“A cross between Woodstock and the Algonquin Round Table,” is what Michael Redhill called it. Dorothy Parker grinding out an electric cover of “The Star Spangled Banner”? Well, not quite. Rather, Redhill, the literary curator for Luminato 2013, was describing A Literary Picnic, the annual festival’s celebration of storytelling, creativity, and the written word.

On Saturday, June 22, 60 authors will hold very casual court in Trinity Bellwoods Park, reading from their works, discussing their writing processes, signing autographs, and reclining on blankets for one-on-one chats with fans. The Toronto Public Library Bookmobile will be nearby for anyone looking to borrow a tome or two, and picnic-goers are invited to swap books with each other at a designated table. A fleet of local food trucks will be on hand for those whose arms are too full of books to carry a packed lunch.

As Redhill’s “Woodstock Round Table” line suggests, A Literary Picnic is a mash-up of tastes. The free admission and communal feel may be hippie-friendly, but this bookish sit-in has a pedigree that would please even the most straight-laced literature snob. Redhill and his team have booked a roster of highly acclaimed authors from an array of literary forms and genres: Believer Book Award–winner Tamara Faith Berger; Jessica Westhead, one of CBC Books’s top 10 female writers of 2012; Griffin Poetry Prize–shortlisted Priscila Uppal; Globe and Mail Books Editor Jared Bland; and dozens more writers of novels, short stories, poetry, and non-fiction.

Evan Munday, author of the Silver Birch-nominated Dead Kid Detective Agency, will be at the picnic to preview Dial M for Morna, the second installment of his mystery-fantasy series for young readers. But Munday, who is also a publicist at Coach House Books literary press, is equally excited to see the other headliners at the picnic. “I hope I’m able to catch them all,” he said, reeling off the names of several of his favourite attending authors.

A Literary Picnic represents the breaking of new ground for Toronto’s literary community. “This is the very first time an event like this has ever been mounted in Toronto,” Redhill said. In addition to marking the start of a new program, the afternoon’s theme, “Beginnings,” is a nod to Luminato’s June 20 citizenship ceremony, featuring a talk by Institute for Canadian Citizenship Executive Director and CEO Gillian Smith. And, more relevant to the authors at the picnic, it’s an acknowledgement of the challenge that every artist faces when starting a new project, a self-directed question that Redhill summarizes as, “How to start?”

The 2013 Toronto Jazz Festival descends on the city this Friday with a huge “free for all” event. That means all of Friday’s programming at every Jazz Festival venue is, yes, completely free of charge. There will be concerts from local favourites Molly Johnson and Mary Margaret O’Hara, plus a show by Smokey Robinson and Martha Reeves, who will be launching the fest from its epicentre, Nathan Phillips Square.

Here’s a rundown of some of the shows worth checking out on Friday—and during the rest of the festival, when you’ll actually have to pay.

Folks who are planning on having a swim in the pool at Scadding Court Community Centre over the next few days may find themselves a little disappointed. Those who want to go fishing, however, will probably be ecstatic.

For the rest of the week, the Community Centre will be holding its annual Gone Fishin’ event, meaning its indoor pool will be an indoor fish pond. The pool has been drained, dechlorinated, and refilled with 2,000 rainbow trout, to be caught by local children and families.

Photo by {a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/sevennine/2188201172/"}sevinnine{/a} from the {a href="http://www.flickr.com/groups/torontoist/"}Torontoist Flickr Pool{/a}.

Paris is a stroller’s paradise, home to gracious tree-lined boulevards long cherished by artists, lovers, and the Wehrmacht. However, areas along the iconic banks of the Seine river have been less than flaneur-friendly since 1967, when then-Prime Minister Georges Pompidou flanked them with expressways under the Rob Ford-ish slogan, “Paris must adapt to the car.”

But times have changed, and Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoë has announced the beginning of the “reconquest” of the banks of the Seine for pedestrians.

The plan will reintroduce walking to parts of the Paris riverfront currently reserved for automotive traffic. The first phase will take place next month, when the roadway along a one-kilometre stretch of the right bank will be narrowed and new traffic lights installed to make way for pedestrian corridors, boulangeries, and probably beret shops. In the spring of 2013, two and a half kilometres of the left bank will be rendered off-limits to cars, and Parisians will be treated to a new park, which will include floating gardens, a volleyball court, restaurants, and other pedestrian-friendly installations.

Toronto lacks the moving water of Seine-ish majesty, but we do have Lake Ontario. Our equivalent to riverside highways is the Gardiner Expressway, which like the Paris autoroutes has been standing between citizens and their waterfront since the car-crazy days of the 1960s.

The elevated portion of the road that cuts through downtown must have looked appealingly Jetsons-esque back then, and in any case, the waterfront was largely devoted to heavy industry. It was a lousy place to take the family on a day trip.

Regardless, people have been trying to figure out how to get rid of the Gardiner practically since the day it was built. As the lakeside has been developed for leisure and residential use, calls to do something about it have gotten louder.

Parts of the expressway have already been dealt with: in 2001, the eastern portion of the Gardiner from the DVP to Leslie was knocked down.

The need to find a solution for what remains may have to do with more than just aesthetics: chunks of concrete have been falling off the Gardiner with increasing frequency, posing risk to those driving or walking underneath. Structural engineers’ reassurances notwithstanding, nervous motorists may wonder if their commutes are going to be interrupted by a groan of crumbling concrete as the road under them collapses like a dying brontosaurus.

There have been a multitude of formal reports and informal ideas about what to do with the Gardiner. Burying all or part of it as proposed in a 1999 study, is sexy and high concept, but with the city and the province in fiscal crisis and the electorate in a constant roil over taxes, a multi-billion dollar, multi-year project isn’t happening right now.

Still more esoteric and unlikely is a 2006 proposal to replace much of the Gardiner with a 1.65 billion dollar viaduct. More practical and less costly is the idea of a “Great Street” that would see the Gardiner demolished from Spadina to the DVP and replaced with a University Avenue–style grand boulevard. While pedestrians would still have to find ways of getting across it, the new route would be more picturesque than the perpetual twilight under the current roadway.

Another idea is simply to gussy up the space under the elevated portions of the Gardiner, with markets and retail where possible. This would be relatively inexpensive, and broadly consistent with the Paris model. Done right, it would make the area more welcoming, and would give tourists and locals something to do on the way from Front Street to the lake (besides dodging panhandlers and falling masonry).

In a similar vein, an assessment by Waterfront Toronto, to be completed in 2013, may recommend leaving the structure intact, with the addition of a “green roof” over parts of it. This would essentially be an elevated park filled with plants.

Solutions that involve leaving the Gardiner standing are looking more and more reasonable. As the core waterfront area south of downtown becomes more built up with condos, retail, and people, the impact of Toronto’s most heavily traveled eyesore gets diminished anyway, and the “maintenance-only” option becomes more palatable. While it’s unlikely that the space under the concrete monoliths will ever be beautiful, it could one day be a tourist attraction in its own right.

Like a pedestrian on an urban stroll, taking advantage of short-blocks and cross-streets to explore new routes or to discover a never-before-seen neighbourhood or jumble of buildings, Soderstrom’s book is a true exploration of the topic. In addition to discussions of urban planning from Roman times to the present, housing and economic policies, the looming energy crisis, and the current sub-prime mortgage meltdown in America, Soderstrom darts off onto colourful tangents through literature and film with urban planning lessons gleaned from Emile Zola and It’s a Wonderful Life, among many others. By doing so, The Walkable City separates itself from more dry academic works in urban studies.
Soderstrom begins by talking about two thinkers who have had huge influence on making cities walkable: Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who undertook the nineteenth-century reconstruction of Paris by clearing slums and razing entire neighbourhoods; and Jane Jacobs, the twentieth-century urban philosopher, beloved hero of stop-the-freeway movements in New York and Toronto, and promoter of municipal development on a human scale. By the very nature of her book, Soderstrom cannot offer a definitive account of the biography, ideas, and actions of either urban theorist, but her background shows how their ideas continue to influence the cities around us.
Following Jacobs’s advice, Soderstrom looks beyond the mere ideas of city planning to investigate the lived experience of the city. So to extend discussion to the real world, she sets off to examine case studies of walkable—and supposedly walkable—neighbourhoods to uncover what works and doesn’t work in Toronto, Paris, Singapore, North Vancouver, and beyond. In addition to providing a street-level view of that streetscape today, in each case she investigates an area’s landscape, history, and the policies and ideologies that framed its development within a broader city. It’s easy to get lost in the details, but it’s not always completely clear how all these layers of a street’s texture mesh together into the larger argument. Nevertheless, she uncovers fascinating nuggets such as the Brazilian urban planner who, given Haussmann-esque carte blanche to completely remake Curitiba’s downtown in the 1970s, chose instead to turn a busy roadway into a pedestrian mall. Despite initial opposition, he became a local hero.
Soderstrom wisely looks beyond the downtown core—for Toronto, her discussion includes not only the Annex, but also Don Mills and Vaughan—and she recognizes that the suburbs will also have to make strides in becoming walkable. Canada’s original Garden City, Don Mills, was developed by E.P. Taylor as a self-sufficient community to meet the pent-up demand for post-war housing. Despite the fact that there are no sidewalks (or at least not along Greenland Drive where Soderstrom explored), because it’s laid out in four quadrants with low-rise apartments and houses within easy reach of a crossroads that serves as a community heart and a shopping district, Don Mills remains quite pedestrian-friendly today.
In Vaughan, however, Soderstrom dissects a less-than-walkable district around Vellore Park Road to examine the principles underlying its construction. Vellore Park neighbourhood is one of seventeen areas built in the New Urbanist style in Toronto—there are more here than anywhere else in North America—which, as a more compact design, is purported to place more emphasis on walking. Soderstrom discovers that not only are there no sidewalks (again), but that the simplest errands can only be undertaken on foot at great time and distance. It might be a bit presumptuous to condemn a neighbourhood before it is fully built—maybe the Cornell district in Markham would’ve been a more matured area to investigate—but it seems instructive that suburban children no longer walk to school or get sent around the corner to pick up a carton of milk. Simply ascribing to a set of broad design principles will be small comfort if the lived experience of the street does not fulfill them.
Acknowledging that no city is perfect, Soderstrom’s volume shifts from the descriptive to the prescriptive in the last couple chapters to provide lessons for cities like Toronto. Her tone is hopeful but cautious. The current mortgage meltdown and the looming oil crisis create the conditions for an uncertain future, but they also provide the “opportunity to rejig the entire relation between city and suburbs.” Just as post-war sprawl was determined by the stipulations of CMHC-sponsored mortgages, the availability of financing—what style of home will it fund and in what sorts of neighbourhoods—will determine the future of housing stock. Will the crumbling infrastructure of roadways be rethought or simply reconstructed—and furthermore will government abdicate responsibility to a private sector that has a vested interest in increasing traffic on toll roads like the 407, not in alleviating it? Should the rejuvenation of once-declining areas, such as Montreal’s Griffintown, be undertaken as massive projects or as small-scale redevelopments? Can the refurbishment of older high-rise residential towers and the erection of new ones be achieved in a way that better connects them to the streetscape below—in that the higher rents new towers demand for street-level retail don’t drive out lower-margin neighbourhood businesses? How will citizens need to adjust to a city that meets the demands of the future when this means “we are going to have to live closer together than most of us have been accustomed to”?
Soderstrom raises these and other questions of dry public policy options, but her deft writing style keeps it all quite interesting and lively. The book is very well researched but, as is the infuriating case of so many quasi-academic books aimed at a popular audience, lacks an index so that readers can return to quickly consult the book later. It would also have been useful to include maps to give a bit of context to unfamiliar settings explored in Paris and Singapore. These are minor quibbles because she’s given us an easy-to-read book that presents substantial ideas that will continue to percolate as the reader explores his or her city.
Photo by PDPhotography from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. Cover Image courtesy of Véhicule Press.

Photo of the Public Presentation (with Philippe Martin and Remi Feredj in the top right) by Kevin Plummer.
In addition to increasing mobility, the T3 was also built with the dual goal of redeveloping and enhancing the urban environment in a declining part of the city. Being buried out of sight, subways don’t offer the same opportunity to remake the streetscape that LRT lines provide. More connected to the street, LRT lines can fundamentally change the roadway’s character for the better, and, as Paris has learned, trams can even work as a beautification project. Except at crossings and stations, the T3′s entire track is lined with grass, like the tram system in Nice that Torontoist swooned over recently. In Paris, trees are also planted in T3 stations. It’s hard to over-state the mental benefit of a little extra well-maintained greenery in the city.
The trams are quieter and produce less pollution than the cars they are replacing. In fact, with the loss of one lane in each direction, vehicular traffic has decreased by 50 per cent along the main road and dropped by 20 per cent on neighbouring streets. The addition of trams has also slowed the pace of the remaining traffic. Clearly all of this adds up to significant improvements toward making the urban environment much friendlier for pedestrians and cyclists. The most evocative part of Friday’s presentation was a series of before and after photos showing just how much the streetscape had been transformed—from a major thoroughfare with three lanes in each direction into a much more hospitable, greenery-lined boulevard.

Photo of the T3 Tramway from Wikipedia.
The construction of the dedicated tram track, however, had its critics. Sacrificing one lane in each direction meant the loss of parking for local businesses. Given Toronto’s recent experience with building a dedicated streetcar line along St. Clair, the crowd on Friday was a little shocked at the apparent ease with which the loss of parking was accepted when the Parisian mayor demonstrated resolve to force the issue. To minimize outcry, liaisons from the RATP and the city of Paris held discussions with the public, transit users, and local business owners throughout the tram’s development. The monthly monitoring of sales, which began right at the outset of T3 planning, still continues in an effort to accurately assess the tram’s long-term impact on business. As one would expect, sales declined while the heavy-duty construction was underway, so the RATP set up an alternative dispute resolution mechanism to hear grievances and offer compensation if sales dropped by 8 per cent, or the disruption to the business lasted more than three months. Now, over a year since the tram opened, the RATP reports show that sales are higher than before the tram’s construction. Even the Parisians admit that it’s still too early to conclude definitively, but the introduction of added public transit appears to have boosted local businesses.
With the T3 trams taking priority at signals and crossings, there are obviously a couple snarls with vehicular traffic. Most notably, the RATP presenters admitted that traffic management personnel are always needed at Porte d’Orleans, a major entrance into downtown Paris, to ensure that cars keep the tram tracks clear and obey the signals. But the tram has been such an overwhelming success that Paris and the RATP are already conducting initial studies on a proposed extension.

Pompidou‎ Center

PARIS, FRANCE
BY CHRISHANZ

Mayor David Miller unveiled a YouTube video asking Canadians to sign an online petition urging Ottawa to ban all handguns in Canada. While most handguns are already illegal, the gesture would serve a powerful symbolic purpose by pushing the blame for Toronto gun violence onto the feds.
CBC News says that a highly publicized series of raids in 2005, which police said took a major gang out of commission, have resulted in almost no convictions in spite of the fact that drugs and guns were seized and 1,350 charges laid. You know what would have helped? An online petition.
Police are seeking two sword-wielding men who robbed a TD Bank in the west end yesterday morning. When police arrived, they found the swords and stolen money nearby but no trace of the robbers. Police believe the bandits were either arrested by Superman and dropped directly into jail or eaten by werewolves.
In Paris yesterday, the Olympic torch had to be transported by bus after it was snuffed out three times by protesters angry at China’s occupation of Tibet. The chaos followed similar scenes in London, and officials expressed concern that there would be further trouble as the torch passed through San Francisco Wednesday. A Chinese government official explained that Americans would be unwise to protest because, “We own most of your national debt.”
A study out of Atlanta has found that among young monkeys, males prefer playing with toy trucks while females are drawn to dolls and plush toys. They also found that among adult monkeys, females earned 35% less money than males in comparable positions.