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rfmcdonaldThe cover article for this month's issue of Toronto Life was Philip Preville's article "The New Suburbanites". (Subtitle: "Screw Jane Jacobs.") The subject?
People who've been following A Bit More Detail have probably become awar eof the ongoing culture wars within the City of Toronto, pitting the old urban core against the "inner" suburbs, the former municipalities once federated with the old City of Toronto but then amalgamated into a single megacity the 1990s. The downtown of Toronto tends to vote for left-wing candidates, proponents of the philosophy of New Urbanism and social democracy and the extension of mass transit; the old inner suburbs tend to vote for right-wing candidates and be more skeptical of government. Rob Ford was elected on the basis of this sentiment.
Naturally, a very high-profile article arguing that life in the City of Toronto was becoming unlivable and that suburbs offered better lives for many Torontonians--most notably, that the suburbs lambasted by downtowners offered a closer emulation of the sainted Jane Jacobs' ideals of the tight-knit urban community than Toronto did now, and that Jacobs' hostility to certain megaplans made Torontonians' life difficult--got a lot of reactions. Many of them were hostile: John Lorinc, one Toronto writer on urban issues, wrote an article simply titled "Toronto Life Screws Jane Jacobs". Lorinc knew Jacobs in life, see, and takes offense on her behalf.
Lorinc's argument in Jacobs' defense? Toronto's problems are the consequence of a deeper lack of vision that's the antithesis of Jane Jacobs' interest in sustaining diverse neighbourhoods.
(Also, Lorinc notes--as Preville notes, too--that the emigrants profiled in his article are mostly white and middle-class. Just saying.)
When I read the commentary of Edward Keenan, writer for first eye weekly then for its descendant free weekly The Grid, in his post "A suburb by any other name ...". Preville's not talking about classical suburbs at all, the suburbs of housing subdivisions stretching for kilometres along arteruies. He's talking about smaller cities.
Urbanists who worship at the altar of Jane Jacobs—the urban-planning theorist whose acolytes come in for a trashing in Preville’s piece—actually romanticize small-town life, and if anything the iconic, livable, big-city neighbourhood is meant to be a simulation of a small town except with maybe more diversity and with access to more economic opportunity. Small scale, with independent businesses and neighbours who know each other and socialize together; civic involvement; a community-driven type of growth rather than centrally planned mega-projects: this is the downtowner’s ideal, rooted in a nostalgia for what they imagine a “real” human-scale community in a smaller place looks like.
And this, Keenan notes overlooks the real suburbs, Toronto's inner suburbs and the communities immediately surrounding it.
Many of these suburban and quasi-suburban communities are, or are like, the suburban communities that have been suffering a long-term decline in living standards and social inclusion, the "Three Torontos" syndrome. This sense of feeling isolated and misunderstood--I would argue--made it possible for Rob Ford to be elected mayor, the populist cost-cutting candidate of the suburbanites who felt overlooked by downtown left-wingers who didn't seem in touch.
And so the culture wars continue. What next, I wonder?
Brian Porter and Carrie Low thought they’d hatched the perfect plan to avoid the eight-lane gridlock they faced every week on their drive to the family cottage in the Kawarthas. Porter, a soft-spoken 41-year-old Toronto firefighter, would arrange his work schedule to be home on Friday. He’d pack the car at noon and pick up his daughters, Lily and Amelia, from daycare shortly after lunch. Then, rather than head from their home in the Beach to pick up Low downtown, he’d drive to a strategic pit stop in Oshawa. Low, a slim 41-year-old redhead, works as a lawyer with RBC in the financial district, her days and nights packed, respectively, with meetings and paperwork. Her role in the escape plan was to get off work early and catch the GO train to Oshawa Station. Often, she’d end up working a pressure-packed day until 5 p.m. anyway, leaving Porter and the girls waiting at the station for hours. In the end they never gained that much time—it could still be a challenge to get to the cottage before nightfall. But at least they’d avoided the worst hours on the DVP and the 401.
Porter and Low’s weekend escape strategy was symptomatic of their over-engineered city lives. To juggle all their needs and obligations—two careers, mortgage payments, bills, kid drop-offs and pickups, groceries, meals—they had built a life that resembled a Rube Goldberg machine, and any misstep threatened to collapse the entire contraption. Grandparents were often called in to shuttle the kids to lessons and play dates and birthday parties. “My mother-in-law would phone me at work and ask, ‘Where is Amelia’s dance outfit?’ and my stress level would go through the roof, ” recalls Low. “I’d say, ‘Why are you calling me at work for this? It’s in the house somewhere. Don’t ask me, ask Brian.’”
The problem, they decided, was not each other or their careers or their kids, but the city itself—a surprising diagnosis given that they had both grown up in Toronto, happily, in the Beach. They bought their 1,600-square-foot detached home on Benlamond because they wanted to raise their family there, too. But living in the city required too many contortions. They decided to divorce it.
People who've been following A Bit More Detail have probably become awar eof the ongoing culture wars within the City of Toronto, pitting the old urban core against the "inner" suburbs, the former municipalities once federated with the old City of Toronto but then amalgamated into a single megacity the 1990s. The downtown of Toronto tends to vote for left-wing candidates, proponents of the philosophy of New Urbanism and social democracy and the extension of mass transit; the old inner suburbs tend to vote for right-wing candidates and be more skeptical of government. Rob Ford was elected on the basis of this sentiment.
Naturally, a very high-profile article arguing that life in the City of Toronto was becoming unlivable and that suburbs offered better lives for many Torontonians--most notably, that the suburbs lambasted by downtowners offered a closer emulation of the sainted Jane Jacobs' ideals of the tight-knit urban community than Toronto did now, and that Jacobs' hostility to certain megaplans made Torontonians' life difficult--got a lot of reactions. Many of them were hostile: John Lorinc, one Toronto writer on urban issues, wrote an article simply titled "Toronto Life Screws Jane Jacobs". Lorinc knew Jacobs in life, see, and takes offense on her behalf.
Long before I became a magazine writer, and certainly well before I spent a decade as Toronto Life’s politics columnist, I used to work part-time for Book City, in the Annex. The remainder tables always used to be piled high with copies of a paperback called “The Death and Life of the Great American Cities,” about which I knew nothing.
Fairly regularly, a tall but stooped older woman, always wearing a shapeless brown wrap, would come in to browse. Eventually, one of my co-workers told me she was the author of said remainder. Jane Jacobs.
Only later did I become aware of her accomplishments — here and elsewhere — and her truly remarkable celebrity among urban thinkers. But when I think of Jane Jacobs, I often imagine her in person, among the stacks at Book City.
Lorinc's argument in Jacobs' defense? Toronto's problems are the consequence of a deeper lack of vision that's the antithesis of Jane Jacobs' interest in sustaining diverse neighbourhoods.
When Jacobs was writing in the early 1960s, she was responding to the centrifugal conditions created by post-war suburban sprawl and automobile dependency (not to mention white flight). Municipal planners thought that the best way to connect the new subdivisions to the existing urban commercial cores was with highways that, as it happened, would cut through working class neighbourhoods whose residents didn’t really count.
Fulford somehow manages to blame Jacobs for Toronto’s congestion problems, because, as she argues, Jacobs gave us a legacy of opposing “big plans.” This is a woefully simplistic argument, of course, and one that overlooks a lot of intervening history, but has the virtue of fitting well with a sensational headline.
I am not denying that Toronto has nasty traffic congestion – worse in the 905, by the way, than in the core, where transit is a viable alternative – and certainly Jane Jacobs wasn’t right about everything. But the city’s most wicked problems are a legacy of a long-standing cheapness that runs deep in our politics, and is currently expressing itself, so to speak, as a complete unwillingness on the part of the region’s residents to pay for the sorts of things a big city needs.
(Also, Lorinc notes--as Preville notes, too--that the emigrants profiled in his article are mostly white and middle-class. Just saying.)
When I read the commentary of Edward Keenan, writer for first eye weekly then for its descendant free weekly The Grid, in his post "A suburb by any other name ...". Preville's not talking about classical suburbs at all, the suburbs of housing subdivisions stretching for kilometres along arteruies. He's talking about smaller cities.
The new twist here is that Preville is discussing people who think of themselves as city types moving to towns and cities on the edge of the GTA rather than to suburbs, to essentially urban places. Downtown Cobourg, Uxbridge, Dundas, Creemore—as Preville says, “19th-century towns built of brick and stone, with elegant and durable housing stock shaded by giant leafy canopies, picturesque old city halls and quaint, lively downtown commercial avenues. They look nothing at all like the cookie-cutter, aluminum-clad, cul-de-sacky Mississaugaish, soulless wasteland of the downtown imagination.” He even acknowledges that most people would not define these areas as suburban, saying, “You could argue that some of these places are small towns, not suburbs. But the march of sprawl swallowed Port Credit and Oakville, and it will swallow East Gwillimbury, too.”
I think this is an issue that is not so easily dismissed. Preville’s saying that if people move to an area outside the city “while still making a living off the big-city economy,” then they’re effectively making wherever they go a suburb. I understand the point—that many satellite cities function as bedroom communities to the city. But Preville’s project is in part an attempt to dispel some of the cultural snobbery urbanists feel towards the suburbs and those who move to them. And that’s why the bait and switch is kind of pivotal, because I do not think downtown residents feel any snobbery at all towards the kinds of places he is discussing. Quite the opposite, actually.
Urbanists who worship at the altar of Jane Jacobs—the urban-planning theorist whose acolytes come in for a trashing in Preville’s piece—actually romanticize small-town life, and if anything the iconic, livable, big-city neighbourhood is meant to be a simulation of a small town except with maybe more diversity and with access to more economic opportunity. Small scale, with independent businesses and neighbours who know each other and socialize together; civic involvement; a community-driven type of growth rather than centrally planned mega-projects: this is the downtowner’s ideal, rooted in a nostalgia for what they imagine a “real” human-scale community in a smaller place looks like.
And this, Keenan notes overlooks the real suburbs, Toronto's inner suburbs and the communities immediately surrounding it.
[O]f those 95,700 people between 25 and 44 who left Toronto between 2001 and 2006, I’d wager the vast bulk of them moved not to the “new suburbs” but to actual suburbs, places like Markham and Aurora and Pickering. And they had their reasons to move to cookie-cutter big-box cul-de-sac-land, reasons that go unexplored in this story about the supposed “exodus to the ‘burbs.” I know a lot of those people, and anecdotally I’d say that the primary reason people do so and tolerate a long, road-rage filled commute is simply that they get a bedroom for each kid and a big backyard for their money in those places. That’s why my parents and my family moved to an unsung suburban cul-de-sac in Scarborough in the late 1980s. These are the actual victims of cultural snobbery, whose lifestyle and motivations are impenetrable to the minds of downtowners.
Many of these suburban and quasi-suburban communities are, or are like, the suburban communities that have been suffering a long-term decline in living standards and social inclusion, the "Three Torontos" syndrome. This sense of feeling isolated and misunderstood--I would argue--made it possible for Rob Ford to be elected mayor, the populist cost-cutting candidate of the suburbanites who felt overlooked by downtown left-wingers who didn't seem in touch.
And so the culture wars continue. What next, I wonder?
