The sidewalks of Toronto
A nasty tiff’s been going on in Toronto over sidwalks — or more specifically, the widening of sidewalks and the reduction of traffic lanes on the city’s toniest shopping boulevard, Bloor Street.
I took a stroll on Bloor from Avenue Road to Church Street the other morning, and I have to report it’s a bit of a mess. In fact, I hardly recognized the street from six months ago. A gaping space at the southeast corner of Bloor and Yonge awaits the rise of Toronto’s newest office/condo tower. Along most of this stretch of high-priced fashion shops, pavement is being dug out for installation of underground rewiring while the sidewalks are being relaid at twice at their previous width.
The $20 million project is financed in part by members of the Bloor Yorkville Business Improvement Area. The work went swimmingly until one influential retailer raised objections. William Ashley, the upscale chinaware dealer, applied for an injunction to stop the sidewalk-widening project.
Ironically, the sidewalk in front of that store is already twice as wide as it is in front of its neighbors. The bid was thrown out of court a couple of weeks ago. The judge criticized William Ashley for its “unduly delayed” challenge to the project.
This business of people vs cars has a considerable history in Canada. Back in the 1970s, Premier Bill Davis made a name for himself by stopping the Spadina Expressway which would have carved its way through choice downtown neighborhoods on its route to Lake Ontario.
But as the Bloor Street tiff illustrates, the battle is never finished.
A new book by my friend Mary Soderstrom, The Walkable City, brings this issue into focus. In a wide-ranging survey, she discusses how cities like Paris, New York, Toronto, Singapore, and even Lushoto, Tanzania, have grappled with the phenomenon of urban crowding and the competition between people and cars for possession of the streets.
Ms. Soderstrom, the Montreal author of such fine works as Green City: People, Nature & Urban Places, makes it clear which side she’s on: She wants the 21st century to preserve streetscapes that people can walk in, that they can use to reach nearby neighborhood shops and other services, and that will serve as the focus of a safe and vibrant community life.
She uses a charming technique to set up her case: a series of mythical conversations between Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann, the architect of Napoleon’s Paris, and Jane Jacobs, the great urbanist who fled New York to live out her life in Toronto, all the while creating such landmark volumes as her 1961 masterpiece, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
We “meet” Haussmann and Jacobs standing near the edge of the Grand Cours du Louvre, looking toward the Jardin des Tuileries. Mary Soderstrom admits “the two make a rather odd couple.” She then takes us off on a tour of Paris, having first explained how homo sapiens got up on her hind legs in the high grass of East Africa, to demonstrate that the human race indeed has “feet made for walking.”
Just how wrong we have gone is shown by the fate of the suburbs of Paris. Mary points that out suburbs “do not mean the same thing in France, or in much of the rest of Europe, that they do in North America.” In Europe, the poor and the immigrants have been pushed into the suburbs, the opposite of the traditional pattern in the U.S. and Canada.
That now seems to be changing, at least in Toronto, where the poorest parts of the city are no longer the inner core, but the largely-immigrant outer suburbs in places like Scarborough and the infamous Jane-Finch corridor of northwest Toronto.
In contrast, a city like North Vancouver, clinging scenically to the slopes of Grouse Mountain, “is not a suburb where you are completely dependent on your car; it offers the choices that go with interesting urban life.” These choices include businesses, single family homes and apartment buildings, all intermingled within walking distance.
The developers of Toronto’s Don Mills tried to achieve this and largely succeeded, although the distance one has to walk to shop is greater than the ideal. I lived there when I first moved to Toronto.
More comfortably, downtown Toronto neighborhoods like Cabbagetown offer a pleasant mix of medium and high-cost housing. The infamous Regent Park which repeated all the urban planning mistakes of postwar U.S. public housing, is now being demolished. It is being replaced with a mix of social and market priced apartments.
Singapore, Mary reports, has managed to rehouse its people in high rises set amid parks. Public transit is readily available, so that no one lives more than a walkable distance from a subway or a bus station.
I wish she had visited Shanghai and reported on the vast changes now taking place there. I visited Shanghai not long after the Cultural Revolution, when places like the old Peace Hotel offered the same jazz musicians (by then in old age) playing their favorites from the 20s and 30s. I wonder what her verdict would be on the immense building splurge that’s overtaken one of the world’s largest and most modernized urban zones.
A Walkable City is a leisurely but thought-provoking tour of a range of cities that have taken different paths to accommodate our need to move about in the great urban conglomorates that we’re building for the future. Every urban planner, politician and architect should read it.
