Building a better Toronto for less
There's more to building the city than megaprojects that cost billions.

thestar.com
April 26, 2015
By Christopher Hume

What if StatsCan is right? What if Toronto really is one of the unhappiest cities in Canada? According to a recently released report, only Vancouverites are more miserable than we Torontonians.

Though it’s hard to explain precisely why, the sorry state of municipal infrastructure looms large as a cause, or more specifically, it may be the looming cost of expanding and rehabilitating that infrastructure.

Issues such as transit and housing affect city residents directly, but dealing with them will require tens of billions of dollars over the next two or three decades.

No wonder Torontonians are unhappy; one way or another, they and every other Canadian will have to pay through the nose to make up for 25 years of neglect.

The amounts will be - already are - staggering. Just installing a light rail line on Hurontario St. will cost $1.6 billion, easily $2 billion by the time the fairy dust settles. Whether it’s constructing new subways, extending highways, repairing public housing, finishing Union Station or keeping up the Gardiner, public money will flow as never before.

And because taxes scare us; we will sell off one public utility to help another survive. But knowing what we do about corporate-sector incompetence, it’s hard to see how privatization is the answer. And if it were; why sell off Hydro One? Why not the TTC, GO, or the LCBO?

Still, concerns about quality of life in Toronto and the GTA are heard more often. It should come as no surprise that a blanket of NIMBY resistance has settled over the city. Change is not a word Torontonians want to hear, especially not in their neighbourhood.

Cleary, what’s needed is a new sort of micro-urbanism focused on small-scale interventions designed to transform the city without threatening nervous residents. Applying the successful Waterfront Toronto model, it would mean compact projects powerful enough to alter perceptions.

Toronto has forgotten - if it ever knew - that less can be more. By contrast, some cities - New York is one - revel in the conviction that anything is possible. The High Line could only have happened in Manhattan. Similar opportunities exist elsewhere, even Toronto, but remain invisible.

The latest example of the Big Apple’s hunger for the pleasures of urbanism is a “Pop-Up Forest” that will appear in Times Square for three weeks next summer. The idea is to recreate a mini-woodlot in the most unlikely, most unnatural, city precinct. A $50,000 Kickstarter campaign reached half its goal within days of being launched in March.

Let’s not forget, either, that Times Square was remade in 2009 with little more than tables and chairs, some planters and a few cans of paint. Many worried that handing over road space on Broadway to pedestrians would create chaos, but the changes are now permanent.

Toronto has proved resistant to such experimentation even though cost isn’t a big factor. Certainly, opportunities abound. Dundas Square is an obvious site for a temporary forest, so, too, are Nathan Phillips Square, David Pecaut Square and Scarborough Civic Centre.

The highly successful Winter Stations project launched last February at the foot of Kew Beach is an example of how imagination makes up, at least partially, for minimal funding.

No one would confuse a series of decorated lifeguard stands for a new subway line, but they remind us that as big as Toronto may be, it’s also a place we relate to on an individual level. Somewhere between the urban abstraction of the big city and its human-scaled details are the spaces we inhabit and, if we allow ourselves, have fun.