OK – sorry this took a couple of days – here are the election riding results for urban areas to compare with the pre-election situation of the last post. “Ring Around the Liberals, A Pocket full of Layton. Tories! Tories! We all fall down!” I’ll leave the analysis to the wogs. Well done Vancouver for the largest concentration of NDP seats seen in some time (5 contiguous seats!), and shame on you Alberta – the only province (well – apart from PEI which only has 4 seats) to elect candidates from only one party (boring for the map, no doubt boring in reality) – even the Quebecois have never done that! Kudos to Olivia Chow, Layton and Peggy Nash for stopping Toronto from becoming a big red rash on the country.

Canadian cities outside of Alberta have a little antipathy towards voting Conservative, though suburban areas get increasingly Conservative the further out you get. This all seems like common sense – but for your viewing pleasure (and oddly showing the hard time the NDP has had winning seats even in inner cities) here are maps of the major cities across the country showing the current seat distribution as we go into tomorrow’s election. I think you can figure the colour-coding out. Props to Elections Canada for the mapping.

For a while it’s seemed like Landscape Architects have been increasingly relegated to subservient roles in many areas of their work outside of their core discipline of designing and overseeing construction of built landscapes. Sometimes, hard as it can be to admit, willingness to accept these roles has become a justification for this trend – references to Landscape Architects as simply putting trees and green on plans are saddening largely because of how frequently they are true. However, recent events in the Railway Lands in Toronto have highlighted the ongoing battle over Landscape Architecture’s home turf.

In some ways the momentum of design initiative itself – particularly in the urban environment – has been slipping away from Landscape Architects for some time. Whether it’s because outsiders have much fresher perspectives on the issues of landscape architecture, or overly pragmatic professional associations solidifying mediocre standards and approaches as “best practices”, or a fault in landscape architectural design education, designers without an affiliation to landscape architecture have been successfully winning many large and significant projects within the core discipline of the landscape architecture profession.

From Downsview Park‘s winning design (by Bruce Mau and Rem Koolhaas) to Dundas Square‘s controversial slickness (by Brown + Storey), landscape architects are becoming simply a required member of a team led by an architecture firm for many of the biggest landscape architectural projects in Toronto.

And now, enter some new competition. Douglas Coupland, the author and artist who “coined the term ‘Generation X’ with his book of the same name” has been “hired to design a three-hectare park” in Toronto, according to press reports released last week. The park in question is the new community park required to supplement Concord Adex’s mammoth CityPlace development in the West and Central Railway Lands. The headlines were euphoric: “Impassioned Canadian artist, Douglas Coupland, commissioned to design eight-acre urban park at Concord CityPlace”, “Coupland’s Toboggan Vision”. The Globe and Mail was more realistic – “Author Coupland to help design park”.

Never mind that the press reports are slightly inaccurate. Never mind that Coupland is in effect the artist selected for the City’s public art requirement, was selected independently of the search for a landscape architecture team, and is intended to be “working in tandem with the landscape architect.” Never mind that as far as I can tell that means that the Landscape Architect will be designing the park – and that means Greg Smallenberg of well-regarded Vancouver firm Phillips Farevaag Smallenberg, aided in Toronto by David Leinster of The Planning Partnership.

Is there something about landscape architects that makes them so much more unglamorous than other potential designers? Is there something that makes them unworthy of having the headline even when it’s one of the most significant privately-funded landscape architecture projects in the city in decades? Maybe landscape architects these days lack the vision of other designers or don’t have the same authoritative way of capturing the imagination of the public. Is it landscape architects who have lost their imagination? Let’s face it – they must be doing something wrong if everyone accepts that an artist is needed to create a great park, or that a landscape architect can’t be trusted to come up with a fresh, imaginative and interesting concept.

While on one hand I’m hurt by this attitude towards landscape architects, part of me knows and admits that the profession in Canada does desperately need some freshening up – both in imagination and authority. There are landscape architects doing great, interesting work – from built to theoretical – but we must start to accept that we can no longer take for granted our role as key designers in our core discipline. Just as landscape architects need to fight for their roles at larger scales and at the periphery of the discipline by competition and equivalence with others working in those areas, so they must join the fight in defending their own backyard so to speak – the future of design seems to be the need of designers to prove both their role and their worth regardless of professional affiliation. And the kind of self-examination and re-examination of core principles that this would require may be just what the landscape architectural profession needs.

You do not want to know how long it took to get all this mapping and unit #s together. I’d call that an example of how useless the City is at presenting a comprehensive view of what’s going on. This map is from just east of Bathurst to just west of Dufferin, from the waterfront up to north of Queen. Click it to enlarge and see the number of units for many of the completed, under-construction and proposed developments in this very rapidly changing area. Some figures are estimates (with ? beside).

Ever get really pissed off trying to find out what the hell is going on (development-wise) in one of Toronto’s several large development projects? We’re talking showcase large scale urban brownfield sites, the likes of which – once developed – we will rarely see again, such as the Massey-Harris/Ferguson lands, the Inglis lands, and the Railway lands (shown above before the yards, and western roundhouse were removed). Now, you might think that a simple visit to the City of Toronto’s website would clarify the matter – especially for a location as fundamentally important as the railway lands. Perhaps the Planning Department would give us a clue? Nope. Do a search for Railway Lands. Aha! So here we have the Urban Design Guidelines for the Central/West Railway Lands (but just try getting there from the Urban Design page). But of course, urban design guidelines are a relatively toothless mechanism to control development (something that’s being addressed with recent proposed changes to the Planning Act, Municipal Act, Provincial Policy Statement, and Ontario Municipal Board, see Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing who do a great job at clearly explaining all of their work) so how do we know that what they show is what we’ll get?

Now we all know that there are comprehensive plans done for all these areas just so the developers can ever get approval. At some point no doubt there were public meetings at which the plans were shown – but where the hell are these things now? Shouldn’t people be able to see the shape of the city to come, even if they didn’t happen to be at the one or two public meetings? Wouldn’t it be helpful, informative, and simply good public policy to keep the citizens of Toronto aware and on-board – especially when the projects are large to the point of being virtually sensational? Isn’t this where the dialogue about how to make a good city, how to grow responsibly and in a way that adds to the quality of the city, should be taking place? Maybe the developers don’t want anyone to know their detailed plans? Maybe noone thinks that anyone cares once all the planning’s done? Think again.

Given the disappointing results of the first phase of CityPlace (Central Railway Lands) one would think the City would be at pains to be more up front about what’s happening. On the other hand, you would think that they would be delighted to be giving out information on successful large scale development on important sites in the city. Sure the CityPlace: Railway Lands West Public Realm Master Plan, Architectural Guidelines and Implementation Plan got an honourable mention at the 2005 city urban design awards in the visions and master plans category (see here, but the real question is, did it deserve it) – but wouldn’t it be nice if uptodate information about the detailed design of this stuff as it will actually be built was continually available? It could be that I’m just slow and can’t find the information that is plainly on the City’s website. Just in case anyone else has the same trouble as me – here’s a few snapshots of what to expect in the West Railway Lands. If you don’t read plans well, or can’t picture what’s going on – tough. I challenge you to find anything better – and secretly hope you do! The two 3d images below are probably well out of date. In the detailed plan below, the block directly east (to the right) of the community park will house public schools (public and separate) and a community centre/daycare (all up against the east-west street, Fort York Boulevard). South (below) the schools buiding is an “affordable housing” complex which appears to be peculiarly isolated from all public right of ways, serviced by what looks like a private road. Why on earth we are we still building affordable housing in isolated separate buildings? Why can’t units of affordable housing be distributed individually in market-rate buildings the way it is proposed to be done in Regent Park? Anyways, somehow it all looks a little thin on the ground to me – especially for a site that on the whole particularly suffers from a physical isolation from the rest of the city, jammed as it is between the railway corridor and the Gardiner Expressway.

The following is an excerpt from a delightful little monologue written by Howard Engel for CBC Radio, now a lovely little book published by Key Porter Books and illustrated by Bill Slavin.

“Whenever I remember Christmas as a child in Scarborough, I can never remember whether the slush was new or old, or whether we lived on the sixth street north of the shopping plaza stoplights and I was seven years old, or whether it was the seventh street and I was six. But still my nose and fingertips tingle at the thought of Christmas in the row housing, whose names rang their challenging, forlorn ways down to the fast-backed, nerve-and gear-racking lanes of the freeway: Elegance Manors, Tweedingham Mews, Buckingham Back Courts.

“And I am again a boy among boys, riding our crash-barred, chrome-bedazzling bikes through the supermarket swing-doors, grabbing girls’ tuques and popsicles in the Mac’s Milk and diving with our arms spread to make angels in the snowbanks that the plows churned up, plunging our hands to the soggy, stitch-straining armpits…

“And clear as the chlorinated water in the taps, but not so clear as a secret rivulet in the snows that we boys found near the highway that was gone in the spring when the hill was cleared for a condominium, I see Uncle Harry turning away the Salvation Army girl at the door and his making us all laugh as she fell on the path, on the ice I should have chipped away.

“Christmas in Scarborough was nothing if it was not families and laughter. But before the compacts and the late-models and the single sports car owned by Aunt Hetty, the divorcee, who bought the Fugs record, before the hordes of uncles and aunts and cousins jousted for a parking spot and the superintendent appeared to ask us to remove a car that been parked in someone else’s spot, there were the presents that smothered Father’s absence due to overtime, and Mother’s voice raised in the kitchen downstairs while the supper held in the stove at low heat congealed…

“And then it was afternoon: all the cousins, friends of friends, who had been stuffed into spare rooms and cautioned to nap because they had stayed up all night in candy-caned anticipation of catching Santa and delayed for a day his return to the department store throne, were awakened and sent off into the streets…

“Then Father phoned from Number 41 Station to say that he had been in the egg nog again, and that he would be detained, and Mother drank the cooking sherry, and the turkey went unbasted.

Then Uncle Frank, who had been a stockbroker and then a convict, tried again to dance the Windfall of ’65 and fell through the picture window.

Then the neighbors knocked on our wall and we knocked on the neighbors’ wall and then the police came.”

(Howard Engel – A Child’s Christmas in Scarborough)

Beautiful – and real. Happy Christmas to all and to all a good night!

OK. I’m a little behind the times. It’s been months since the TTC started installing media video screens on the subway platforms showing CP24 and advertising, but I’m only now getting around to a response.

First of all, I don’t know what the fuss is all about. The Public Space Committee and their ilk are having a fit over all this – and maybe TV is getting all-pervasive with CP24 being broadcast on a giant media screen at Yonge and Bloor and too many to count at Dundas and Yonge – but the fact is, I don’t mind having access to those scrolling news reports, and given the length of a subway platform, the size of the subway screens is easy enough to ignore if you’re not interested. And despite what the TPSC and Spacing seem interested in perpetuating, I don’t find the “design” of Toronto’s subway stations (downtown) to be wonderfully stimulating simply because they bothered to change the colour of the tiles in each station. Frankly the stations look, feel, and sometimes smell like a not-very-well-cared-for public convenience. Bring on the advertising! It’s the only thing to read on the subway when I don’t have a book or newspaper or it’s rush hour and there’s not enough room to get one out.

Some of these people seem convinced that advertising is somehow impacting the sociability of people on the subway. I don’t think these people can possibly ride the subway every day – in a WASPish society, social interaction doesn’t tend to happen on the subway unless you already know the person – that’s just not the way we are. Staring at walls and avoiding eye contact is what we do – advertising or no advertising. And while Toronto is far more diverse than being mono-WASPish, I think many of the other cultures here adopt the dominant social convention when it comes to things like subway culture. Want proof? Just ride the subway.

But I digress. That’s not the point. What I cannot understand is how the TTC has not required that these new video screens display the wait time for the next train the way it is done in innumerable other cities. More to the point – how can a first-class subway system like the TTC’s not afford to have their own information system for the next train? Now it might seem pointless to do so for Toronto’s simple subway system – with only 2 lines, basically all trains going to the end of the lines, and trains supposed to be never more than every 5 minutes, why would you need to know when the next train is? To me it’s simply a question of passenger appreciation – it’s always nice to know how long the wait will be because sometimes something happens and the train won’t be coming in 5 minutes. You reduce passenger anger and frustration by letting us know when the next train will be – if the first train is full and I know the second one is only 2 minutes behind it, I won’t feel so bad waiting for it.

Back in July, Howard Moscoe, City councillor and chair of the Transit Commission, publicised an idea to provide electronic information screens for bus stops in suburban parts of the city. While I support this idea – (but hey let’s start with streetcar lines and frequent service routes since those are the ones without a detailed schedule – most suburban routes stick to a pretty strict, timed schedule that can be posted in print at stops) in almost every other city I can think of that has these bus information systems, they did it first on their subway system. On the Spacing Wire story, the picture they use isn’t even from a bus shelter – it’s from the Jubilee line in London (Stanmore is the northern terminus). In so many other places such as London, Paris, Rotterdam, Singapore – they believe it is worthwhile to tell passengers when the next train will be. There are far fewer subway stations than bus stops, and they already have to know exactly where every subway train is for safety purposes, so for a starter project, why is it so hard – especially when they’re replacing information screens on the subway already?

But, while I’m on this topic – let’s talk about the other side of subway communications – announcing the current station and the next station. The TTC has been beefing up its vigilance in requiring subway operators to call out the next stop and the station when they’re pulling into it. However, I was recently moved to write this article after a week of horrible rides culminating in a terrible operator announcing each station with an Eyore-like death and doom voice that for me made the act of riding the subway a tightrope walk of seasonal depression. Not to mention other times when mumbled station names were inaudible, when stations were incorrectly called, and when the mic seemed to cut out just before the station was called – “the next station is ——-“.

In many other city’s subways, such as some lines in London, all Singapore lines and on the Vancouver Skytrain, station names are called out with an automated system using a pre-recorded soothing but audible voice – almost always a woman’s – clearly announcing the stops. I don’t think this is space-age technology! Please, oh please can they start using a system like this on Toronto’s subway! I do already know all the stops – but sometimes when the car is full you can’t quite see the station name or remember what colour tiles your station happens to be (especially if you’re not on a trip you do every day). If the TTC already cares enough to require their operators to call out the stops all day long, can they please see the reason in installing an automated system?

As an aside – LED displays of the current station and next station are an on-board feature of many of these same systems – giving a visual clue for those who haven’t heard or understood the audible announcement. In many other cities, they even have such displays on buses, let alone subways. A few years ago when the TTC started receiving delivery of their new subway cars, I was shocked to find that apart from being shiny steel and having red seat covers instead of orange and brown, the only real improvement over the old cars (which must have been at least 20 years old) was wider doors. There were no other technology or passenger features that made the subway-riding experience better. How many years will we have to wait now until some more sophisticated rolling stock is delivered? I prefer not to think about it. All I can say is I’m glad the TTC decided to forestall their replacement of the streetcar fleet in favour of refurbishment since I’m sure all they would have done is reorder the exact same streetcars.

No innovation here. Given the TTC’s budgetary restraints I’m not sure I blame them, but I think it’s awful that they’re not even bothering to try to leverage advertising space for improved passenger information systems. Come to think of it – Toronto sucks at that in general – take the garbage can fiasco as an example.

In 2002 we completed the ridiculous Sheppard Subway line at a cost of $934 million and yet the TTC did not implement any of these passenger information system initiatives – let alone some of the other passenger experience improvements of other systems such as glass walled automated platform barrier/doors that make it impossible for someone to be pushed into the tracks, stop the wind from rushing through stations, and look HOT. While I know that transit financing in Canada is so tied to politics that understanding the logic behind any of the decisions is pointless, it still bothers me that $934 million can be spent on a subway to nowhere, but nothing can be found to help improve the experience on the existing system, nor a couple of million dollars extra (on a pricetag of $934 million) to pilot a new information technology on a new line.

All I can say is, it’s sad. But in case you think it’s impossible in Toronto, go and check out York Region’s fancy new Viva rapid tranist bus system. Not only do the bus stops have displays showing how long until the next bus, but there are on-board displays showing next stop and time to next stop. Hello future.

I came across this appropriation of a development notice a while ago and only just found the photo again. It was somewhere in downtown Toronto but I can’t remember where, and have no idea who committed this clever act of subversion (though suspect some of the people over at the public space committee or spacing might know something about it).

Not that I have anything against development. I guess I have something against the way it happens and the kinds of buildings that get built – and sometimes the kinds of buildings that get torn down to make it happen – but most of the time I’m just hoping the current building boom will last long enough for Toronto to get rid of a few more of the surface parking lots that still dot the downtown – one of the most offensive reminders of the ridiculous nature of development economics (since all of them would have had buildings on them, now long demolished because surface parking is so damn profitable).

I’ve been searching around for some truly inspiring and beautiful descriptions of the city in children’s literature. Why? Because if we don’t bring our children up to love the city, to appreciate what it is, what it can be, and to be interested in how the city can be improved without damaging its unique benefits, how can we expect them to grow up into people that will defend and care for the city that reared them? When 94% of all visible minorities in Canada live in “cities” (census metropolitan areas) of over 100,000 people, 79.4% of all Canadians live in cities of over 10,000, and 50% live in either the Toronto region, the Montreal region, the Vancouver region, or the Calgary-Edmonton corridor, and we are considered one of the world’s most urbanised countries, the lack of interest in what a livable, successful and vibrant city really is astounds me.

There are endless examples of wonderful descriptions of the landscape and country life in children’s literature, but where are the urban ones? Should we be worrying about how we are supporting the anglo-canadian tradition of the glorification of nature and the rural idyll, at the expense of our attitudes towards urban life? In some ways it’s a vicious cycle – our cities seem ugly and unimaginative and so people crave nature instead, but people too busy appreciating nature perhaps don’t have the effort or understanding left to care about the city enough to demand its improvement. Even our most famously beautiful city (Vancouver), derives the largest part of its aesthetic charm from the landscape rather than any innate beauty of the city itself.

So I’m launching a campaign to bring together a list of great urban children’s books. If you know of one, please leave a note to that effect in the comments area (end of the post) and I’ll compile whatever we get in a new post.

As an example of the problem, I’m posting a few quotes – gratuitously starting off with The Wind in the Willows and one of the great descriptions of the English countryside.

“It all seemed too good to be true. Hither and thither through the meadows he rambled busily, along the hedgerows, across the copses, finding everywhere birds building, flowers budding, leaves thrusting – everything happy, and progressive, and occupied…

He thought his happiness was complete when, as he meandered aimlessly along, suddenly he stood by the edge of a full-fed river. Never in his life had he seen a river before – this sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh, to fling itself on fresh playmates that shook themselves free, and were caught and held again. All was a-shake and a-shiver – glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble. The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spell-bound by exciting stories; and when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea…

Leaving the main stream, they now passed into what seemed at first sight like a little land-locked lake. Green turf sloped down to either edge, brown snaky tree-roots gleamed below the surface of the quiet water, while ahead of them the silvery shoulder and foamy tumble of a weir, arm-in-arm with a restless dripping mill-wheel, that held up in its turn a grey-gabled mill-house, filled the air with a soothing murmur of sound, dull and smothery, yet with little clear voices speaking up cheerfully out of it at intervals. It was so very beautiful that the Mole could only hold up both forepaws and gasp, ‘O my! O my! O my!'” (Kenneth Grahame – The Wind in the Willows)

Contrast that with the following passage from E. Nesbit’s The Phoenix and the Carpet, published only 4 years earlier and betraying baggage of a more social kind:

“It was a delicious ride, and the children felt how lucky they were to have had the money to pay for it. They went with the tram as far as it went, and when it did not go any farther they stopped too, and got off. The tram stops at the end of the Gray’s Inn Road, and it was Cyril who thought that one might well find a short cut to the Phoenix Office through the little streets and courts that lie tightly packed between Fetter Lane and Ludgate Circus. Of course, he was quite mistaken, as Robert told him at the time, and afterwards Robert did not forbear to remind his brother how he had said so. The streets there were small and stuffy and ugly, and crowded with printers’ boys and binders’ girls coming out from work; and these stared so hard at the pretty red coats and caps of the sisters that they wished they had gone some other way. And the printers and binders made very personal remarks, advising Jane to get her hair cut, and inquiring where Anthea had bought that hat. Jane and Anthea scorned to reply, and Cyril and Robert found that they were hardly a match for the rough crowd. They could think of nothing nasty enough to say. They turned a corner sharply, and then Anthea pulled Jane into an archway, and then inside a door; Cyril and Robert quickly followed, and the jeering crowd passed by without seeing them.” (Edith Nesbit, The Phoenix and the Carpet)

As a final kick at the can, I came across a great little book at Eliot’s on Yonge St. from Venezuela called “The Streets Are Free” by Kurusa. Unfortunately, if you’re looking for a paean to the city, you won’t find it here:

“On the hill above the town of Caracas, where Cheo, Carlitos, and Camila now live, there was just one house. It was a simple house made of mud and dried leaves from sugar cane and banana plants. In the mornings, when the family went to fetch water, they often saw lion’s tracks in the soft earth. Later, they would stop by the creeks to catch sardines for dinner.

Years passed and more people came from town and villages all over Venezuela to make their homes on the mountainside.

They built their houses of wood and the children played among the trees, in the creeks and on the open fields.

The forest began to grow towards the new village, and the village began to grow towards the forest.

The dirt road that led to the big city was soon covered with asphalt.

And more people came.

There were so many houses that they reached right to the top of the mountain where the lion tracks used to be. The creeks became sewers. The dirt paths were littered with garbage. The mountain became a very poor town called the ‘barrio’ San Jose.

The children who used to play in the open fields could no longer play there, nor in the forest, nor in the streams.

The fields in the valleys were now filled with office towers. The whole mountain was covered with houses. The main road became a highway. There were only a few trees and not one flower.

The children had nowhere to play.” (Karusa, The Streets Are Free)

Of course, to be fair this is a setup to a stirring story of children trying to get a playground built in their very poor barrio, which is hardly a model urban environment to write about. At any rate, the progression from idyllic country setting to nasty city is still there.

OK, so if you can think of a great urban children’s book add your suggestions below in the comments, or paste a great quote there and we’ll see what we get.

The “ubiquitous (urban) principle is the need of cities for a most intricate and close-grained diversity of uses that give each other constant mutual support, both economically and socially… The science of city planning and the art of city design, in real life for real cities, must become the science and art of catalyzing and nourishing these close-grained working relationships.” (Jane Jacobs)

This passage, so early in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, speaks to an inner truth about the city that is still far from accepted in the way we plan and build cities: that the city is not merely a product of economics, and is not mechanistic. There are values tied to the proportions of our bodies, the way we interact, the intangibles of “constant mutual support” that cannot be accounted for in an equation. They also have the tendency to sound frivolous and indefensible when not spoken and defended by the genius of Jacobs herself.

But it remains to be seen, and has nowhere been proven by Jacobs, that we can actually deliberately create the relationships she examines. Years of study of the city have not necessarily made Jacobs better able to create a better city than a planner, just as years of study of ecology does not necessarily enable an ecologist to successfully create an ecology. It is a fundamental problem with urbanism, this discord between thought about the city and the building of the city. The building is left to the practical, the unimaginative, the conventional. We can read their lines in the city. It reeks of their mediocrity. And yet for all we know they’ve done a better job than any of the theorists ever could. Because of the scale of the urban problem, just fully comprehending the city can be overwhelming. It is this scale we must attack and diminish. As Rem Koolhaas argued in “Whatever Happened to Urbanism?” it is the scale and complexity of the problem of the city that handcuffs us, paralyses us in the face of our own incompetence.

“Thus, when travelling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form.” (Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities)

Christopher Alexander talks about intricate relationships between things and people in the city in “A City is Not a Tree”. He tries to describe them. He introduces sets, series, formulas. He talks about the lattice structure that might enable you to map them and think about them. But the study of the city is not science. Cannot become stifled and controlled by the all-powerful academics, journals, and jingoistics of the scientific world. Alexander’s example becomes so complicated and convoluted that it defies understanding except by the most advanced and dedicated. People love simple truths, and planners and designers are no exception.

The city, unlike science, is truly for everyone. The lay opinion in science is worthless, useless, derided and mocked. The “lay” opinion of the city is the lives of its lovers, its saints, its enemies. It is never worth less than what a planner or designer has to say. But how can this be balanced? Everyone can’t be right, can they? They can’t all have their say. At some point, the professionals have to take over. Right? So we have “public consultations”, community meetings, councillors messing with planning policy. And we drown the voices of the city with the cries of those bored and angry enough to actually show up to the meetings.

Regardless of whether the city is a problem in organised complexity, in most cases it is simply too complicated for those of us who must make decisions to comprehend. Jean Kerr once said, “If you can keep your wits about you when everyone else is losing theirs, it’s just possible that you haven’t grasped the situation.” Now in the case of the city, that attitude might seem defeatist, but one can’t help but wonder how much this is the case in the city. Many trained professionals and “experts” give evidence, present ideas and findings, and are forced, by the very natures of the processes, to always sound like they know exactly what’s going on. In fact, the more the public is involved, the more the professionals have to sound like they know what’s going on.

When the novelist, the poet, the artist, the botanist, the bum, the prostitute, the drug addict, the planner, the ecologist, the arborist, the businessman, the architect, the politician, the senior citizen, the child, the policeman, the clerk, the single mom, the poor, the immigrant can all come to the table equally, and move forward together, and be able to actually accomplish something in a timely fashion, then will the city of compromise finally work. It’s hard to know whether such a process can ever work, or imagine what it would have to be like and what kind of city would result. Is it even worth the trouble?

In the meantime ground is ceaselessly breaking on development after development, based on none of these principles, serving none of these interests – driven by a narrow vision of the profitability of catering to a selfish middle class who should be demanding better. In the market-driven development economy, the consumer is supposed to have that power. But in reality, in whose image are we making the city? Homebuyers have gotten used to what suburban urbanism is all about – unaware perhaps that they are driving its form (literally). Is the challenge now to present a new vision of the city that they will be willing to buy into? Or will that once again serve no interest but their own?