TORONTO STAR: "T.O. needs a Department of Fun"
hey everyone, i don't mean to post another article about re-hashed topics, but i thought this one was a worthy read and wanted to share..
David Olive brings up a lot of good points that I can definately agree with having been to some of the cities he mentions in his article. Some of you who have been to a few of these places might notice as well. i think that Toronto really has a lot of potential to go a long way but what it lacks is the right kind of vision in its leadership ..
hopefully we can take some initiative to change our city this coming election and show the current regime that the younger generation truly cares about its city and has worthwhile, practical, and feasible ideas..
| quote: |
T.O. needs a Department of Fun
SMALL MINDS BIG CITY : Why is Toronto so hostile to the dramatic, bold decisions that could transform the city?
Jul. 30, 2006. 08:10 AM
DAVID OLIVE
Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die.
— Daniel Burnham, 19th-century U.S. architect
A rant.
As a lifelong Torontonian, I've had it to here with the softly-softly incrementalism that passes for urban-planning progress in this increasingly boring town.
A recent example is Imagine a Toronto... Strategies for a Creative City, a report on the need to nurture the artistic talents of the city, commissioned by Toronto and Queen's Park and released Monday.
Prepared over two years by a blue-ribbon panel of 17 experts in the arts, media, business and the non-profit sector, it is the wrong report about the wrong topic at the wrong time.
Of course, one might as well argue against oxygen as against culture: Those who commissioned the report could not have settled on safer ground from which to project the illusion of progress. In this case, the experts explore the outer bounds of banality in calling for more arts instruction in the schools (don't they already teach art at Jarvis Collegiate, or did I miss a crucial school-board meeting?), the launch of a "creativity/innovation convergence centre" (so what's the Design Exchange about?) and free admission to the city's museums and art galleries to those under 20 (don't the AGO and the ROM already have discount days for all ages?).
Little plans. Likely not to be realized, any more than the 80 long-forgotten recommendations in David Crombie's early-1990s one-man Royal Commission on the Future of Toronto's Waterfront, or the exhortations of a pitifully impotent former waterfront "czar," Robert Fung.
Toronto is hostile to big plans.
Crowded and over-built, the city appears to offer few if any large canvases on which to build boldly. It is governed by a cumbersome body of 44 disputatious councillors and a mayor with one vote, abetted by a rules-bound bureaucracy. And the city is daily scrutinized by armchair urban-planning critics in the media. No wonder the city resists "game-changing" innovations that invariably float on waves of controversy.
The process of getting things done here also is infused with political correctness.
The legacy of the heroic 1970s preservationist-protestors who rescued Old City Hall and Union Station from the wrecking ball is that, more than 30 years on, we're afraid to even contemplate the genuinely transformative project.
Thus, no Bilboas for us. Let that grimy industrial Spanish city become a tourist mecca trading on Frank Gehry's Guggenheim-museum masterpiece while the Toronto-born designer is permitted only a touch-up to the AGO in the very neighbourhood of his upbringing. (A project which, true to fashion, has prompted objections from nearby residents.)
And no "Big Dig"(admittedly dogged by delays and cost overuns), a network of underground expressways and above-ground parks and recreational amenities that has come about as close as one could hope for in transforming gritty, inner-city Boston into a garden of Eden.
And no Millennium Park, also plagued by controversy and delays, a novel public- and private-sector scheme that has renovated Chicago's famous "front lawn" with a stunning amphitheatre, dazzling reflective sculpture, playgrounds, fountains and other cheery distractions hugging the shore of Lake Michigan.
The otherwise noble legacy of the 1970s environmentalists who waged a successful campaign against acid rain and rid the Don River of phosphates is that very few contemporary schemes meet with their approval.
Possibly their greatest "victory" was sabotaging Ataratiri, a planned public-housing development for tens of thousands of residents near today's Distillery District, in a desolate gulag of abandoned slaughterhouses and oil-company tank farms. The greens were convinced, even in the absence of convincing scientific tests, that no amount of remediation would make the soil safe enough for housing. So Queen's Park withdrew its funding.
Thus the Distillery District, a lonely outpost in the east end, remains a financially dicey proposition, having few local residents to draw on, and Toronto's inventory of new affordable housing remains shamefully negligible.
The architectural preservationists and the greens scored a minor joint coup a decade or so ago with the removal of the festive lighting that briefly outlined the contours of Old City Hall — a desecration, they said, of the landmark's artistic integrity, and also a waste of electricity. Fortunately their alarmism has not yet infected the thinking of the administrators of the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen or the B.C. legislature in Victoria, although to gaze on either is to reminded of our city's aversion to playfulness.
Complacency, too, wreaks its toll.
We've been mocked so long for our supposed "world-class" and "centre of the universe" pretensions that we see little need for, and perhaps something ominous about, the grand project — so easily represented by detractors as grandiose.
How else to explain the protracted delays in waterfront renewal, in renovating Union Station, in erecting a new opera house, in putting the Gardiner Expressway underground, in building a dedicated rail line to Pearson, in restoring the lower Don River to the fishing and swimming retreat it was a century ago — even small things like the westward extension of Front St. past Bathurst?
We have worshipped at the altar of Jane Jacobs too long, convinced that every flirtation with the spectacular bears the seeds of our civic ruin. We even dithered endlessly over a new purpose for Maple Leaf Gardens, ideally located on the Yonge subway line, until it defaulted to a Loblaws supermarket.
We don't lack for ideas.
When he headed the Metro Toronto Housing Authority in the early 1980s, former mayor John Sewell rolled out a blueprint for me devised by University of Toronto architecture and anthropology students that called for scores of small-scale affordable housing residences, scattered across the city and suburbs to avoid the NIMBY curse. The scheme came to nothing, of course, with Sewell lacking the backslapping skills to get the city's political and business leadership behind it.
We have worshipped at the altar of Jane Jacobs too long, convinced that every flirtation with the spectacular bears the seeds of our civic ruin
A few years later, I was trekking with then-councillor Jack Layton in the estuary of the Don and asked him what he would do about the long-neglected waterfront.
In an instant, Layton was sketching on a serviette his low-cost idea for parks, playgrounds, marinas, cafés, gardens, fountains, outdoor theatres and dance floors stretching from the foot of Parliament St. to the foot of Bathurst St. Then he stuffed the serviette in his pocket, explaining that suburban colleagues on council would never sponsor a project seen to exclusively benefit downtown residents.
Finally, there's the legacy of Robert Caro, Pulitizer Prize-winning biographer of "master builder" Robert Moses ("If the ends don't justify the means, what does?").
Moses was depicted by Caro more as a ruthless autocrat who destroyed neighbourhoods with his expressways, bridges, power plants and parks, and rather less as a pioneer of urban renewal who hosted the memorable 1939 World's Fair and was the driving force behind the construction of Shea Stadium, the Lincoln Center and the United Nations (which would have gone to Washington had Moses not lobbied so forcefully for Manhattan).
In the depths of the Great Depression, Moses wheedled from FDR one-quarter of all the New Deal money and channelled it into a cramped metropolis whose denizens were treated finally to inner-city green space, swimming pools and affordable housing.
Both depictions of Moses are accurate. Yet it's Caro's bile that has prevailed, and it accounts in some degree for the modern reluctance of North American urbanites to place much power in their mayors or any one individual, and for the joyless, strictly utilitarian character of most major cities on this continent.
Frederick "Big Daddy" Gardiner, a more benign autocrat who visited Moses and claimed him as a creative touchstone, was Toronto's last sponsor of grand projects. The erstwhile mayor of Forest Hill yoked Toronto's municipalities under the Metro umbrella in 1953, from which followed the construction of the subway, the Gardiner and Don Valley expressways, 133 new schools and 1,200 hectares of parkland by 1961.
Using his influence with fellow Tories at Queen's Park, Gardiner encouraged then-premiers John Robarts and Bill Davis in their own schemes for Ontario Place, the Ontario Science Centre, the Metro Toronto Zoo and a network of urban community colleges.
Despairing at the planning paralysis that began to stultify the city by the mid-1970s, when Crombie's "small is beautiful" ethic first took hold, Gardiner readily acknowledged he did not share the civic pride we are told to derive from being a city of neighbourhoods. With their chronic objections to any kind of meaningful change, the first Metro chairman said in retirement, community groups "raise a hullabaloo that sounds like a midway circus and they cause more trouble than they do good."
Toronto for as long as I can remember has been led by mayors of timorous mien. The most popular of them, Crombie, was celebrated for discouraging grand designs. In retirement, Gardiner saw the curtain drop on his era of transformative projects — and transformative leaders. Testifying at Robarts's 1975 Royal Commission on Metro's future, Gardiner tartly characterized his successors: "I see they have got `Chief Executive Officers,' speech writers, advisors of this kind, advisors of that. If I was impolite I would say that if they would get up off their rusty-dusty, as some people call it, and get out and do the things instead of hiring a flock of experts to confuse them, the place would be better off."
The flock of experts behind Imagine a Toronto... Strategies for a Creative City, whose efforts were warmly embraced by Mayor David Miller this week, had little to say about what exactly their nurtured artists would do after having their genius "unleashed."
Putting aside that traffic congestion, gang warfare and polluted beaches concern most Torontonians more than the city's cultural health (which the report's authors pronounce to be robust, an assertion that sets the mind reeling about the need for the report), it seems not to have occurred to the Creative City folks that artists — and engineers, and architects, and stone masons and dress designers — need patrons.
We have narcissistic aristocrats to thank for Rembrandt's genius in portraiture, and the Vatican for much of Michelangelo's oeuvre. Pharaohs, monarchs, tycoons and civic leaders have made art possible by funding those who make it. Or have indirectly inspired it with their infrastructure projects — from the Pyramids to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.
The ambit for artists in Toronto would seem rather limited, given this city's undistinguished topography and almost purposeful aversion to excitement — save for the initiative of dynamic citizens who sponsor film festivals, Caribana, Taste of the Danforth, and the largest Gay Pride festivities on the continent.
Lewis Mumford, the American urbanologist, is not easily surpassed in his 1955 description of a city's purpose. "If the city ceases to be a milieu in which people can exist in reasonable contentment instead of as prisoners plotting to escape a concentration camp, it will be unprofitable to discuss its architectural achievements — buildings that occasionally cause people to hold their breath for a stabbing moment or that restore them to equilibrium by offering them a prospect of space and form joyfully mastered."
A prospect, that is, of what men and women can achieve when aiming high in hope and work.
In my admittedly casual recent canvass of coffee-shop confreres I found that "fun" was most often the answer to the question I posed: "What one thing would you do to make this city more liveable?"
Oscar the Turkish émigré spoke of dazzling floral and star-shaped patterns in the tiles of Ankara piazzas; the boulevards whose lanes are divided by fountains with jets that spray shoots of unpredictable height and colour; and the city-sponsored street fairs of jugglers, fashion models, and fire-eaters.
Jessica proposed murals covering the walls of undistinguished buildings, each telling a story of the neighbourhood. Kevin called for more of the exuberant geometric designs of Santiago Calatrava's bridges and train stations across Europe. (We are fortunate to have a superb Calatrava atrium at BCE Place.)
Mumford's city is one that is both livable, made so by amenities that lift the spirit, and a showcase of human achievement. The stuff of postcards, for which the CN Tower is a bland substitute for Garnier's opera house, the Spanish Steps, Nelson's column, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, Vancouver's Burrard Street Bridge, the Citadel at Quebec, the Jet d'eau in Geneva bay, and Norman Foster's mesmerizing "gherkin" tower in London.
Unless we are to define ourselves by ceaseless inquiries into what needs be done, we'll have to shake ourselves of a lethargic resignation to stress-puppy life on an office treadmill and contemplate a Department of Fun — which translates simply into livability.
Its mandate: The construction of statues that tell the story of how we got here; more gardens and fountains in the parched inner core; free weekly concerts at Kew Gardens, High Park and Woodbine Beach; a free-admission civic aquarium; street performers like the "living statues" who stand motionless for hours in European cities until you guess their identity; and fireworks every Saturday in the harbour to draw even suburbanites to a waterfront they would come to regard as their own. And so on.
An unapologetic big-ticket renaissance for this city is long overdue. It would include a greenlighting of a streamlined traffic grid to ease congestion. A fund to kickstart the retrofitting of abandoned century-old factories as artists quarters or affordable housing. A new mandate for the CNE so it no longer functions as a mere parking lot 49 weeks of the year. And a costly, if need be, reconnection of the city with its waterfront, after absorbing the lessons offered by Boston's "Big Dig."
After 172 years, Toronto should be a city where it is possible, as in a mid-sized European town, to turn in any direction and see a building, statue, sculpture or fountain that provokes curiosity and rejuvenates the soul, however fleetingly.
Mayor Miller talked on Monday of a city engaged in "self-rejoicing" and a populace "busy loving our city." What we've been implored to rejoice is our civility, ethnic diversity and commercial prowess — things we should indeed love, or at least cherish, but which engage most of us at the level of an admonition to eat your broccoli.
Me, I'd rejoice as I danced each Civic Holiday down a reborn Yonge St. mall, closed off to traffic for 20 blocks. I'd be dressed as Lord Simcoe to honour the occasion, or Richard Simmons, as the spirit moved me.
Imagine... A Mardi Gras of the North. Now that would get the world's attention.
|
source:
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Co...72154&t=TS_Home
___________________
Palm Trees > Pine Trees , Sand > Snow
|
i only read the first few lines and some other ones throughout the article. coles notes?
