@Real_EstateInfo Hilarious, but so very wise!
Our Precious Public Spaces
Franchising of the GTA
by Chris Caldwell
Where there was once plenty of public space used avidly by friends, families and children to meet, commune and chat about anything under the sun, we have lost that to privatized copycat cafes. I grew up on the outskirts of Toronto. I remember, in the early 70s, walking regularly with my grandparents to the corner store and sitting in a parkette to enjoy a sandwich or a drink. It was an event.
These days that privilege costs some kind of usage fee – you have to buy something. You get an over-priced drink and a view of a parking lot or traffic-clogged arterial roadways through franchised windows.
Community character
Public spaces help define the character of a neighborhood. But now we meet in privatized space all the time, unaware that communications are constrained by the locale and potentially – as cameras are now being installed everywhere – under surveillance. The social aspects of meeting change as our public space diminishes.
Soon everything will be owned and we will have to buy something, anything, just to meet somewhere. Regardless, we won’t be able to chat with anyone as they are either all Wi-Fi connected to the Internet or on a cell phone.
Urban planning
Modern urban planning and design facilitates community social dynamics by ensuring there is enough public space. Libraries, parks, transit and sidewalks all qualify as public. How much is enough? Can there be too much?
If everything is given over to the developers and franchisees, only sidewalks will remain in public domain. Even then we have to compete with skateboarders and in-line skaters (because they have nowhere else to go), while we avoid tripping on coffee cups, plastic drinking bottles and other trash carelessly discarded by those that do not value our public spaces.
Historically, public spaces have been generators of great change. Revolution, protests and decision-making have found their roots in public space gatherings. Some of the most memorable moments occur where the population stands together to fight for what they believe. Take Tiananmen Square in China: the time a lone man stood in front of a tank and a vision that inspired the world. What about Central Park in New York, the best thing that could happen in a city?
Coffee houses on the 17th century in England that gave birth to The Times newspaper were one thing, but somehow I just don’t see public dealings happening inside a franchise. Granted, they make a good Cafe Americano, but they are too chic for passionate radicalism to develop (or perhaps it’s general apathy that prevents actionism).
Use it or lose it. Value your public spaces and use them for more than just relieving your dog. We can sustain these special places if we can get our cans off the comfy chairs at the franchise.
Chris Caldwell has a Masters degree in Environmental Studies, Sustainable and Strategic Urban Planning with a Graduate Diploma in Business and the Environment, from York University. He is passionate about community and sustainability. www.systain.ca
by Editor
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Toronto: vision to create a ‘delightful’ city
by Chris Caldwell
Urban planning and public health are inter-related. As a planner, I strive to balance societal goals with that of the individual, however, there are some that are common to everyone.
A movement defined as ‘Active Living’ simply asks ‘how can I make my neighbourhood an enjoyable place to be?’. We must reflect and ask whether or not we are happy with our lives and the direction of our communities, if not, we must understand how to plan better to create a more enjoyable place to live and spend time.
Although we spend our lives trying to be happy, we overlook the importance that planning policy and transportation has on our daily outlook in life and on our basic psychology. This leaves two important questions:
1) What are we doing now in planning that is perpetuating negativity or unhappiness in our communities?
2) How can we improve planning for communities to be sustainably happy and healthy?
To understand recent modernist planning, we need to revisit the last few decades since the post-war boom.
Modern Planning
After the war, we entered the age of mass production and consumption
After the war, we turned the industrialized power of making mass weaponry into making mass consumer goods. Scale of costs went down and suddenly everyone was able to afford a home, a tv and a car – this was the rise of suburbia. The sense of empowerment and entitlement that came with consumerism allowed everyone to individualize, customize and change who they were by buying new clothes, a new car or whatever symbol may have been important to their status at that time. We became the brand that we bought into.
The ‘consumer’ ethic took greater hold when mass media took arms with the corporations to increase consumerism as a lifestyle and commercials and advertising appealed to our need to be popular and safe. We still see this today as it works quite well. However, we need to understand that consumerism as a mode of being in society affects how we build cities to accommodate. We wanted more things and more cars, well then, we also needed more roads, more highways and more shopping malls. So our modern cities grew with the desire of society to consume.
Age of Consumption
Media influence designed by corporations
Ed Bernays, author of Engineering Consent, drove the propaganda model that influenced a nation. He maintained that entire populations, which were undisciplined or lacking in intellectual or definite moral principles, were vulnerable to unconscious influence and thus susceptible to want things that they do not need. This was achieved by linking those products and ideas to their unconscious desires. This is how women smoking was made to be socially acceptable.
The combination of social influence and the ability to generate great wealth by using advertising created an economy that was now based on produce, consume and throw away.
Shortly after the end of the war, retailing analyst Victor Lebow expressed the solution: “Our enormously productive economy … demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption…. we need things consumed, burned up, replaced, and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.”.
So here we are today, an economy and now a society based on digging, cutting, burning, using and discarding resources in an extremely wasteful manner. We have replaced the social needs and life satisfaction provided for by family, friends and nature with the temporary satisfaction of shopping. It’s not so much that consumption is the problem , but the amount and type of harmful waste we produce in the process. But things are changing.
From Globalization back to Community
In recent years, the destructive qualities of the global capital economy have been closely monitored. Fisheries are on the verge of collapse. Humanity is now consuming more natural resources and producing more waste than the forests, fields and fisheries of the world can replace and absorb. The climate is changing. Business as usual is not an option.
Globalisation has brought many products and innovations to our communities but at a cost. The costs of pollution, air and water quality degradation, loss of biodiversity, industrial agriculture, all are externalized or ‘left out’ of the accounting process. Labour and production move at the whim of corporations to the cheapest and least regulated areas of the world (see China) to avoid social welfare or environmental protection to create cheaper goods. Global policy creates a ‘sameness’ in cities and communities (see Walmart).
With growing awareness for preserving culture and community identity, a new urbanism is sweeping the western nations. Great examples now flourish in various cities (Curitiba and rapid buses, Bogata and bike lanes, mixed usage development around North America). We recognize that physical solutions by themselves will not solve social and economic problems, but neither can economic vitality, community stability, and environmental health be sustained without a coherent and supportive physical framework.
Encouraging a new urbanism also means reforming planning to give neighbourhoods more ability to determine the shape of their communities, powers to help communities save local facilities and services, training a new generation of community organisers and supporting the creation of neighbourhood groups, supporting the creation and expansion of co-operatives and social enterprises, and using funds to establish a bank or credit union, which will provide new finance for neighbourhood groups, charities, social enterprises and other nongovernmental bodies.
Happiness Planning for Toronto
A new age for Toronto can begin with a change in political and social foresight. People know what they want but we need to have that expressed in our built environment and in how we approach planning for the future. We need to ask will the government be a partner in this and demand a say or will this be specifically a grassroots deliberative and democratic movement co-created by citizens themselves?
Development in Toronto has not been the result of community decisions – but commercial.
Communities have had to fight to have unfair planning decisions rescinded at great cost and effort and provoking NIMBYism (Not in my back yard). Now we have a chance to move forward with all the education and knowledge on how to build great communities based on how people want to live.
In a 2006 survey performed by Catherine O’Brian PhD. , respondents were asked to check a list of descriptors that apply to their delightful place. See if you recognize these in your own desires. The top ten were:
1) a pleasure to walk through, 2) peaceful, 3) beautiful, 4) appealing for children, 5) lots of visible green space, 6) appealing for youth, 7) appealing for seniors, 
welcoming, 9) natural, and 10) a pleasure to ride a bicycle through/in.
Some comments from the study:
“Create a walkable city (like Vancouver), and limit cars inside the perimeter. Include wide sidewalks, good transportation options, plant trees and flowers, good lighting for nighttime accessibility, create lots of little neighbourhood areas with all services needed within the neighbourhood. Create multiple-use buildings.”
“Provide more cycling/walking trails in other natural areas close to cities.”
“Governments would have to share this vision and listen to key stakeholders who want cities to be planned to incorporate bike paths, parks and wonderful meeting places along already existing waterways, etc.”
“It is a nature preserve and to re-create it, we must protect natural areas from
development.”
“A delightful place is an area/place you return to over and over and always leave with a smile and a sense of connecting with something bigger than you.”
“A place that makes you feel energized, calm, in tune with life and people.”
“A place where I can’t stop smiling.”
“An ability to return to this place in one’s mind and find an inner peace, even when one is many, many miles away.”
By employing the community in the planning and development process we can create complete neighbourhoods, walkable, bikable, clean, built to human scale with enough density and social behaviour to create a vibrant local economic centre to thrive.
Chris Caldwell has his Masters in Environmental Studies, Sustainable and Strategic Urban Planning from York University and a Graduate Diploma in Business and the Environment, from Schulich Business School. He is Ward 29 candidate for Toronto City Council in the 2010 Municipal Elections, and he is passionate about community and sustainability. www.caldwellforcouncil.ca
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