[URBAN NOTE] New Toronto comparison cities!

[rfmcdonald]

Toronto, the insecure and terribly young metropolis of Canada, measures itself by other cities as it searches for an antidote to its insecurity, by other world cities. New York City--the arguable centre of its countrry's economy and popular culture and whatnot--is the usual metric, and as one would expect Toronto comes up short. Chicago, the other dynamic city in the Great Lakes basin, has made appearances of late in the print imagination, but again we call short.

We've two new ones now!

At the Globe and Mail, Siri Agrell suggests that Torontonians look to Melbourne, second city of Australia, looking to that city's urban planner Robert Adams for advice on how to revitalize its mass transit systems and engaging the public and convincing mayors to change their minds on things where necessary.

Robert Adams, director of city design for Melbourne, Australia, arrived in Toronto this week for a talk hosted by the non-profit organization 8-80 Cities. His visit came at a somewhat inauspicious time: Mr. Adams delivered an address on the importance of pedestrian traffic and bike lanes on the same night that hockey commentator Don Cherry derided Toronto cyclists as “pinkos” at the inauguration of the city's new mayor, Rob Ford. To some, Mr. Adams's accomplishments are a daydream vision of what Toronto could some day become. Mr. Adams lobbied to make transit in hiscity free before 7 a.m., drastically changing the city's commuting dynamic, and cars were banned from Melbourne's busiest street. During his tenure, Melbourne has been transformed into the third most livable city in the world, according to the Economist. As a sign of his influence, his address at the Design Exchange this week was attended by two members of Mr. Ford's executive team, as well as an array of planners, city thinkers and transit officials. “It's so hard to arrive in a city and pass judgment, but I think you're heading in the right direction,” he said of Toronto. “At some stage you have to stop talking and start implementing.”

eye weekly, meanwhile, has Shawn Micallef suggest that Toronto should learn quite a lot from a more cosmopolitan, more dynamic, more confident London.

[T]these days, we may be wiser to direct our gaze back to our colonial mothership, London, England. It used to be that our fine city looked across the Atlantic for most things intellectual, cultural and political. (Street and neighbourhood names too: King, Queen, Bathurst, Islington.) These days, London gets more media play for its rapidly deteriorating social and spacing conditions than for its cultural supremacy. Add to that a population now swollen to over 8 million people and you wind up with a British tonne of problems to try and contain in a land mass only 40km wide from suburban edge to edge.

As it happens, Toronto is almost exactly the same size. And as we swear in our new suburban mayor, many of the very same issues plaguing London—transportation, congestion, immigration and the urban-suburban divide—have emerged, rather aggressively, as our most pressing concerns. In fact, one could argue that London and Toronto are on very similar paths—only a hundred years or so apart.

Consider the similarities. In the 1890s, there were about 5.5 million Londoners, which is close to the size of the GTA’s population today. Imperial London grew quickly during the mid-to-late Victorian era as people from all over the world migrated to the city to be at the centre of it all. Likewise, Toronto is growing today through its immigration boom, placing us at the centre of a global multicultural network.

These comparisons are fresh, at least, and even promise some insight. Go, read.