financial impacts and finding “efficiencies” shows that Park People is paying close attention to the current climate at City Hall by speaking their language.

The report highlights the need for the City to shift resources into maintenance of existing parks as opposed to the creation of new parks, as well as the benefits of working more closely with the community and facilitating the creation of more neighbourhood park groups. “Toronto Park People will work in partnership with City staff to make this happen,” the report says.

The report also calls for a look into private investment in parks, including sponsorships and partnerships with surrounding business improvement areas. It is likely these types of recommendations will find the most traction within the current City administration, but Park People maintains that advertising should stay out of city parks, and that the community should approve any sponsorships. Many other cities, like New York and Chicago, have parks funded by businesses and corporate sponsorships; however, as shown in a panel discussion on parks in April, some in Toronto are wary of the idea.

Parks, Forestry and Recreation was one of the City departments told to cut 10 per cent from their operating budget for 2012. Yesterday morning the City released these budgets, showing that Parks had made a reduction of 4.9 per cent, or $13.4 million. “No additional reductions were recommended beyond this point,” the report notes, “as further reductions would significantly impact PF&R’s service levels.”

There are a number of service impacts outlined [PDF]. Impacts noted as minor ranged from off-peak closures at select arenas to reducing the Parks Ambassador Program—which identifies homeless people in parks and refers them to support services—from two people to one person. Major service impacts included the closing of five wading pools and two outdoor pools, and reducing a program that prunes and removes hazardous trees. The report also calls for introducing children and youth program fees in priority centres, which will bring in an estimated $1.1 million.

Torontoist caught up with Park People steering committee member James Chan at Thursday’s public consultation. He said the problem with cutting funding to parks is that, though cuts may not always have an immediately visible impact, they have long-term effects on the quality of the park system, especially given the already considerable maintenance backlog. Basically, while closing an outdoor pool has an immediate impact, the effect of reducing the amount of tree maintenance may be felt less directly but is still significant.

This is something that those at the Park Plan consultation understood. At the end of the consultation, an overview of some of the comments from each of the tables was given. People wanted more benches, better maintenance, more cricket pitches, and better wayfinding signage and lighting. They wanted upgraded washroom facilities, more community gardens, and better tree care. For them, the city’s parks are an essential service—not a nice-to-have, but a need-to-have.

This is the city within a park, after all.

Anyone who claims they can eliminate congestion is either deluded or a liar.

So contended transit activist Steve Munro Tuesday night, at a public forum on transit hosted by U of T’s Cities Centre. “If we focus on congestion,” he said, “we’re taking a car-oriented approach to building transit, and that’s doomed to failure.”

Dr. Eric J. Miller, director of the Cities Centre and the second speaker of the evening, agreed. Congestion is not the problem, he said, but the symptom of a problem.

The evening was called Moving People: Responses to Congestion, the second in a six-instalment series discussing major issues the city is facing. Transit is certainly one of the biggies in Toronto—a complicated issue that everyone loves to talk about, and many think they can fix. Politicians love to draw lines on maps, usually more than they like to build those lines. Commuters grumble about wait times, crowded buses and trains, streetcars holding up cars, cars holding up streetcars—it’s a long list that, by now, we all know by heart.

Photo by {a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/phil_marion/5021610621/"}Phil Marion{/a} from the {a href="http://www.flickr.com/groups/torontoist"}Torontoist Flickr Pool{/a}.

Both Munro and Miller focused on the importance of asking the right question when it comes to transit planning. For starters: not “Where can we put a subway?” but “What do we need to accomplish, and where?” And both, but particularly Munro, spoke about what he called our technology hang-up, where we get so stuck in an endless cycle of debating technologies (subway vs. LRT vs. bus vs. streetcar vs. monorail) that we don’t actually end up building any of them. As Miller noted, there has been very little transit infrastructure developed over the last 20 years, while the region has grown considerably. “If congestion is to be reduced, transit and non-motorized modes need to do more than just keep up,” he said.

They haven’t even been doing that.

We also can’t look at transit in isolation, ignoring the land use context. The way that we build the city, and have built the city, greatly affects our ability to service any area of it. If we build sprawling, low-density, single-family housing suburbs, then that is going to affect our transit options differently than if we build dense, multi-family, mixed-use neighbourhoods. This is something that Miller pointed out when he threw up numerous charts and graphs, the gist of which were to show that transit use is heavy in Toronto’s downtown, while car use is heavy in its lower-density suburban areas. No surprise there. His point was, however, that if we want to talk congestion, we can’t just talk transit. We need to talk about the shape of the communities through which that transit runs.

Photo by {a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/imhalfmydadsage/6047837029/"}Half my Dad's age{/a} from the {a href="http://www.flickr.com/groups/torontoist"}Torontoist Flickr Pool{/a}.

When Rob Ford put Transit City out to pasture on the first day of his mayoralty, many in the city decried the rejection of a plan that would have moved Toronto in the right direction on this issue. Miller acknowledged some debate about the merits of the Transit City proposal, but then added, “If not Transit City, what?”

What, indeed. Our current transit plan seems to be more about cutting services, burying LRT lines where burying them doesn’t make sense, and building expensive subway extensions into areas of the city that don’t need them. “If Ford finds the four billion to build the Sheppard Subway line, that’s four billion wasted,” Miller said. Ideology has trumped evidence, as it often does in transit, much to the detriment of Toronto.

What Transit City was attempting was exactly what both Munro and Miller highlighted as one of the backbones of a workable transit system: a hierarchy of different modes and feeder systems. The plan would have extended higher-order transit service to areas in the city that needed it, connecting them to the larger, more established network of the city. A subway is great, but if you can’t get to it then what’s the point? And then there are the buses. No one likes to talk about buses until someone suggests they be cut. But it’s buses that are the most important in low-density areas, ones without enough commuters to justify more intensive transit infrastructure. We’ve made our urban form bed, and now we have to lie in it.

So, how to encourage more people to take transit? According to Miller, the three things that influence people’s choice the most are: How long do I have to walk to get to a stop or station? How long do I have to wait while I’m there? And will it come on time?

All of which sounds a bit menacing when you remember that these are some of the things that will be affected when the TTC reduces service in response to budget constraints.

Of all the graphs that Miller put up, the most interesting was a probability curve that showed the likelihood of people taking transit. On one side of the curve were low-density, car-dependent areas where you have to spend a lot of money on transit improvements to get a very small boost in ridership. On the other side was high-density, already transit-dependent areas where you can similarly spend a lot of money on transit to get only get a small boost. What’s important is the stuff in the middle of the curve, the areas where smaller improvements in transit can go a long way.

If we are to move Toronto forward, it is clear that we need to put evidence before ideology, examine our urban form, and identify those areas where improvements in the system will go the furthest in encouraging transit use. If only we had a plan, funded and ready to go, that did those things.

Photo by {a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/loserprince/2610015591/”}claire.somerville{/a} from the {a href=”http://www.flickr.com/groups/torontoist/”}Torontoist Flickr Pool{/a}.

Last night, the University of Toronto’s Cities Centre had its first talk in a series called Toronto in Question. The question, Is Toronto Broke?, brought Enid Slack, director of the Institute of Municipal Finance and Governance at the University of Toronto, and Shirley Hoy, CEO of the Toronto Lands Corporation and former City Manager, together for an evening of frank discussion.

Hitting the Skids?

So, is Toronto broke? “Of course not,” Slack said. “The city can’t go broke.” By law we have to balance our budget every year, unlike the provincial and federal governments. But that doesn’t mean the budget problems we have each year aren’t real or important.

One of the biggest questions is whether Toronto has, as Rob Ford says, a spending problem, or whether the city actually has a revenue problem. It’s clear from both Enid Slack and Shirley Hoy that the problem lies distinctly with an inability to generate adequate revenue for city services. Combine a lack of appropriate revenue tools with the downloading of many social services from the province during Mike Harris’s tenure, with the forced amalgamation of the City of Toronto and you wind up with what Hoy called a structural deficit.

And what about that $774 million dollar budget gap we are desperately trying to plug? Many have come out questioning the validity of that figure, with former budget chief David Soknacki saying that it might actually be half that size. In fact, one of the things Slack said was that Toronto can only estimate its revenues and expenditures to a certain extent. The land transfer tax is, for example, bringing in more than the City thought this year. Basically, we don’t really know enough to proclaim $774 million as the number to end all numbers.

How Our Taxes Are Failing Us

With the lengthy list of services that the City must provide, you’d think it would have access to a variety of financial tools and taxes with which to fund itself. After all, these aren’t just piddling services, but ones that are crucial to well-being and health of citizens, as well as in attracting international businesses and tourists.

You might think that, but you’d be wrong. The City largely funds itself through three revenue sources: the property tax, provincial transfers, and user fees. The City has no access to the so-called growth taxes—sales and income tax—as do the provincial and federal governments. Slack did speak in favour of the property tax as a stable tax, well-suited to municipalities. It is essentially immobile (meaning people can’t just pick up their property and move to another jurisdiction), and it works in theory like a benefit tax. This means that, supposedly, you understand and feel that the tax you are paying is directly related to benefits you yourself see. (Remember all those services listed earlier?)

But the property tax also has some very real limitations. For one, it’s inelastic, meaning that it doesn’t grow at the same rate as the economy. It is also a highly visible tax. Slack said that she rarely encounters people who know how much income tax they paid last year or how much HST they paid, but those same people will be able to sound off the exact number in property tax they paid, because they got a bill for it. The number is right there, presented to you on official stationary.

The property tax, Slack said, “is good for local government, but it shouldn’t be the only tax for Toronto.” While the City of Toronto Act, passed in 2006, allowed Toronto access to more funding tools, it didn’t open up the tax system to allow Toronto a piece of the really good taxes—what Slack called the “bread-and-butter” taxes of the income and sales tax. The taxes the City could levy, Slack called “nuisance taxes.” These are very visible taxes that bring in small amounts of revenue, and basically just irritate people. Chicago, she said, has a whole slew of these taxes, on everything from bottled water to amusement to boat mooring. The personal vehicle tax, for all its headaches, brought in only about $45 million—just the tiniest of nibbles in what Toronto spends each year.

One Possible Solution

What she advocates for is access to the sales or income tax. Not only would this bring in stable, growth-related revenue for the City, it would capture some revenue from those who pay property taxes outside of Toronto, but come in to work or vacation and use our services. These taxes don’t have to be large, and could be carried out by piggybacking a small percentage onto the current HST or income tax paid in the city. In fact, Mayor Naheed Nenshi of Calgary has called for a penny added to the GST paid in Calgary to go towards the city. (Toronto had a similar campaign under former mayor David Miller.)

Of course, any talk of taxes is rapidly turning into a taboo subject, as one man in the audience mentioned. He spoke of the need to reclaim the word “tax” from its current depths as a kind of slur. If we want something nice for the kitchen, he said, then we have to pay the price. Similarly, if we want a nice city to live in with good services, we have to pay the price.

This does, of course, become complicated due to the fact that many city services, like sewage and water delivery, and to some extent police and fire, are invisible; we don’t really think about them much until something goes wrong with them. What we think about is what we can see: the condition of our roads, our parks, our libraries, our transit system. There becomes a disconnect between what we feel we are paying for and what we feel we are getting in return.

If we are truly to build and sustain the kind of city we want, and deserve, we are going to need access to bigger, better revenue tools. Unfortunately, the pretty-much-over provincial election didn’t really address this issue. “Let’s go to the province and say we want to take control of our city,” Slack said. “We’re a city of 2.5 million people with a budget of $13 billion. I think we’re all grown up.”

photo by {a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mtunney/3282585763/"}Michael Tunney{/a} from the {a href="http://www.flickr.com/groups/torontoist/"}Torontoist Flickr Pool{/a}

After several polls showed Rob Ford and his plans for Toronto are becoming deeply unpopular with citizens from all areas of the city, the mayor came out to say that he was going to “stay the course.” But what exactly is that course, and is it the right one for the city? Does Toronto have a vision, or has it stumbled blindly into a dark spot? And maybe most importantly, how do we get out of it?

This question was put to four city builders yesterday at an event organized by the Canadian Urban Institute and hosted by the University of Toronto’s Cities Centre. The panel consisted of Geoff Cape of the Evergreen Brickworks, University of Toronto professor David Hulchanski of “the three cities” fame [PDF], Julia Deans of Civic Action, and John Van Nostrand of planningAlliance.

There has been much hand-wringing over the state and direction of Toronto during the last 10 months since Rob Ford stood in the front of the council chamber and officially became mayor. During this time it seems many people have gathered at events, much like the one put on by Canurb, to basically ask the question: “How the hell did this happen to us?”

One of the answers to that may be found in something that former mayor David Crombie said at a discussion of the work of Jane Jacobs last week when he spoke about the gap in dialogue between the old City of Toronto and the newer amalgamated city with all its suburbs. One can’t help but reflect on this gap after attending several of these events, which all happen to take place in the downtown area and are attended mostly by downtown residents. “There’s a real need to get to know each other’s city,” John Van Nostrand said. In fact, several of the panelists at yesterday’s event spoke of the need to provide spaces for discussion in suburban areas, where members from across the city can gather to share exactly what kind of city they want. Or, in other words, talk about that vision thing.

Many times at these events it’s easy to come away with the unsatisfying feeling that, although many interesting things were discussed and debated, real, practical solutions remain slightly out of sight. Sure, it’s great to speak about the need to create wider dialogue and spaces to connect, but when the inevitable questions arise during the Q&A period about how to actually achieve these things, the discussion becomes a lot more difficult.

However, two ideas emerged, not from the panelists, but from audience members during the question period, that present a real, practical way to work toward building a new vision for the city. One was presented by a member of the Annex Residents Association who said the ARA hopes to “twin” with another residents association, such as one in Scarborough, and will hold several joint meetings in both neighbourhoods. This idea has enormous potential to get residents from different areas of the city to meet and share.

The second idea, which built on the first, came from a woman who wondered how to engage Toronto’s youth from across the city. She suggested a similar “twinning” program for school classrooms, where downtown classes travelled to meet with classes from suburban areas and vice versa. David Hulchanski spoke about the need to create spaces where ideas can happen, spaces of compromise and discussion. This “twinning” could be one way to create such a space.

Visions are not something formally bestowed upon a city from above; they come bubbling up from underneath, from the, as Geoff Cape put it, “patterns of actions” of different communities.

We are at a perfect point in Toronto to discuss the vision thing. Rob Ford has done much for civic engagement in this city by forcing many people who perhaps don’t engage often in civic issues to become deeply involved in things like the core service review, or the plan for the waterfront, or the TTC. We are gathering and discussing and debating big civic issues almost monthly. And this engagement will hopefully continue now that the City’s Official Plan, the document that sets out the course of development in the city over the long term, has come up for its five-year review.

Over the next few months, Torontonians will be meeting across the city to discuss exactly what kind of Toronto they envision. Planning is done best when it’s done not just by “experts” at the top but through facilitating discussion with the very people who live in communities all around the city. John Van Nostrand said yesterday that “we have a potential plan lying beneath us.” We just need to all figure it out together.

CORRECTION: September 22, 2011, 2:10 PM This post originally stated that the ARA had already “twinned” with a residents association in Scarborough, when in fact the idea has not been formally adopted by the association.

Photo of the Sherbourne Common Pavilion by {a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ashtonpal/5682261547/"}AshtonPal{/a} from the {a href="http://www.flickr.com/groups/torontoist/"}Torontoist Flickr Pool{/a}

These are some of the questions, along with others much more subtle, that the jury for the TUDA must weigh when making their choices. This year there were 129 submissions, of which 90 were built. Thirteen awards of excellence were given, as well as 10 honourable mentions, in 10 different categories that ranged from “small open spaces” to “visions and master plans” to “student projects” [PDF].

In a head-slapping moment, as reported by Torontoist yesterday, the Fort York Bridge was given an Award of Excellence for its use of “innovative shapes and forms to entice pedestrians and cyclists to cross a wide, and for some forbidding expanse of track.” Sounds great. If only council hadn’t voted to kill the bridge months ago.

Sugar Beach was given an Award of Excellence in the “large places or neighbourhood design” category, with the jury commending the attention to small design details and its sense of enclosure set between the Corus building and the Redpath Sugar Refinery. The recognition here surely has special meaning as Waterfront Toronto, the developer of the site, has come under fire recently from the City.

Waterfront Toronto garnered another win in the “elements” category with the Sherbourne Common Pavilion, a Frank Gehry-esque wavering piece of silver designed by Teeple Architects that connects the splash pad and the grassy field on the south edge of the park. (Sherbourne Common as a whole, however, was missing from the list.)

Another well-deserved win went to the West Toronto Railpath in the “small open spaces” category. This two-kilometre cycling and walking trail spans from Dundas Street West up to Cariboo Avenue. The jury noted that the “design is an inviting composition of sensitive landscaping that respects the wild quality of the rail corridor, combined with public art pieces and distinctive markers around the entry points and intersections with the street grid.” We only wish it was longer.

Other notable wins included 60 Richmond Housing Co-op in the “private buildings in context—mid rise”, the Thompson Hotel and Residences in the “private buildings in context—tall residential” category, and the TIFF Bell Lightbox in the “public buildings in context” category.

What is immediately obvious about the awards is that most are located in the old City of Toronto, and many right downtown. This is a fault the jury notes, as they expressed concern over the lack of submissions from North York, Scarborough, and Etobicoke.

Whether you agree or not with the choices for the awards given out, the recognition of the importance of quality and thoughtful urban design, planning, and architecture in Toronto is paramount at this point in time. Development should not simply be concerned with extracting the most value from the land as possible, but must also give something back to the public realm. Many of the selections by the jury do just that.

A rendering of the approved Lower Don Lands plan from {a href="http://www.waterfrontoronto.ca/image_galleries/lower_don_lands/?9631#9650"}Waterfront Toronto{/a}.

To listen to Toronto city councillor Doug Ford (Ward 2, Etobicoke North) and landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh speak about the development of Toronto’s Lower Don Lands is to listen to two very different things. One speaks of Ferris wheels and monorails and megamalls, while the other uses words like “carefully considered” and “metrical analysis” and “multiple interrelationships.” Can you guess who is who?

Today at the Royal Ontario Museum, the Toronto Society of Architects brought Michael Van Valkenburgh of MVVA Inc., the architectural landscape team that won the 2007 international Waterfront Toronto design competition to develop a plan for the Lower Don Lands, to speak about the specifics of that plan. It was a strategically placed talk, as city council meets this week to discuss the alternate plan put forward by Doug Ford that was revealed with much fanfare and promises of dropping jaws just a few weeks ago.

Jaws have dropped, but not quite in the way Doug Ford had hoped.

Since Ford’s announcement, concerned citizens, in the form of a campaign called CodeBlueTO, have organized and petitioned for council to stick with the plan it unanimously approved in 2010.

That plan, as explained by Van Valkenburgh, consists of an extremely intricate and thoughtful design that was developed over an extensive public consultation period. The plan centres around what Van Valkenburgh characterized as the “three legs of a stool” of flood protection, re-naturalization, and city building. Not only does the re-naturalization of the mouth of the Don River, which was artificially redirected into the Keating Channel in the early 20th century, help with flood control for the area, but it will create a sustainable and beautiful natural attraction that will run right through the heart of the new neighbourhood. “This is a careful piece of science, which has been folded into the design,” Van Valkenburgh said.

For those concerned about a preference for parkland over development in the plan, Van Valkenburgh said that the structure of their plan raises the linear metres of frontage onto open space from 4,400 metres to 5,200 metres. The new river, he said, has helped structure the urban form. Basically, what this means is that more developments will front directly onto open space, thus raising real estate values in the area. Well-designed parkland and open space isn’t just a “nice to have,” as Mayor Ford might say, but a “need to have” if you are looking to raise real estate values as well as create a livable neighbourhood.

What was clear from watching the presentation was that the current approved plan for the Lower Don Lands, if built out according to the design, will be one of the most ecologically sensitive and intelligently designed dense neighbourhoods in Canada. Himy Syed, once a mayoral candidate, asked in the question period afterward, “How many cities have walked away from something like this and what the hell do they look like now?”

To be sure, the timeline for building the site is a source of frustration, as evidenced by one woman in the audience who expressed this very concern. Paul Bedford, former chief planner for the City of Toronto, attempted to minimize concerns over timelines, suggesting that full build-out could happen in 10 to 15 years, but that this really depended on the market.

It would be a travesty to scrap these approved plans, starting the process of waterfront development over with the goal of maximizing profit and speed, likely to the detriment of public consultation. As Sugar Beach and Sherbourne Common show, Waterfront Toronto is moving forward and producing results. Van Valkenburgh showed an image of Don River Park, currently under construction. Even without the trees and grass, it looked impressive.

Sometimes good things really do come to those who wait.