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Always Changing, Always Becoming Something New
Torontonians certainly love talking about their city. Now, with this month’s publication of a new collection of essays, Toronto: A City Becoming, assembled by David Macfarlane, there’s even more to talk about.
This latest addition to the urban affairs bookshelf engages the question of whether the period of massive change Toronto has been undergoing—demographically, economically, politically, and culturally—is for good or ill. Following the success of the uTOpia series, another book about the city might breed accusations of navel-gazing from elsewhere in the country. But the ongoing dialogue Toronto: A City Becoming represents is really the only way of getting to the bottom of the city’s complexity and the varieties of experience it contains. “Perhaps in a city that is changing as constantly as Toronto changes,” Macfarlane notes in his intro, “a partial view is the best we shall ever have.” So, he’s assembled nineteen essays (and three photo essays) representing the partial view of the current issues and future directions of the city from civic leaders in fields as diverse as urban geography, politics, architecture, and beyond. Overall, it’s an important book with a strong diversity of viewpoints and thought-provoking ideas. But, as with any assemblage of essays, the results—ranging in tone from critical or self-congratulatory to autobiographical or funny—can be uneven.
A couple chapters, such as former mayor David Crombie lamenting the lack of historical awareness among Torontonians, are simply too brief to do much more than skip across the surface of an issue. Others don’t stray far from the expected, whether it’s Richard Florida trotting out his creative cities thesis again, or Linda McQuaig ridiculing the wealthy. Similarly, the scope of the book is limited to the city’s core, as Macfarlane freely admits in his introduction, with only one excursion into the suburban wilds when National Post columnist Peter Kuitenbrouwer attempts a pedestrian trek through Vaughan. Some weighty topics are tackled, like NDP politico Peter Tabuns’s take on civic environmental policies, or political economist James Milway’s call for the modernization of Toronto’s municipal political system. Mark Kingwell, on the other hand, demands Torontonians ask difficult questions about themselves and the concept of justice in the city they live in. Perhaps the most unexpected inclusion in the book is the uncompromising story (as told to David Hayes) of Andre Morrison’s escalating lifestyle of gangs and drugs, and the difficulty of putting his life back together. It’s rare that a book of this type offers substantial space to include the voice of a criminal without external commentary or apology.
Whether placing the contemporary city in long-term context, or exploring it through the prism of personal experience, the best essays in Toronto: A City Becoming are refreshing, and their novel ways of looking at the seemingly mundane are worth examining more fully. Globe and Mail columnist John Barber provides a passionate defence of “Toronto’s astonishing pluralism, tolerance, and openness” in an era when Europe is retrenching into nativist and traditionalist policies. Instead of resorting the usual multicultural rhetoric, Barber makes his case by charting the evolution of Toronto’s politics from rigid conservatism to reform-minded liberalism through the singular efforts of Robert Baldwin. An under-appreciated 19th century reformer, Baldwin was a reclusive and troubled man who entered politics not out of personal ambition but out of a deep sense of civic duty. A fervent supporter of liberalism, he pioneered the idea of responsible government. His bull-headed efforts to promote this concept—by which the executive arm of government became exclusively accountable to the locally elected assembly, not the crown—prompted its adoption in Canada. With time, as the principle spread throughout the empire, it solidified the notion that freedom for the disenfranchised could come through political reform rather than violent revolution. While it is a tad misty-eyed at times, Barber’s elegantly written account of a largely forgotten political figure is essential reading.
Architect John Van Nostrand explores how the city took its present shape by explaining Toronto’s grand urban planning initiatives from the original 18th century land survey, to the automobile-friendly master plan for the metropolitan area in 1943, to the present day’s Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe. Such a long-term scope allows interesting insight into contemporary issues. For example, long before the Gardiner Expressway, the burgeoning city north of Front Street was cut off from the waterfront when this land was deemed less valuable by the crown and allowed to become home to the city’s poorest citizens, then industry, then rail-yards until today’s efforts at waterfront redevelopment. Van Nostrand argues that the physical and psychological effects of obliterating Toronto’s natural landscape under the utilitarian order of a grid system are only now being righted through modern attempts to excavate this buried landscape.
On the more personal end, Toronto Life columnist Philip Preville charmingly reveals how the joys of city life are sometimes found in the most common-place situations. A detailed dissection of a single neighbourhood intersection—Dupont and Christie—lets Preville loose to ponder everything from the social contract between pedestrians and motorists to the urban infrastructure of curbs, manhole covers, and traffic signals. He takes particular interest in the evolution of pedestrian signals, discussing everything from their origins in tragedy to Torontonian Paul Arthur’s design of the little white Walking Man and the tyrannical Raised Right Hand for Expo 67. Throughout, Preville’s tone is one of genuine wonderment at a taken-for-granted aspect of life.
Arts critic Sarah Milroy takes the personal perspective one step further to explore how people come to love a seemingly unlovable city. Making the city our own is a common enough experience, but it’s also deeply personal according to each individual’s personalities, tastes, and careers. In Milroy’s case, this occurred through Toronto’s art galleries and the growth of her own family. Her story of coming to embrace the hecticness of the city over the course of decades is the perfect way to close Toronto: A City Becoming. It can be strangely comforting that, however long you inhabit and seem to know this city, it is ever-shifting and unknowable. No single author could ever capture the diversity of city life covered in Toronto: A City Becoming. Yet, there are still so many varieties of experience still to be included, so the only way to wrestle with the complexity of city life is to, as this book does, prompt Torontonians to just keep talking.
Bottom photo by M.V. Jantzen from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.