uTOpia

Towards a New Toronto

Alana Wilcox, Jason McBride

• Publisher: Coach House Books
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9781770562356
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Essays in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Since the election of Mayor David Miller in November 2003, Toronto has experienced a wave of civic pride and enthusiasm not felt in decades. At long last, Torontonians see their city as a place of possibility and potential. Visions of a truly workable, liveable and world-class city are once again dancing in citizens' heads. In the past two years, this spirit has, directly or indirectly, manifested itself in multifarious forms: in writer Sheila Heti's sui generis lecture series, Trampoline Hall; in the transformation of derelict hotels such as the Drake and the Gladstone into cultural hotspots; in renewed interest in waterfront revitalization and public transportation; in exciting, controversial architectural developments such as the OCAD building, the expansion of the ROM and the AGO; in the [murmur] project, which catalogues stories about Toronto neighbourhoods and broadcasts them to people's cell phones; in the explosion of the local independent music scene.

uTOpia aims to capture and chronicle that spirit, collecting writing by many of the people inspired by and involved in these projects. Featuring passionate, visionary essays by thirty-four different journalists, artists, thinkers, architects and activists, uTOpia is a compendium of ideas, opinions and strategies. The anthology explores plans to redevelop the Island airport into a Ward's Island-style community; how the Zeidler family is energizing artist-run centres; what a car-free Kensington Market might mean; the necessity and beauty of laneway housing; the way past efforts to combat devastating developments like the Spadina Expressway have shaped current activism; what a utopian Toronto might look like mapped out; and much, much more. Playful, erudite and accessible, uTOpia writes Toronto as it is shared and created by the people who live here. Though it is by no means a complete picture of what is happening in the city right now, it will hopefully show that what was once just a T-shirt slogan – I Heart T.O. – is now genuine, heartfelt sentiment.

Contributors include Howard Akler, Andrew Alfred-Duggan, Jacob Allderdice, Bert Archer, James Bow, Nicole Cohen, Jonny Dovercourt, Dale Duncan, Philip Evans, Mark Fram, Misha Glouberman, Chris Hardwicke, Sheila Heti, Alfred Holden, Luis Jacob, Lorraine Johnson, Edward Keenan, Mark Kingwell, John Lorinc, Sally McKay, Heather McLean, Dave Meslin, Shawn Micallef, Derek Murr, Ninjalicious, Darren O'Donnell, Planning Action, Barbara Rahder, Dylan Reid, Erik Rutherford, Jeffrey Stinson, Deanne Taylor, Conan Tobias, Stéphanie Verge, Adam Vaughan and Marlena Zuber.

TOMORROW

Bert Archer

Making a Toronto of the imagination

The University of Toronto held a little conference in 2004 called Cities of the Imagination. It brought together scholars from around the world to talk about the way cities exist outside of themselves, whether through literature, film or mythology. I was invited to deliver some general remarks on the subject, and the first thing that came to mind, and the first thing I said, was that I wasn’t sure whether it was fascinating, ironic or simply a little sad that a conference entitled Cities of the Imagination was taking place in Toronto – a city that exists in no one’s imagination, neither in Toronto, nor in the rest of the world.

Evidence of the former fact, I said, is to be found in the tittering you hear at movies when Toronto is mentioned – this does not happen with Niagara Falls, which, for various reasons, does exist in the imagination – and in the disbelief among those who noticed that, in 2005, the Utne Reader declared Toronto the best city in the world for magazine culture. Torontonians are always more than vaguely amazed that we’re mentioned in anything other than a domestic context, whether positively or negatively. Evidence for the latter point comes to any Torontonians going more or less anywhere in the world and telling people they’re from Toronto. The greatest reaction they’re likely to get, and in fact the most likely, is that the person they’re speaking to knows someone who lives there, very likely a family member or friend who moved here. Toronto is a place people live, not a place where things happen, or, at least, not where the sorts of things happen that forge a place for the city in the imagination.

Some of the cause has to be the city’s place in the imagination of our nation too. The Rebellion of 1837, for instance, which has all the potential to be the sort of building block every city of the imagination needs, is just rubble, neglected even by the curricula of many of the country’s schools. Upper Canada’s (and therefore Canada’s) first parliament buildings are actual rubble, right around the foot of Parliament Street (go figure). They were the subject of a brief activation of Toronto historical spirit in 2003 and 2004 that quickly withered. They’re under a Porsche dealership now. The root problems here are the lack of a sense of the importance of such things in Canada when confronted by much more firmly and narratively entrenched stories from Britain, the U.S., France, India and Germany; and the sometimes latent, sometimes not so latent, anti-Toronto sentiment in the rest of the country, where its cultural and financial centrality has been unchallenged at least since the Montreal exodus of the late seventies and early eighties.

Montreal has a much larger place in the imagination of its own residents, and of people abroad, than Toronto. The reasons for this are manifold, and include the extremely low tuition rates that, for several decades, attracted many Americans, who then went off and became a sort of alumni diaspora, and the fact that Montreal, unlike Toronto, is significantly different from the mainstream of American culture. It’s a handy tourist destination: European, but without the expense and bother of transatlantic travel, and so it sticks – at least with Americans. It resides so comfortably in the imaginations of its own people largely because of the mentality that springs up when a place is culturally threatened, as French Canada is by English Canada and the United States, and as English Montreal is by Franco Quebec. Anglo Toronto doesn’t have this problem. We’re not linguistically threatened, and we relate directly enough to the rest of Anglo culture that we don’t, except sometimes rhetorically, feel culturally threatened enough to install ourselves in a Quebec-style garrison.

Quebec has some cultural relations with the francophone world, whether it be France, Haiti, Belgium or the former French colonies in Africa, but Ontario and Toronto’s natural historical cultural connection is to England, a country that is far more concerned now with the centre of the English-speaking world – the United States – than it is with Canada. The royal family may come to Canada on slightly more frequent official visits than it does to the States, but that’s about the extent of our preferred status. At least culturally speaking. The Commonwealth is of very little significance. And so Toronto (and most of the rest of the country) has nowhere to look but south.

Which is precisely the problem. Most of Canada has gone from being a British colony to being an American one, with only a very brief interim, round about the time of Diefenbaker, Pearson and Trudeau’s first term or two. Laurier declared that the twentieth century would belong to Canada, and if Woodrow Wilson and FDR hadn’t come along, perhaps it could have. But they did, and it didn’t.

In any case, our continued devotion – in theory to Britain and in fact to the U.S. – makes us like nothing so much as a child who’s moved back home to his parents’ empty nest, looking for love and recognition he’s just not going to get.

My Toronto includes a Sneaky Dee’s on Bloor Street that’s open twenty-four hours a day. It includes a cinema called the Roxy, way out in the east end at Greenwood, that shows the Rocky Horror Picture Show every Friday at midnight, and a Christian Science Reading Room – beside what used to be a Beaver gas station at Bloor and St. George – where you can buy cheap, pretty, gold editions of the Bhagavad Gita and the Dhammapada to get your undergraduate fix of world religion before chucking the entire concept altogether. It also includes another little bookstore with no real sign, underneath an otherwise featureless government building. This shop is the Bob Miller Book Room; it’s like a bookstore for a small, liberal-arts grad school, except it’s not. It’s across the street from the U of T campus, but it has no affiliation with it. It has display tables out front, just like the big bookstores do, except they’re stocked with the latest life of Saussure, and Bob Miller’s newest best-seller might be, as it was recently, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas.

Everyone has a Toronto like this, made up of a combination of places from the past, little nooks and crannies they find charming or unique, or that have some personal resonance. They’ll also include bigger places, if you ask them, like the Eaton Centre or the Church of the Redeemer or Pusateri’s. We have many Torontos. We have our neighbourhoods, which residents invariably describe as being like little villages (they’ll also, I’ve found, usually tell you the neighbourhood’s a great place for dogs, even in Riverdale, where dogs have been known to get poisoned). Cities exist in layers, and this is the layer that includes your house, your neighbours’ houses, the corner store where you get your last-minute bread and your late-night chocolate, the schoolyard where you take your dog for a walk and the place you like to go for brunch or hangover recovery. This is the insular, inward-looking layer that has a lot in common with those developments you see in Whitby and Ajax and Pickering, where people move when their domestic lives become more important than their social ones.

The next layer is the often barbell-shaped home-work continuum, two blobs of familiarity – the work blob being very much like the home blob, only with more food courts and take-out coffee places – linked by a commute, whether it’s along the Queen streetcar line, up and down the lanes of Avenue and University, or across the 401. There are a hundred things we’re familiar with along the various commutes we make daily.

Along the Gardiner, for instance, there are these hillside flora ads for Manulife, the United Way and a few others (there used to be one for Arthur Andersen before it ran into its difficulties), that R. J. McCarthy school uniform building on the QEW with the schoolbus on top; Big Al’s aquarium store with the shark feedings north on Kennedy; the Hav-aNap motel on Kingston Road; or those halal pizza places (with names like Mecca and Madina) in the Muslim section of the Danforth that you’re always intending to get a slice from, just to see. It’s in this layer that our disconnection from the city begins. Even though hundreds of thousands of us are familiar with the same particulars of these bits of city we travel through, they have in all but the broadest cases (the CN Tower, the Eaton Centre, the ROM and AGO, maybe Upper Canada College) failed to become common points of reference among us. We don’t talk about them.

And nothing happens before conversation. If we don’t consider these sorts of things, our local loci, important enough for conversation, we certainly won’t consider them important enough to write down, or to film, or to otherwise record, and, without that, places – regardless of their population, density or legal status – remain towns, not cities.

There’s a reason this is as it is, and there’s a way out of it.

I remember, as many do, reading Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion for the first time. I had just moved to Toronto and was getting to know the city, the bits I mentioned above, staying mostly around where I was living, at Bay and Bloor. My Toronto at the time didn’t extend west of Bathurst or north of Yorkville or really east of Yonge, but it was a big, exciting city (I’d come from Victoria). I didn’t know much about it before moving here. I saw it on the news every once in a while, but In the Skin of a Lion was not only the first thing I read to have a Toronto resonance since I moved here, it was the first decent thing I’d ever read or seen that considered Toronto important enough to incorporate into art the way Paris or London or Berlin or New York have been for centuries. It was unapologetic, but also unselfconscious. Ondaatje, possibly because he came from somewhere else, was treating the city he lived and wrote in the way a writer would in any one of these other global cities (as Saskia Sassen calls them). It’s as a result of this book that the R. C. Harris water filtration plant just east of the Beaches has the resonance it does. Ditto the Bloor Street viaduct. It’s been outside itself. It’s been in a book. A good book. A widely read book. It’s important.

There’s a feedback loop that gets set up when someone does something good with one of our places or things, or even people, this way. The artist pulls something out of apparent obscurity, except, of course, she’s working from one of those frames of reference shared by thousands of locals. So when those locals read or see it, they’re reminded that, yes, they know that place and isn’t it cool that, say, Ondaatje knows it too? Then they might talk, eventually, to someone else who’s read or seen what they’ve read or seen and, suddenly, the person, place or thing has become communal. But even better than that, the next time they see the noun (let’s call it), it resonates not only with whatever direct personal experience they have with it, but with the added significance of its transmogrification into art, and its promotion from private to communal or public point of reference.

But in the years since In the Skin of a Lion, there’s been very little first-rate follow-up (it was preceded by Morley Callaghan’s stuff, but no one reads that anymore; Hugh Hood’s series would have been great if it’d ever caught on). We’ve had plenty of movies filmed here, obviously, but even the ones that are set here too, such as, to take a couple of decent ones at random, Eclipse (Jeremy Podeswa, 1995) and Sugar (John Palmer, 2004), aren’t confident enough in either themselves or the city to reify it. (I use this word a lot, but it’s really not that useful, since every time I do, I feel compelled to explain that it means, roughly, to thing-ify, to conceptualize and then to present something as a thing worthy of conceptualization and presentation. There.) We see no references to College Street or Roy Thomson Hall (or Roy’s Square or the Annex or Yonge and Eg). People in the audience of both these movies pointed and either giggled or mumbled when they recognized a storefront or a street corner, but the movies themselves never did. No filmic pointing, no mumbling. Toronto’s as much of a stand-in in Sugar as it is in Chicago.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. I’m not too concerned at the moment with offering suggestions about how to portray the city in film and literature (except possibly to mention that grants with strings and CanCon regulations are absolutely not the way to do it. One real, unassisted mention of Bill Barilko by the Tragically Hip is worth a dozen NFB films about Yonge Street). What I’m interested in is that conversation, and getting us into it.

It can be a circular sort of a thing at first. People consider cities important enough to talk about and use bits of them as assumed points of reference when the cities are generally thought to be important enough to talk about and refer to. The question is, how do we get from here to there? Since the two main routes to establishing a place in the popular imagination – history and a dominating presence in contemporary mass culture, whether through traditional cultural product or through being the subject of globally significant or interesting news (Hiroshima, Locker-bie, Waco) – are not immediately open to us, the only practical suggestion is that we follow the leads already on the ground.

New York, contrary to apparent popular wisdom, is not one of those leads. New York has become the city it is in the imagination of New Yorkers and much of the rest of the world in fits and starts. King Kong (the 1933 and the 1976 versions), Saturday Night Live and Woody Allen certainly helped it along, as have the New Yorker, the Algonquin, Broadway (especially once it started feeding Hollywood), Times Square, Andy Warhol, Midnight Cowboy, Taxi Driver, Basquiat, Spike Lee, Seinfeld. The list is prodigiously long. But before they even got to Fred Astaire singing ‘on the avenue / Fifth Avenue,’ or Deborah Kerr standing Cary Grant up at the Empire State Building, the locals had to be impressed enough with themselves and what they’d wrought to put it in print and on...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• TOuchstones
• TOPOGRAPHY
• TOIL
• TOOLS & TOYS
• TOMORROW