All Fried Up In The Big Smoke

Less political. More fictional.

Civic Audacity

Posted on February 13, 2014 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

Point 7.

(Points 1-5 summarized here. Point 6 here.)

I’m just going to come right out and lift it from Charles Montgomery’s Happy City. I couldn’t phrase it any better or more succinctly.

Civic audacity. [page 105]

What Toronto needs now is a whole lot of civic audacity.

Not the kind of audacity we’ve been exposed to over the last three years or so. To re-coin another author’s turn of phrase, that’s The Audacity of No Hope. Toronto as some sort of Get Off My Lawn, Grumpy Old Man. Oh, no we can’t. It’s too expensive. Keep it down, kids. Can’t you see we’re in one of our drunken stupors.

The audacity of mendacity, let’s call it.

No. I’m talking about boldness now. A certain daring-do and courage to step up and say, I’ve got an idea. I’ve got an idea that’s so crazy it just might work.

This may be a little too much to expect. Even discounting the current reactionary regime at City Hall, it’s been some time since the city as a whole has embraced audacity or boldness. Radical initiatives aren’t really in our DNA. We’re toe-dippers, averse to changing what isn’t working right now because it used to work before.

And I fear after the tumult in the wake of the Ford administration that all we’re really going to be looking for is a little peace and quiet. We’re tired of turmoil and embarrassment. Could you dial down the tomfoolery a notch and just get on with governing. Gently. Without kicking up too much of a fuss.

I guess, everything else being equal, it wouldn’t be an unreasonable request. This city has been put through an emotional wringer, a theme park roller coaster that simply will not end. Since 2010, it hasn’t been about governance but pitched battle.

Makes perfect sense to want a little respite. A break from the non-stop action. Hey! We’ve all got lives to live here.

The thing is…

This is no time to fall back to sleep at the switch. There’s too much to be done. We’ve avoided tough choices and necessary action for too long. While the city grows, it has begun to groan and creak under the weight of neglect and indecision. These past three years have been little more than simply fending off further damaging destabilization.

Breathing a big sigh of relief and letting down your guard at this point of time is nothing short of the Coyote opening up an umbrella to protect himself from the falling boulder. An empty gesture. Futile, even.

In the face of such an open attack on the proper state of affairs of this city, what we need now is a spirited, forceful pushback. “A grand experiment”, in the further words of Charles Montgomery, requiring “grander rhetoric”. We don’t want measured. We don’t want milquetoast. We don’t want a bringer of calm.

We want boldness. We want inspiration. We want audacity.

For instance?

OK. Take the matter of the recent staff report on the future of the eastern portion of the Gardiner Expressway, for instance.

The easy thing to do (if not exactly the fiscally responsible thing) would be to maintain the status quo. Throw a billion dollars or so (rounding off in a Ford manner) at it and leave everything as is. Steady as she goes. Doesn’t upset the applecart that’s already pretty much been overturned for some time now.

Or… or… we could tear it down and open up a whole new host of possibilities and opportunities in its place. Yes, some car commuters are going to be inconvenienced, time added on both going to and coming home from work. But you know what? It’s not 1954 anymore. We won’t be the first place that’s started to re-jig our transportation priorities.

Or how about the matter of public transit?

This is an area obviously ripe for audacity, nerve, zazz and more than a little chutzpah. A bold vision, if you will, outlining how this city’s going to get around over the next 25, 30 years. A view that looks beyond vote-generating pet projects and lays out a plan for an entire network and system. Enough of the technology porn already. Tell us how you’re going to get people from point A to point B, quickly, seamlessly and, yes, enjoyably. And not just some people. Every resident of the city.

Pick a thread of our municipal fabric and pitch us as to how exactly you’ll stop it from further unravelling. Affordable housing. Community development. Neighbourhood planning.

Wow us. Don’t underwhelm us. Tell us what we can do not what we can’t. Set the bar higher. Stop diminishing our expectations.

Give the city and its residents something to aspire toward rather shrink away from. Challenge us instead of placating us. Appeal to our better angels. Stop inflaming our worst instincts.

Be bold. We’ve tried brazen. Only later did we realize there’s a big difference between the two.

— upliftingly submitted by Cityslikr

A Recap

Posted on January 28, 2014 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

Earlier this month, near the start of the 2014 municipal election campaign, we set off on a bid to lay out a 10 point (give or take) platform we’d like to see candidates out promoting as they sought public office. Something more than simply slogans or tribal chants. Substantive. City-zen focussed not taxpayer obsessive.

Here’s what we’ve come up with so far (in no particular order save from first to last):

1) Residents of Toronto are more than taxpayers. We live here. We work here. We play here. We raise families here. The taxes and user fees we pay are simply the cost of doing all these things.

Living in a city, being part of the life that goes on around you, should be tabulated by more than what it costs. Referred to as merely a taxpayer ignores the grander social element of being a city-zen. As Charles Montgomery writes in Happy City, “The city is ultimately a shared project…a place where we can fashion a common good that we simply cannot build alone.”

2) A city is only as good as its public realm. The post-war flight from the public good to private interest has undercut a sense of shared experience in city life. Detached, single family homes, dispersed on big lots, the automobile, shopping malls all represent an elevation of the individual good, a buffer against a collective enterprise.

Take the car (please!) for example.

Huge swaths of public space is designed, built and maintained exclusively for the movement of single individuals driving in their cars. Suggest a more equitable arrangement for other ways to get around, and somehow it’s declared a war. Find somewhere else to go. This is ours.

Again, Charles Montgomery in Happy City: “Rome rose as its wealth was poured into the common good of aqueducts and roads [not just for chariots – me.], then declined as it was hoarded in private villas and palaces.”

3) Ease of mobility. The title of Human Transit’s Jarrett Walker’s transit talk last week? Abundant Access: Public Transit As An Instrument of Freedom.

Disproportionately favouring one mode of how we move around this city puts people who don’t need to, want to or can’t afford to use that mode as their primary source of transportation at a disadvantage. Especially if that mode is the least efficient way of moving the most amount of people around the city. It carves out public space in favour of private use.

The only rational, civic-minded approach a municipal candidate can take in terms of transportation policy is a pledge to re-arrange the priorities that have been in place for decades and decades and decades now. It’s been said many times by many people but the goal should be about moving people not cars. Candidates need to be saying it louder and more often.

4) Taxation. Ugghhh. It’s time we stopped referring to taxes as a burden and recognize them for what they are. The only way we build a better city, with a better public realm and provide the most opportunities for the most people.

There’s no other way, folks. Anyone who tries to convince you otherwise, that there’s some magical way out there that we can get everything we want without paying for it is either lying or delusional. Maybe both.

I heard it said at a recent deputation at City Hall, a request to ‘tax us fairly, spend wisely’. We can debate until the cows come home on the concepts of ‘fairly’ and ‘wisely’ but we need to move on past this silly, selfish idea that taxes are bad, a burden. Harkening back again to Charles Montgomery, “The city is a shared project…a place where we can fashion a common good that we simply cannot build alone.” And in the words of one former mayor (more or less), a great city, a prosperous city, a fair city does not come for free.

5) The urban-suburban divide. Governing this city does not have to be a zero-sum game. I mean, it does if you’re trying to promote divisiveness as a political strategy. We are not complete aliens to one another, we Torontonians. Many have grown up in the suburbs and moved to the inner core. Others the reverse.

Of course, some of the challenges we face are different and need different solutions, depending where we live, where we work, where we go to school. One size does not, cannot fit all. But any approach to fixing the problems that currently plague us as a city shouldn’t come at the expense of others. It needs to come at the expense to us all.

Sure, we face some problems arising out of built form. There are no easy fixes. We’re talking culture changes.

That’s a tough nut to crack. It’s much easier to disengage and retreat to our respective corners. Blame other people and pine for the old days, the good old days.

Well, to quote (no, not Charles Montgomery this time) The Libertines, there were no good old days. These are the good old days. And we’re in it together to make sure of just that. These are the good old days.

To be continued.

— hopefully submitted by Cityslikr

A City Is Public Domain

Posted on January 9, 2014 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

Point 2.

(Point 1 being from Monday that began our search for a 2014 campaign manifesto creed. A document to move us beyond talk of taxpayers, to find words or ideas that encompass the complexity of our relationship with each other and the city we live in. In his book Happy City, Charles Montgomery cites Henri Lefebvre who talks of citizens and denizens. Citadin, he says. Citident? Resizen? We’ll keep working on it.)

We have been pitched a faulty narrative over the course of the last few years, decades really, if we go back to Margaret Thatcher’s claim that there is no such thing as society. Here in Toronto since 2010, it’s all been about the taxpayer. That hardworking, heroic figure who just wants to make a few bucks, put food on the table for his family, maybe have a coupla pops on a Friday night. The little guy.

The only thing standing in the way — like a streetcar hogging up two perfectly good lanes of road — of this simple, common sense approach to life, is the government. All greedy, grabby hands, reaching deep into our pockets, taking our hard-earned money to spend on their sketchy (and probably corrupt) boondoggles and international excursions. Everything would be so much better if governments would just get off our backs and let us do our thing!

Picture this.

A house on a street. Not one of those European semi-detached ones or row houses. An actual house. On its own. A nice front yard. A driveway to the side.

A home. A castle, am I right? A haven from the rough and tumble world going on outside of it.

The urban homestead. Pitched by self-sufficient pioneers come to the city despite its purse-snatchers and perverts, jaywalkers and bus riders, to seize the opportunity from petty bureaucrats and political bagmen. Look out world! Here I am, twirling on a street corner, tossing my hat in the air. [Note to self: rework that last image. It comes across as a little too girlie.]

It’s a myth, of course. Pure bullshit. Always has been.

Underneath that detached house on the street, pipes and drains and mains. Overhead, wires. All conveying some sort of public utility. Let me state that again. Public utility. Potable water in, treated first somewhere, a city service. Sewage out, again, treated somewhere, a city service. Electricity. Gas. Likely some combination of public-private partnership, depending on where it is you live.

That street out front of that house?

Built and maintained, if not directly by the city, by tax dollars brought into and paid out by the city. Cleared of snow and ice in the winter by the city. Cleaned of refuse the rest of the year by the city. On many of those streets, the city provides space for private vehicles to park at rates far below what the market would demand.

Any notion that any of us live or work in this city free of assistance and cooperation from everybody else is simply delusional. A taxpayer alone lives in a shack in the woods at the end of dirt path. He fends for himself.

Even the mighty industrialists among us depend on the kindness of strangers to chip in and pay for the infrastructure business needs to deliver its goods and services to succeed. Who did our mayor turn to in order to gussy up the surroundings of his family business in time for its 50^th anniversary? Why, the city of course.

Look at our most recent run in with crazy inclement weather. No, not the outer space-like cold snap. Before that. The ice storm, and the toll it took on this city’s trees.

We all know trees, and how beneficial a healthy tree canopy is to a city. So much so that City Hall exerts a mighty control over their well-being. It spends a lot of money maintaining a healthy stock of trees.

You might have a tree in your yard. It is rooted in your property but overhangs a neighbour’s house or a neighbour’s car parked on the street. The ice storms blows through, bringing down huge branches of your tree, crashing down on top of that car, taking out the wires that provide electricity to a couple of your other neighbours’ houses. Power’s not restored for days. A lot of the food in their fridges and freezers goes bad.

Ooops.

Just because that tree is in your yard, you can hardly be expected to pay for all that damage. Such an expectation would just be silly and dumb. That tree in your yard contributes positively to all of our lives even those of us who don’t live in your neighbourhood or community. It makes sense that we all pitch in to help when things take a turn for the worse for that tree in your yard.

That’s not just a real life example. It works as a metaphor too, I think. A city cannot function on the self-interested efforts of individuals. While there is an ‘i’ in city (and community and neighbourhood), it is only just one letter among many. It can make its own word but isn’t much of a stand alone read.

In Happy City, Charles Montgomery refers to a city as a “social machine”. A place that provides opportunities to connect and engage others on an infinite number of levels. Friendship. Romantic. Business. Shared interests.

As diverse and complex as the inhabitants who dwell there.

If you only see yourself as a taxpayer in your relationship to the place you live, the opportunities for engagement with those around you are limited. Those outside of this limited social circle are little more than rivals for the resources you’ve paid for. Get off my lawn! Get out of my way! Get moving!

At its very core, it’s adversarial. Cities are a collaborative project. Living in one as just a taxpayer is nothing more than a shirking of your responsibilities to everyone else who helps make your life a whole lot easier.

— collectively submitted by Cityslikr