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?

And now for something completely different:

“Night-time. I walk. I prowl the city like a tormented animal, looking for nothing and everything. Can’t stay inside. A need to be alone, cold, refreshed. I am lucky. Anywhere I walk, I get someplace. I am nestled deep within the body of the city. I have to walk myself dead to escape its clutches. But it is not confining, caging me. It’s freeing. My feet are freedom in the city, and they cost me nothing but the shoes I need regardless. Here, I can get someplace for nothing. Any place for a token. Here, I can hide amidst the teeming multitudes, or escape them altogether, trolling the back alleys for thoughts. I collect thoughts, chase them across the glistening streets. Follow them down the twisting passageways of reverie. The city is like the web of my own memory. There, I met her. Here, I browsed the books, buying only what I came across by chance. Chasing nothing but thoughts. I’ve been there, eaten that. But not tonight. I know him, but here, tonight, I can hide. Be anonymous. I walk fast. The thoughts come clearer the faster I walk. I step into the street – cross through crawling traffic, pursuing that idea. I stop. Look around; agoraphobia attacks me. It’s stifling; the bustle too intense. I turn off, head down the dark residential street. Quiet. The rhythm of the headlights of passing cars, soothing. I’m tired. I’ve walked to tire myself, I realise. Mind and body. The journey through thoughts and city mimic each other, towards the same purpose. The sleep that evades me. I am a watcher. I want to see the city. I want to see it fall asleep and wake up. I want to see it live, I want to see it breathe. Here, I feel it. An outsider, walking. I don’t want to miss anything, but once home, I’m disconnected, cocooned. Protected, I don’t need to see the city anymore, I can ignore its pulse. But I am lucky. For it will still be there, waiting, when next I prowl. Seething with my own memory.”

I’ve been having fun over at Yellow Pages exploring just what a real downtown is all about. They’ve got a great new search feature called Proximity Search. So if you want to know what makes a more traditional downtown such a great place for people on foot, keep reading. Using Dundas and Yonge in Toronto as my centre point, I performed a search leaving the category field blank and using the smallest radius (1 km) which would give an area of 3.14 square km. The search returns 10,000 businesses. A few more searches reveal that 10,000 is the maximum the Proximity Search can return, so who knows how many more there might be.

But that’s not all – scroll down the search returns and on the left side will be a list of “related categories” which will tell you how many of each category of business falls within the search area. This shows that 902 restaurants, 1,265 lawyers, 33 hotels, 54 retail florists, 115 social and human service organisations and for some reason 72 mining companies are within 1 km of Yonge and Dundas. In case you think there might be some kind of mistake, a similar result is achieved within 1 km of Granville and Robson in Vancouver – 9,101 businesses within a very geographically restricted area – whereas again it is over 10,000 within 1 km of Ste. Catherine and St. Laurent in Montreal. The downtowns of some of our smaller cities tend to be closer to 4,000 or 5,000.

It is precisely this sheer “proximity” of such a wealth of choice and diversity of work opportunities, shopping opportunities, and services that makes downtowns such magnets – and that same concentration is what makes them reasonable places to get around without a car and logical places for the convergence of public transit. Add to these figures the large numbers of people who live within these areas and require services, and you begin to understand the vitality and bustle of the downtown – my estimate is that in the general area of Toronto around Yonge and Dundas, an area of about 3.14 square km would house about 20,000 people along with an astounding 235,000 jobs (I’ve based these statistics on data available on the City of Toronto’s Website here and here).

I bring this up in reference to our attempts at creating new “town centres” – and the constant promises of improved transit ridership through marginal increases in overall density. In order to create an efficient network of public transit, we need nodes or corridors of high density, but we also need extreme concentrations of businesses and residences like those of the downtowns listed above – places that demand transit by creating demand. We already know how to build high density suburban residential development – we’re doing it all around the GTA at densities that frequently exceed those of the City of Toronto – but these places are not seeing the transit ridership many would have hoped for – in fact, the transit modal split for the GTA is going to continue falling for many years before we succeed at inching back up – it could be 2020 before we’re back where we are now (see the Neptis reviews of Smart Growth).

With the vast size of the GTA, expecting time-efficient transit service capable of replacing the automobile without extremely dense nodes (such as a downtown) seems thoroughly naive. Yet all of our attempts to create new “town centres” so far pale in comparison to the central downtowns of a Toronto or a Vancouver. When I perform the same proximity search as above for Mississauga’s downtown (an area that includes the colossal Square One Mall) it returns 1313 businesses – for Scarborough Town Centre (coincidentally another mall) it returns 1,243.

As a comparison, I would like to present one last search to put these results in perspective – Dundas and Ossington in Toronto – a primarily residential neighbourhood of detached and semi-detached homes cut by a grid of “main street” retail about 2 km west of downtown. A 1 km proximity search on yellowpages.ca returns 3,240 businesses – more than double the number of businesses within a 1 km radius of downtown Missisauga.

This kind of extreme meshed mixed use of old inner cities is the stuff transit dreams are made of. For many, it is also the stuff urban livablility is made of – choice – the choice to walk, bike, take transit or drive – the choice of many businesses, restaurants and stores within walking distance. Despite constant rhetoric to the contrary, suburban development is not delivering on these key markers of a truly sustainable urban life and won’t be any time soon. It is hard to imagine that we will easily find a way of reproducing the amazing mix of business and homes of the inner city neighbourhood, but we can rethink the scale we are imagining new city centres because these do have the capability of reproducing the function of the traditional downtown, but only if they present the diversity, density, vitality and concentration that makes true downtowns natural nodes (of both transit and urban life) instead of imposed ones.