A street fight we need to win
Half of all Canadians live in our eight largest cities. In most of them, lifestyle arguments are heating up over what to do with our streets. Leave them to cars, make room for bicycles, or turn them back to pedestrians.
Rather than the decline that’s staring many American (and some English) cities in the face, Canada’s main population centres must deal with problems of growth. The few exceptions include Windsor and Oshawa, where auto industry cutbacks are pushing people to move on.
As usual, it’s Toronto, our biggest and richest burg, where the shape of the city future — and our streets — is at its most intense.
Civic planners have opted to support public transit, bike riders, walkers, instead of drivers. Inevitably, drivers don’t like it.
St. Clair Avenue West, the busy thoroughfare cutting through Little Italy, has been a mess during construction of an above-ground rapid transit right of way down the middle of the street.
Residents of cushy Rosedale and other northern points are upset at plans to take away a lane of Jarvis Street to make way for tree plantings and bicycle lanes.
In Vancouver, the new “Vision Vancouver” regime has been experimenting with streeet closures this summer. Commercial Drive, a busy and eclectic, ethnically diverse street in the city’s east end, was closed for the past five Sundays. But people didn’t come out the way the planners expected, and the experiment has been terminated.
You have to look at the history of cities, and the stark differences in street cultures that exist around the world, for a glimpse of where these changes are likely to take us.
This is what Anglo-American architect Joseph Rykwert set out to do — and accomplishes admirably — in The Seduction of Place: The History and Future of Cities (Oxford University Press).
Rykwert builds on the teachings of Jane Jacobs to extol the virtues of “small plans” that leave no room for either cars or the monstrosities of modern architects.
But the book is at its best in giving us a fascinating historical overview of the social history of such places as New York, London, and Paris. Beginning with the Industrial Revolution, he examines the big developments that made these cities what they are — and what they might become.
I have no doubt what Rykert would choose to do about the uncertain future of Canada’s biggest condo tower project. That’s the intended 80-storey spire at Toronto’s Bloor and Yonge intersection. He’d level it.
That’s what’s likely to happen, thanks to the credit crunch which has put the project by Bazis International, a developer headquartered in the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, on hold.
What’s to become of the site? John Bentley Mays, the Globe and Mail’s architectural critic, sees a need for another condo tower there. “We need density … more people in the urban core,” he writes.
An opposing view comes from the Toronto Star’s Chrstopher Hume. In his view, the city should recruit a corporation to underwrite the cost of keeping it as a public square.
Thinking of the calming peace I’ve enjoyed in the squares of busy European cities, I agree with Hume. There’s nothing like Russell Square or Berkeley Square in London, or Place de la Madeleine in Paris, to renew one’s spirit amid the chaos and the tumult of the crowd.
Toronto’s one nod in this direction, the horrible concrete creation called Dundas Square, doesn’t do it for me.
Rather than leave such a crucial amenity to big business, the City of Toronto should take over the empty corner of Bloor and Yonge. Pay for it with the money Mayor Miller says we’re saving on not having to reward future city employees for unused sick days.
Put a small, architecturally pleasing 2 or 3 storey retail service building in the middle of the square. Surround it with walks, grass, trees, flowers and benches. Let the city breathe at its core.
It’s not practical to close off important arteries that move people around the city. We can win the fight for the streets by compensating with islands of quiet when we get there. A reasonable compromise. Isn’t that the Canadian way?
