A Civic Proposal: The City of Toronto Store

Last year I took a $100 bill to Chicago for the express purpose of buying a parking meter. You see, the Lonely Planet Chicago guidebook referenced this "City of Chicago Store" - a place where actual surplus city property, up to and including street signs and parking meters, was available for purchase. Unfortunately, only individual editions of a guidebook remain static, and by the time I made it to the Windy City there was no sign of the place. I will, however, admit the possibility that the CONSTANT RAIN and my general obliviousness meant that I missed the place entirely.

Still, to the best of my knowledge there's never been anything like that in Toronto. The TTC Transit Stuff store in Union Station was vaguely similar, but its stock was extremely limited and also it's closed now - thankfully I got the subway and RT T-shirts while I still had the chance. If for whatever reason you want to express Toronto pride now through swag you can buy, the only avenue that comes to mind is through the subway station buttons Spacing sells.

I think there's a vacuum here that the city government might do well to fill. Imagine a City of Toronto Store - not just a run-of-the-mill city souvenir store, since there are plenty of those in the airport already, but a place where you can pick up things you wouldn't be able to find elsewhere. Like surplus parking meters - or, for that matter, surplus street signs.

I'd buy that for a dollar! At least! Just needs a bit of scrubbing to get the rust off!

You may have noticed that, since its introduction back in late 2008, the new street signs are starting to appear with greater and greater frequency across the city. At first it was a coup for me to spot one, whereas now I need to put more effort into not looking for them. The counterpoint is that the old acorn signs, the ones that I still think of as quintessentially Torontonian even though I know for a fact the same design is used in Dorval, are disappearing - being replaced. I've heard rumors of the city selling them, but I've never encountered anything concrete. A City of Toronto Store would provide the municipal government with a crackerjack outlet for its superfluous stuff - and if managed properly, it would be that most precious of feathers in a government's hat, an agency that actually turns a profit.

It could be something worth considering.

PDP #240: The Whirlybirds

In two days the G20 summit will kick off in Toronto, and while the red zone downtown hasn't yet been locked down, the heightened security measures are becoming more obvious - from the phalanx of bicycle cops that passed by on Yonge Street the other day to the mounted patrol at Yonge and King and the helicopters slashing through the sky over Parkdale. I can't identify them myself, as I was rather more a fixed-wing nerd in my youth. The image has been cropped somewhat to remove the rather annoying and distracting dead pixels my camera likes to throw up.

Incidentally, this photo was taken at approximately the same time as yesterday's earthquake - definitely within a few minutes. Personally, I never felt it.

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A Stellar Break of Secrecy

There's a friend of mine who takes a rather dim view of the news media. I've never asked specifically why, as I'm rarely in the mood for an ideological lecture, but I can understand how someone might settle in that opinion. While the idea that "the public has a right to know" is a worthwhile ideal to pursue, I can't help but think there are times where that should be balanced with a consideration of whether or not something should be reported, just because it can be.

Case in point: today's Toronto Star has a story detailing some of the background security measures for the G8 and G20 summit - in particular the Joint Intelligence Group, described as the "nerve centre" for security operations in Toronto and Huntsville. This is where decisions will be made if, as the Star reports, "any major attack" takes place.

Earlier reports in the media stated that the JIG was up in Barrie, effectively equidistant between the two summit sites, but went into no further detail than that. In an attempt to ensure operational security, the Integrated Security Unit "has requested media outlets keep the location of the Barrie nerve centre a secret since it would be an obvious target."

Barrie, Ontario and Kempenfelt Bay

So what's the Star's response to this? Why, to not only publish a photograph of the JIG setup, but to specify exactly where it is. Who cares if the media was asked not to report on the minor detail of the precise location? Going into specifics doesn't make a difference - Barrie is barely a step removed from being a black hole anyway. So how does the Star justify this? By claiming that it "became a rather poorly kept secret when the ribbon-cutting for the facility included a large contingent of Mounties in red serge posing on the lawn outside."

Oh, all right. So because it's a poorly-kept secret, it's perfectly all right to ignore the ISU's request to report on a single detail that is not material to the release. If it was such an open secret, you'd think I'd have been able to find something mentioning it in the Barrie Examiner's archives - but not a thing to be seen in there. Honestly, there's a difference between breaking a veneer of security for valid reasons in the public interest, and doing it just for the hell of it. It's as if the Star's editorial board considered the ISU's secrecy request and said "fuck that, we're going to do it anyway."

I'm reminded of a story related by military historian Geoffrey Regan in his Book of Military Blunders - though since I can't find my copy of it right now, I can't verify if my recollection is totally accurate. It dealt with the Crimean War and focused on the British at the siege of Sevastopol, and how the British guns frequently came under preternaturally accurate Russian bombardment. The reason for the Russian accuracy was that the Times of London reported on the events of the siege in great detail, up to and including the location of the British guns, and new issues of the Times reached the Russians in Sevastopol before the British.

I can understand wanting to make sure the public knows, but newspapers need to choose their battles. The role of the media isn't to antagonize the security apparatus purely for the sake of it.

PDP #239: Between the Fences

Yesterday, work was completed on the network of fencing that will, on Friday if not sooner, lock down a chunk of Toronto's downtown core for the G20 summit this weekend. It's a very sobering thing, seeing fences go up on your city streets. With them comes endless security theatre and speculation on what's going to happen next - it's like that part of the city will be waiting to exhale until the walls come down again.

Here, on Front Street, there's two adjacent layers of fencing - or at least there were last Friday, when this was taken.

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Walking a Road to the Future

Take a look at a street photograph from a hundred or so years ago, and aside from the physical quality of the photo itself to the styles of the buildings and the clothes, there's one key factor that tends to separate the early 20th century from the early 21st - back then, pedestrians made the street their own. Rather than stick to the sidewalks, they took advantage of all the space from curb to curb, and why not? This was a time where automobiles were curiosities, playthings of the rich. There was precious little traffic, other than streetcars, for people to be alert for.

With the coming of the car, of course, that all changed. Cities shifted from being centered around pedestrians to cars and their passengers. Most cities tore up those streetcar networks, leaving Toronto one of the only North American cities that kept the rails in its streets. People were pushed back to the sidewalks, to the fringes. Plenty of people would, I have no doubt, see this as natural progress - but I can't help but think that the pendulum may yet swing the other way. For decades, modern Western culture has pushed the notion that an old thing is an obsolete thing. What I've come to see recently is that our ancestors may have plenty of answers for the problems we've created through our natural progress.

Take cities. Back in the day, cities were walkable because they had to be. The suburban exodus was the result of multiple social, political, and economic issues intersecting - compare the drastic emptying-out and suburbanization of once-major American cities like Detroit and Cleveland to the patterns of development around Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. There's no absolute reason why cities couldn't still be walkable - it's just that for the last decades, many cities have been catering to the suburban impulse to the exclusion of all others. Go to Mississauga, for example, and unless you spend all of your time in Port Credit or Streetsville you'll find wide, wide roads where cars slash past like shooting stars.

Dependence on cars to sustain a healthy streetlife is like keeping a boa constrictor as a pet - unless you're careful and everything goes absolutely right, sooner or later you're going to get into trouble with it. Witness St. Clair Avenue West, which was in a state of reconstruction for five years between road repair, watermain replacement, and the reinstallation of the streetcar right-of-way. All those conspired to keep traffic away from St. Clair, and while I was there this weekend, I noted no shortage of empty storefronts up for lease. Though it's a shame that so many dreams died in such a way, the real shame, in my mind, is that the cityscape is so dependent on a single mode of transit that its absence can make things fall apart. Brief events like the "Feet First on St. Clair" pedestrian celebration last weekend, where the whole street was closed off between Vaughan and Winona, inject fresh life into the asphalt - it's the sort of energy our streets deserve to always have.

On June 20 this portion of St. Clair Avenue West became a pedestrian mall, and the road a canvas for chalk art

The most dangerous thing we can do is assume that today will always lead smoothly into tomorrow. Nor can we discount the lessons of the past, even if we don't pay that much attention to them. We can't bind our fate to that of the automobile, and we shouldn't let what's convenient for four wheels dictate our destiny.

PDP #238: Tower in the Sunset Hour

One thing that I had to get used to about Vancouver is that it's not quite as vertical as Toronto - while there are a number of condo towers rising in Coal Harbour and elsewhere, in the city's actual downtown the skyscraper situation is a bit more subdued. The 34-storey Scotia Tower is one of the disctinctive buildings in the downtown skyline.

It also jolted me out of suspension of disbelief for Battlestar Galactica, as I recall at least one skyline shot of a city on Caprica that displayed it, and the Scotiabank logo, rather prominently.

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We Almost Lost the Solar System

I've written before about the necessity for politicians to take the future into greater consideration if we're ever to improve our lot beyond simply "muddling through." One of the big problems with this is that humans in general just aren't wired to consider the future - for many of us, the further we look beyond tomorrow, the more difficult it becomes to see anything. While it's perfectly understandable given our origins - our distant ancestors couldn't afford to dwell on what the next sunrise would bring when they still hadn't brought back fresh meat for that night's meal - today it conspires against us. Now, more than ever, we need to live with one foot in the future.

Now and again, governments are capable of making the forward-looking leaps that make tomorrow a bit brighter. Nevertheless, our governments are still made up of people, and "capacity to consider the future" isn't a quality that necessarily accompanies leadership. As a result, even when they're trying to take the future into account, many times they don't. Exhibit A: the Agreement Governing the Activities of States on the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, more compactly known as the Moon Treaty. This treaty would, in essence, have taken the current regulatory regime that applies to the sea and expanded it to cover the entire solar system.

And for what? Well-meaning but utterly shortsighted notions of "common heritage of mankind" provisions spreading out into space. I'm sorry, but like the level of gravity to which we've become accustomed, there are some things that just don't apply off Earth. I cannot see how those provisions should apply to celestial bodies that are, as far as current science knows, absolutely dead.

I still haven't been able to find a concrete reason as to why this treaty was pushed through the United Nations, aside from the typical UN bafflegab about "international cooperation" and "peaceful uses of outer space" and so on. Despite the almost science-fictional nature of the treaty, I really don't think that the people behind it were sparing much thought for the future. Except for offplanet versions of the science stations in Antarctica, the Moon Treaty would have confined the efforts of humanity to Earth orbit. No resource extraction, no possibility of property rights, and everything subject to inspection by any of the States Parties to the treaty. While it'd be difficult at the best of times for anyone live in space, the Moon Treaty would go one step further and make it intolerable, if not impossible.

Perhaps, though, that was part of the motivation. I've been reading more works from the 1970s recently, a time that in North America was deeply characterized by the 1973 energy crisis and was also the first great eruption of environmental sentiment. The origins of that damned mantra, "solve Earth's problems before we go to space," can probably be traced back to that decade. Perhaps the idea *was* to confine humanity to Earth - to prevent the idea of an escape valve from distracting people from the issues at hand.

But that's pretty conspiratorial. The simpler explanation is that they just thought they were doing a good turn for the future, without stopping to consider what it actually might do to the future.

PDP #237: On the Edge of the Night

The evening is its own world. As the sun sinks below the horizon and whatever else may be in its way, things emerge that are hidden during times of light - owls, vampires, that sort of thing. The world in dusk and twilight frequently stands in stark opposition to that of the day - there are perspectives that you just can't get at high noon. Like this one - taken from Vancouver's Lions Gate Bridge, the sun ready to disappear between the rolling mountains of the North Shore.

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A Civic Proposal: Feet First on Yonge

When I was in elementary school, I read a brief short story about alien observers over Earth, who studied the shape of civilization and came to the conclusion that the automobile was the dominant life form. When I think about Toronto today, sometimes I feel as if that's literally the case. Whenever anything rises up that could even conceivably threaten the dominance of our internal combustion overlords, there's no shortage of people charging forward to decry it as the next salvo of the "war on the car" - whether it's the prospect of bicycle lanes on Jarvis or speed bumps, which the Toronto Sun suggested with a straight face last year.

If you'd only ever experienced this city and its hinterland, you could be easily forgiven for thinking attitudes like this are universal. Fortunately they're not, and Vancouver - a city that didn't just stop its Spadina Expressway equivalent from crashing through downtown, but never built any kind of municipal expressway system - is at least one place where, next to the mountains and enlivened by a fresh breeze off the mighty Pacific, I understood just how crazy this all is. Personally, I was always of the opinion that cities should be designed around people. Automobiles have had their day in the limelight, but instead of a day it's been seventy years.

Granted, Toronto isn't standing still on this - it's recently created two new pedestrian zones, one along Gould Street within the Ryerson University campus and another on Willcocks Street at the University of Toronto. It's a fair start, but that's all it is - a start. Toronto has a long way to go yet, but there are other cities that have gone this way before. It's easier to go forth when you know you're following a path that others have successfully and safely walked.

Granville Street at Robson

Granville Street is fairly significant in the Vancouver street grid. South of False Creek it supports South Granville Rise, a thriving neighborhood that reminds me of Queen West in many respects, but as it crosses the Granville Street Bridge and makes its way into downtown, its character shifts significantly. Between Smithe Street and West Hastings Street, it becomes Granville Mall, a transit and pedestrian zone to make Toronto's latest offerings look like crude sketchwork. During the day, at least, private vehicles are not allowed on this part of Granville - though they are able to pass through it on all cross streets - and as a result the street has an energy that I've only seen rivalled by Augusta Avenue on Pedestrian Sunday. From messages left in chalk by passers-by to magic shows to a guy rocking out in a Spider-Man mask, this stretch of street really was the province of the people and not the automobile.

What's more, it's been like this since 1974 and yet it has not been reduced to a vacant, smoking ruin. Though I know this may be difficult to believe for the suburban crowd, just because a car cannot go somewhere does not mean that people will not go there. From what I've heard, the recent construction on the Canada Line beneath Granville had more of an effect on businesses than the vehicle restrictions.

There is no reason this concept couldn't be imported to Toronto - nor should there be a reason to keep from doing so. A city, first and foremost, should reflect its people, not its vehicles. In that vein, as a candidate for Mayor of Toronto, this is what I propose - a pilot project for summer 2011 wherein, during daylight hours, Yonge Street between Dundas Street and College Street would be closed off to form a pedestrian mall. Yonge Street is the core of Toronto's identity - it should be given, first and foremost, to the people directly.

Personally, if we can't give five hundred and forty-six meters of roadway directly to the people that make this city possible, I think it just demonstrates the depths of the challenges Toronto will face in the years ahead. We're at a point where we can't keep making the same old decisions anymore.

PDP #236: Bridging the Gate

The other day, someone found this weblog by asking Google "why is the Golden Gate Bridge a wonder of the world and Lions Gate isn't?" It's a valid question, one that I was wondering a bit myself while I was in Vancouver. They're both very similar in design and they are close contemporaries, but while the Golden Gate Bridge is rather well-known worldwide, the Lions Gate Bridge is obscure outside of the Lower Mainland. I hadn't even heard of it myself until I started doing preparatory research. I'm not really sure why things settled out that way - the easiest answer I can come up with is that "it's not American," since a lot of the Golden Gate's recognizability has come from its many appearances in film and television. Sure, Vancouver's become a major entertainment production area, but how much is actually set there? Less stuff than is set in Toronto. Aside from Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids and the Leaning Tower of Pisa, how many international landmarks do you see in American productions?

So here's a photo of the Lions Gate Bridge. It's a lot easier to just look at it than actually walk across it.

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