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Backed by a recent announcement by Dalton McGuinty (that "the province will limit the endless NIMBY wrangling that accompanies its every attempt to introduce environmental measures"), Hume takes aim at Toronto NIMBYs and blasts away. No holds barred, great stuff:
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The NIMBY response has become a given, a default position, an automatic reaction, a cliché. It's the same whether we're talking about highrise condos in north Toronto, narrowing Jarvis St. from five lanes to four, constructing a streetcar right-of-way on St. Clair Ave., rehabilitating the Wychwood Barns or trying to slow global warming to save the planet and this sorry ass of a city.
Many residents assume that to live in a neighbourhood confers the exclusive right to decide what should or shouldn't happen in it. In some cases, NIMBY opponents of homes for unwed mothers and the like have claimed the right to say who can live next door. The sense of entitlement behind such an attitude could sink a battleship.
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So true.
Christopher Hume asks if Torontonians (living along the largest river in Egypt?) can learn to love it - winter, that is. What I find particularly useful are the suggestions for ...urban winter stations (for want of a better name). See highlighted bits.
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The design of the city itself affects the way we relate to the seasons.
"It sounds strange," says Toronto architect James Brown, "maybe even dangerous, but I think we should have regulated places, specific sites, where people can have bonfires. There are a number of places where you could do that safely, especially along the waterfront. We also need to create amenities, places where people can get a cup of coffee and a bun."
Brown also suggests that "five-ton stake trucks be parked every 1,000 metres in places such as Coronation Park and the Martin Goodman Trail. They would sell everything from cold beer to hot chocolate.
"Part of it's the winter," says landscape architect Janet Rosenberg, "part of it's a head space. You need winter programming as well as ways to try to make it comfortable for people."
Discussion of Montreal's Canadian Centre for Architecture's publication "Actions: What You Can Do With The City" (Mirko Zardini and Giovanna Borasi): 98 examples of "techniques, events, ideas and strategies aimed at making cities more sustainable, humane, efficient, livable and, not least, fun." I was especially intrigued by what Hume describes as "Actions"' subtext, *waste* - see article.
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"Our whole economy has become a waste economy," writes Zardini quoting Hannah Arendt, "in which things must be almost as quickly devoured and discarded as they have appeared in the world, if the process itself is not to come to a sudden catastrophic end."
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Add Sticky Note"Between the utopian fantasy of starting over and the impossible dream of continuing in the direction that we are headed," writes architect/activist Fritz Haeg, "there lies a middle ground in which we come to terms with the urban decisions that have already been made and repurpose aspects of our existing built environment in strategic ways. ... No matter what has been handed to us, each of us should be given licence to be an active part in the creation of the cities that we share."
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Yule Heibel on 2009-01-19Well said, and interesting to think about in relation to someone like J.H. Kunstler, who thinks there's a tabula rasa coming up.
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If Actions has a subtext, however, it's that of waste. Many projects included are based on reclaiming the vast quantities of food we throw away – a quarter of all food produced in North America ends in a trash bin, much perfectly edible.
"Our whole economy has become a waste economy," writes Zardini quoting Hannah Arendt, "in which things must be almost as quickly devoured and discarded as they have appeared in the world, if the process itself is not to come to a sudden catastrophic end."
Arendt's words, written half a century ago, have never been so pertinent.
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Discussion of the work of architects Stephen Taylor (London) and Ryue Nishizawa (Tokyo), featured at an exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. Focus on how housing can be integrated into the fabric of the city.
I'm thinking about this in relation to heritage.
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city of houses
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city of gaps
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On the rise of condo living in Canadian cities.
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Not surprisingly perhaps, Torontonians remain fixated on height, which can be counted on to raise the inevitable hackles. Often overlooked in the clamour is the growing number of small, infill schemes that fill gaps in the urban fabric. These can be seen along arteries such as Queen St. E., King St. E., Kingston Rd. and even the laneways and alleys of the old city.
Municipal authorities – political and bureaucratic – have fought the charge to intensify these lesser avenues, but at some point resistance will be futile. It is an idea whose time has come and which can no longer be denied.
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The most glaring oversight of the industry and city officials is the lack of family-sized units. Finding apartments with enough bedrooms can be difficult, if not impossible. Indeed, the trend is to smaller and smaller units.
Historically, middle-class Canadians have disapproved of families living in highrises, unless, of course, they are poor. That, too, has started to change. The flight to the suburbs that traditionally occurs when couples have kids has slowed and more families are opting to stay downtown.
Thus the condo builders' focus on young professionals and empty-nesters no longer reflects reality.
In other words, the condo industry is struggling to keep up with a market whose demands grow ever more sophisticated. In light of developers' deep-seated conservatism, this should be expected. What it means is that the city must adopt a more proactive stance, encouraging appropriate built form with tax and density incentives.
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For the last 50 or 60 years, urban topography has been a largely accidental creation. Although planned in every detail, it adds up to less than the sum of its parts. As a result, we inhabit a terrain of unintended consequences. Little wonder, then, that landscape architecture could be to this century what architecture was to the last.
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For the vast majority of Canadians, who live in towns, cities and suburbs, the geography of daily life revolves around the man-made environments of work, home and play.
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We're starting to wake up to the fact that the world we have created – especially the public realm – leaves much to be desired.
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Hume looks at facadism - when it works, and when it doesn't.
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Yule Heibel on 2008-11-30
- example of facadism at its worst
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Every major city – Paris, Dublin, New York – does it. It's just that Toronto does it so often.
"We have a lot of façadism in Toronto," admits one of the city's leading heritage architects, Michael McClelland. "And almost no one likes it. But it's indicative of Toronto's political climate. Though it's easy to deride façadism, what do these people propose in its place? People who simply dismiss it don't understand. It's often the agreed-upon compromise."
It has also become an acceptable method of balancing civic growth and architectural history. And despite the obvious drawbacks, it's a strategy that can work.
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Hume discusses a new book about Toronto, "Unbuilt Toronto: A History of the City That Might Have Been," by Mark Osbaldeston. What I find compelling for my interest in Victoria is Hume's reference at the start to "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" (which immediately conjures Marianne Faithful's rendition) and his reference to Venice as a beautiful corpse preserved for tourists.
It seems we have a lot of necrophilia in this town (Victoria), but it would be *really* interesting to do an article on our Boulevard of Broken Dreams -- with an eye to showing how failure proves that this is indeed still a living/ working city, and not just some kind of Disneyville.
Excellent article by Christopher Hume, commenting on the post-Federal election blues reality in Canada. Key quote: "In an age when an 'economic tsunami' can sweep across the planet in days and hours, however, only the quick survive. But nimble we're not." Canadian cities are hobbled by the British North America Act and the subsequent cast of the Canadian Constitution (difficult to fathom how it could be written in the later 20th century), and instead of nimble, they're paralyzed.
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An election without a winner may be exactly what Canadians like. But it does raise questions about how diffident, if not skeptical, we have become about leadership. Even when we want it, we don't trust it.
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Pluralism may be Canada's new reality, entirely appropriate in a country that grows ever more urban and diverse. Diversity, of course, is shorthand for racial variety, simple ethnicity, multiculturalism, but it goes beyond that.
At the same time, traditional political distinctions – Conservative and Liberal, right and left – are less helpful today. Indeed, they have become obstacles. And though we cling desperately to outdated national myths, this is already the most urban century the world, let alone Canada, has ever seen.
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Ever since my "corner-making"/proxemics article for FOCUS, I've been meaning to write an article about the dismal unavailability of seating in Victoria's downtown. We seem more concerned with making it impossible for homeless people to sit down or sleep on benches than making it possible for housed people to take a rest. The streets are unfriendly and cheerless in that regard, and it doesn't matter how many flower baskets the city hangs up.
MORE BENCHES, please!
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It's not that the city is so much greener than others; the difference lies in the ease with which it can be inhabited.
What does that mean? Well, to begin with, benches – and lots of them.
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Add Sticky NoteCompared with Toronto, where finding a place to sit out on the streets is next to impossible, Montreal positively invites visitors to sit down and watch the passing parade. Benches are everywhere you turn.
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Yule Heibel on 2008-10-06
Toronto and Victoria sound more and more like close, like-minded and similarly afflicted, siblings. In spirit, and in fact.
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Hume rips into municipal politics, as well as provincial rights over cities, in a way that to my mind evokes parallels with Victoria, BC. The point of departure is Toronto's seeming inability to develop its waterfront with any sort of sensibility or vision. Sounds familiar (re. Victoria). See notes & annotations for more.
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the need for intervention has been apparent for years, if not decades. But in a city known for timidity and political cowardice, that means little.
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From the moment the waterfront agency was set up, TEDCO treated it as a rival. Using the city-owned land it controlled as leverage, it commissioned parallel master plans and made deals for iffy projects such as the Corus headquarters building at the foot of Jarvis St. and the film studio in the docklands.
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Hume includes that classic bozo line by federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty: "We're not in the pothole business in the Government of Canada." Incredible... The finance minister needs to do a rethink. Infrastructure isn't just about fixing "potholes"...
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F rom an urban perspective, the most remarkable thing about the current federal election is the sheer irrelevance of it all.The issues that city-dwellers care about – jobs, housing, safety, transit – have yet to cause a ripple among candidates, let alone leaders.
This election, it turns out, is about politicians, not politics, and certainly not policy. They call it "leadership," for lack of a better word.
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Yule Heibel on 2008-09-17
Bang on!
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Even Stephen Harper's much vaunted if modest 2-cent reduction in the GST means little or nothing to the average Canadian. Besides, if tax cuts were the answer to the nation's woes, we'd be well along the road to Nirvana. And after eight years of George Bush, our neighbours to the south would be living in the New Jerusalem. Nothing could be further from the truth.
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Brief article on the benefits of public benches on city sidewalks, and that T.O. has too few of them. Interestingly, this is something that has been bugging me for a while about Victoria, too. Too often, there is literally NO WHERE to sit, even on d/t streets with broad sidewalks. As soon as the street is out of the tourist district or off Government, no more benches. No benches on Fort or on Yates, two streets that are wide and generous in other respects (and the sidewalks are wide enough on Yates, although mingy on Fort). The comments on this article are useful, too.
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David Miller first got elected mayor all those years ago was his insistence on the public realm, everything from sidewalks and parks to subways and community centres.
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Miller's argument was that we must create not just a livable city, but one we can fully inhabit. Livability, with overtones of convenience, isn't quite the same as inhabitability, a more all-encompassing term.
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Well, don't say I didn't tell you so:
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"Politically," Miller continues, "cities in Canada don't exist, especially at the federal level. As far as I know, this is virtually unique in the world. Throughout the world, federal and national governments invest in cities, but we don't see that here. All cities in Canada are suffering from lack of federal spending."
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This is so distressing, from where I'm sitting -- because Victoria has the additional burden of being one of 13 municipalities in an urban conglomeration (the CRD), and has the additional burden of being a "lefty" NDP hold-out in BC Liberal Party-land. It shouldn't BE this partisan, and yet it seems to be...
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Just eight years after the end of the last century, it's clear that the word "urban" no longer means quite what it did. Indeed, for the first time in human history, more people now inhabit cities than don't. Canada is no exception.
"Canadians don't think of themselves as an urban nation," Miller notes. "But the fact is that we live in cities. The economic ingenuity of cities is what's going to lead us into the future."
But as Miller points out, we have a little governance issue here that we have yet to deal with; namely weak cities, a federal regime apparently unaware of them, and provinces with their own priorities.
"Politically," Miller continues, "cities in Canada don't exist, especially at the federal level. As far as I know, this is virtually unique in the world. Throughout the world, federal and national governments invest in cities, but we don't see that here. All cities in Canada are suffering from lack of federal spending."
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And although Miller insists he's an optimist, he also admits he's worried. Toronto and Canada are falling behind the rest of the world, he says, in building and maintaining the urban infrastructure.
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Last (so far) in what almost amounts to a series of articles on the importance to a true urban fabric of sidewalks and pedestrians. Hume adds some interesting speculation around Modernism's aversion to mingling/ chance encounters.
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It was the French who first grasped the cultural significance of walking.
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The French even devised new words to describe these denizens of the expanding city. They were boulevardiers and flaneurs. The former were sophisticated and worldly, urban and urbane. The flâneur, on the other hand, was the man-about-town, idle but intellectually curious and aware.
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This article, linked to the other Apr.26 piece in terms of theme and championing the idea that sidewalks (& therefore pedestrians) are key to a good urban fabric, tackles the question of planning & design. Too much is individual project driven, vs. falling into place as part of an overall sense of what the city should be.
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A rchitecture is important, but planning is crucial. Though Toronto's known for second-rate design, our real problem is poor planning. Throughout the city there are examples, painful examples, of the lack of intelligent planning. The result is not just visual chaos, but a clear feeling that nothing adds up, that nothing makes sense, that the city consists of a growing number of disjointed projects. -
insist on certain basic elements that will eventually allow a number of unrelated developments to be transformed into a genuine neighbourhood? And why doesn't the city do what's necessary to give the pedestrian a fighting chance? As it stands, the residents of these new condos are at the mercy of (usually bad) drivers more focused on their cellphones than pedestrians. They block the crosswalks, drive too fast and generally treat walkers with utter contempt. Given that Lake Shore Blvd. has six lanes and Fleet two, pedestrians must take their lives into their hands just to cross the street. This isn't just suburban; it's dangerous, dumb and no way to build a city. It also reveals the hollowness of a community that loves to congratulate itself on its creativity, and its innovative spirit. When it comes down to making choices between cars and people, we invariably choose cars. This is outdated and marks us for the civic dinosaur that we are.
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Together with 2 other articles (Apr.26 and May 3), a nice trilogy in praise of walking and pedestrian rights.
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If only people were cars, maybe then we could get the city to take our sidewalks seriously.
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In addition to the decayed state of city sidewalks, many are too narrow to begin with. And given the city's love of widening roads whenever possible, that makes for a dangerous combination.
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Another article by Hume on the Leslie Street Walmart ("SmartCentres" development). I really like what he writes about delivery/ delivery trucks.
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"Everything about an urban project is more difficult than a suburban one," laments SmartCentres' affable vice-president of development, Tom Smith. "It's easier to do 10 malls in the 905 than one in an urban centre."
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One wonders how different the response would have been had SmartCentres announced that it intended to build the city's first no-parking mall. Sounds ridiculous, but maybe not, on second thought. Already there's a mall in San Francisco that has no parking. Why not Toronto?
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A brief article by Christopher Hume on the Leslie Street Spit, which includes a fascinating video, "Celebrating the Leslie St. Spit," by Greg Smith and Catherine Farley. Before settlement, the area (a wetlands) had an abundance of wildlife. This was then basically obliterated as Toronto took it over for industrial and port-related uses. Ironically, those uses required a seawall, and while waiting for various bureaucratic wheels to turn to allow construction, the city started dumping rubble from construction/ excavation sites. This in turn created a new "Spit," and when economic conditions changed (no need for a seawall after all), the rubble-filled/ built-up area was eventually recolonized by nature. Today it's another wildlife preserve... Neat.
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By the 1970s, however, the Spit had become a five-kilometre-long peninsula, with no apparent purpose. Responsibility for the city's newest landform was then handed over to the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, whose job was to find new uses for the place. The process took so long the Spit was left alone for another couple of decades.
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In the meantime, the ownership of the land had evolved into a patchwork of civic, provincial and federal agencies that in addition to the TRCA includes the Ministry of Natural Resources, the Toronto Economic Development Corp (TEDCO) and the Toronto Port Authority. Its annual management budget is paltry, under $200,000.
Perhaps because of this administrative confusion, and continuing neglect, the Spit was free of the kind of human intervention that has altered the landscape everywhere else. By the time the city started to get serious about reclaiming and revitalizing the waterfront, the Spit was an established part of life in Toronto. Though only open on weekends and holidays, it had become a magnet for birders, bikers, hikers and joggers. Indeed, it has achieved storied status, attracting 250,000 visitors annually. We see it now as a shining example, a desperately needed ray of hope in a world fast destroying itself.
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Christopher Hume goes after banal architecture, specifically the evil banality of non-descript, visually insulting high-rises of certain Toronto areas. (Note: I highlighted the entire article to have as a record, in case the link decays.)
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E very generation looks back and sees evidence of a time when everything was better. It may not be true, but in this regard we are no exception.Still, it's hard to wander around this city and not become convinced that the quality of architecture has deteriorated badly in recent decades. That's not to say there aren't spectacular things being built; it's more that the level of design of the non-landmarks, the background buildings, of the urban fabric has never been worse.
Perhaps it's that only the best of the past survives, but by contrast the bulk of work done by architects today is appalling. Let's be honest: Most people dislike contemporary architecture passionately and often for good reason.
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Yule Heibel on 2008-04-07
True, at some point you get sucked into nostalgia -- but there's no denying that the illustration for this article shows "commie block" architecture at its worst, a sort of computer-generated churning out of floor plates, and a totally graceless "meeting the street" kind of interaction. The buildings just scream "fast & cheap" and "fuck you," too.
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