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Futurist: Where Are We Now?
Now that the dust from Toronto’s birthday parties has settled, it’s time to consider what happens next. Every day this week, Futurist offers a glimpse of the Toronto that is to come.
Birthdays, it goes without saying, are occasions to celebrate. Sometimes parties are involved. Sometimes cake. (Or cupcakes!) But they are also moments to reflect, to think about where you are and where you’re heading, to make plans and dream of birthdays to come. And so, on the occasion of Toronto’s demisemiseptcentennial, we’ve decided to step back, take stock of the big picture, and start imagining what the future might hold for our fair city.
But before we launch into the Toronto of tomorrow, a quick survey of where we are right now…
According to the 2006 census, Toronto’s population is officially just over two and a half million and is distributed among roughly one million households. Fifty-four per cent of dwellings are owned by their occupants, and sixty per cent of them are apartments—only twenty-seven per cent of residences in Toronto are single-detached houses. We are by some measures a lonely city: thirty per cent of households are composed of just one person. That high number of one-person households, among other factors, keeps overall crowding in check. With a population density of 3,972 per square kilometre, Toronto’s got a long way to go before we match some of our more congested international counterparts: Mumbai is at 29,650, Shanghai at 13,400, Sao Paolo at 9,000, and London at 5,100.
Famously, Toronto is a multi-cultural city. Nearly sixty thousand of us, for instance, have been living in Canada for less than a year, and a quarter of a million have been in the country for less than five years. Fifteen per cent of Torontonians aren’t citizens, and half have a mother tongue other than English or French. Despite the eclecticism, Toronto’s aboriginal population is comparatively small, coming in at 13,605. Our largest visible minorities: South Asian (twelve per cent); Chinese (eleven per cent); black (eight per cent); and Filipino (four per cent). The Toronto region as a whole attracted forty per cent of all foreign-born people arriving in Canada between 2001 and 2006, but Brampton, Markham, and Mississauga all had greater growth on this front than did Toronto itself.
Toronto is also, increasingly, an economically divided city. As outlined in a major study by the University of Toronto’s Centre for Urban and Community Studies, our middle class has been shrinking for decades [PDF]. The Three Cities Within Toronto analysed thirty years’ worth of data and concluded that if present trends continue, mixed-income, mixed-ethnicity neighbourhoods, already retrenching, will become even more scarce. In addition, Toronto’s labour force is under duress, struggling to negotiate a massive reorientation away from manufacturing and towards financial, health, and social services.
Map, updated since its original appearance in the study The Three Cities Within Toronto, courtesy of the Centre for Urban and Community Studies.
So where do we go from here?
Over the next few days we’ll be presenting snapshots of the city as it might be in 2010, 2015, 2020, and 2030. These pictures are, of necessity, partial. We’ve compiled information contained in major strategic documents ranging from Toronto’s Official Plan to Transit City, from Ryerson’s expansion to waterfront revitalization plans. Cycling paths, condo developments, and urban agriculture projects all make appearances, as do demographic projections and economic forecasts. Missing: all the ephemeral, unpredictable, glorious, and messy stuff in between. The texture of the city, what it feels like to live and work and play here, is dependent on so much more than designs that can be put on paper or agenda items we can safely predict years in advance. These snapshots can give no more than the outline of what is in store.
Plans, of course, fall apart all the time. Nonetheless, we’ve made the deeply optimistic decision to conjure up Future Toronto as it would look if all these proposals, these lofty projects and ambitious expansions, were to be realized and realized on schedule. We know that they won’t: some will be bogged down by controversy or hampered by funding shortages, others will fall victim to countless mundane logistical delays. But there is value in optimism, in imagining how things might be if they go according to plan—city-building is nothing if not a hope-filled enterprise.
Research compiled by Hamutal Dotan, Jerad Gallinger, Stephen Michalowicz, and Kevin Plummer.