cityscape
Duly Quoted: Jack Diamond
“While there’s little or no gravy to be found in current city operations, there’s enormous wastefulness in the form of our cities… [T]he extra cost of operating a widespread, low-density city such as Toronto, compared with a more compact city such as Zurich or Vienna (to say nothing of Manhattan or Hong Kong), [is] an average of $1-billion annually.”
—Architect Jack Diamond, arguing in an op-ed for the Globe and Mail that while it may be politically expedient to blame bureaucratic waste for the cost of running Toronto, the much less convenient truth is that one major expense is the suburban layout that comprises much of the city. (The costs of maintaining streets, clearing snow, and providing many services increase when living space per person goes up.) Diamond suggests that higher orders of government should, for instance, consider allocating infrastructure funding on the basis of whether projects minimize financial burdens on cities.