[URBAN NOTE] "What would Jane Jacobs do?"

[rfmcdonald]

eye weekly's Edward Keenan is one of the more astute observers of urban affairs in Toronto, and of Rob Ford. Years ago, Keenan recognized that Ford's appeal lay in his demonstrated ability to get things done for his constituents. Might this ability to bypass bureaucracy and get things done be a way Jane Jacobs-style urbanists could connect with Ford? Keenan begins with Ford's cancellation Toronto's failed dirigiste "Toronto a la Cart" street food program.

That program, after all, has been phenomenally short-sighted and ham-fisted, taking the excellent concept of allowing sidewalk dining options other than hot dogs and twisting it to try and ensure that healthy and ethnically diverse food were the only new options. Rather than throw the street-food industry open to anyone with a good idea, a clean cart and some cooking skills, former mayor David Miller and health board chair Councillor John Filion decided in 2008 that the city should control the industry. In an almost cartoonish example of the left’s counter-productive impulse to not just overregulate but to micro-manage too (see also: garbage bin program), the project ordered and manufactured custom food-vending carts that operators were required to purchase from the city, and the city vetted and approved a select list of vendors who paid high fees to participate. Those vendors had their menus full of health-conscious and ethnically representative dishes regulated closely by the city, and worked at fixed locations dictated by health department bureaucrats.

In short, those who claimed to be the urbanist descendants of Jane Jacobs flagrantly disregarded the advice she offered in her seminal book The Death and Life of Great American Cities: “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”

Our current mayor, Rob Ford, back when he was a councillor in 2008, channelled her wisdom when he spoke to the Toronto Sun about street food: “I would just open it up and let them sell anything.... Whatever they want to make money on.” How right he was became apparent as the food-cart fiasco unfurled in the years since: vendors losing money, some going out of business, constant complaints about the program strangling in red tape.

[. . .]

This is one of the only encouraging elements of our mayor’s approach. There are many things he appears not to understand or care about—budget math, light-rail transit, environmental science—but he gets, on a very profound level, the power of the average citizen, and the importance of getting out of their way to let them interact with each other and live their lives free from the blessing of bureaucratic interference.

As my Eye Weekly colleague Dale Duncan said to me recently (she worked in Councillor Adam Vaughan’s office during Miller’s last term and began her career as a public-space activist), “I think activists should make a long list of all the small, grassroots common-sense concerns and take those to Ford.” His affinity for the little guy and dedication to customer service is the opening some of his opponents might find to work with him productively. “There’s a real opportunity here to accomplish all those little things that are so angering,” she says. Cleaning subway stations, for example, overregulation of neighbourhood vegetable markets or byzantine rules about garbage collection and billing.

One hopes.