The reason for the revitalization project is that the big Toronto Community Housing complex at the core of Lawrence Heights, straddling Allen Road between Lawrence Avenue and the Yorkdale Shopping Centre, is suffering from ageing, declining housing stock that needs to be replaced. But behind the concern about the buildings lies concern about the community itself — about poor social indicators such as unemployment, single-parent families, dropout rates from school, and high rates of crime and drug use.

Yet the young men make it clear that their neighbourhood is full of character, of life, of a sense of place. They are deeply suspicious of revitalization, knowing people will have to move away, fearing its strong sense of community will be shattered. What if, one of them says in horror, they end up living in Brampton?

As a social housing project, Lawrence Heights might not seem like a typical suburb, but in some ways it simply illustrates their problems more dramatically. Its poverty is a more concentrated version of the challenges facing Toronto’s “inner suburbs” of Etobicoke, North York, and Scarborough, which are increasingly the home of Toronto’s low-income population and recent immigrants. And while geographically it hardly needs to be suburban at all — there are two subway stations within walking distance, and three substantial malls nearby to serve retail needs – the access to all of these amenities, as well as to neighbouring communities, is awkward and unpleasant, cut off by indirect routes, unappealing paths, and fast arterials with dangerous crossings.

Some of the the difficulties experienced by the neighbourhood have been blamed on this physical layout, which is based on the suburban ideal of the mid–20th century that emphasized a single type of use, buildings set back from the street, and a reduced number of roads that are largely cut off from the street grid that surrounds them. It sounded great at the time, a kind of Garden City, but now it is accused of isolating people from the city and its services, and turning them inward. Yet as Toronto has expanded into its hinterland, this ideal has been the basis for organizing every new community that’s been built. As the young Jane’s Walk guide knew, suburbs like Brampton face the same problems with their layout, but are even more spread out and isolated.

It’s easy to decry the suburbs, but the simple fact is that most of the Greater Toronto Area was built on a suburban model, for better or for worse. Not everyone can live in traditionally urban areas — the supply of these spaces is limited to that part of the city that was built before the middle of the 20th century, and the demand for this limited supply is rapidly rendering it unaffordable to most. Even with infill, there is only space there for a million or so people — and that means the other 4.5 million and growing in the GTA are going to live in suburban areas, built to suburban patterns and scales.

The people of Lawrence Heights have made the best of their situation. If the revitalization is done well, it will keep the benefits of a suburban community — its greenery, kid-friendliness, peaceful residential areas, and sense of community — but add the benefits of denser, more integrated urban infrastructure, such as easy pedestrian and cycling access to retail and transit, and a greater and more varied population supporting more services and opportunities close at hand.

It’s a microcosm of what needs to happen across the GTA. In recent years, more and more attention has been paid to the major issues facing Toronto’s suburbs. Studies by University of Toronto scholar David Hulchanski and his collaborators on the growth of income disparity, by the United Way on Poverty by Postal Code, and by the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences on the “Toronto Diabetes Atlas” have brought media attention to the difficulties being suffered by the inner suburbs. Former mayor of Toronto John Sewell has just written a comprehensive history of how Toronto’s suburbs took their shape (see review, p. 71), while on a more upbeat note, a major exhibition last year titled “Fringe Benefits” showed how new immigrant communities are reshaping the suburbs in their own image.

Governments, too, are paying attention. The City’s massive new transit plans — the Transit City light rail network and the subway extension to York University and the Vaughan Corporate Centre — focus on bringing transit to underserved suburban areas. Likewise, the municipal government’s Priority Areas and Tower Renewal plans (see p. 56) aim directly at poor areas of the suburbs. The provincial government’s comprehensive “Places to Grow” initiative and Greenbelt Act seek to control sprawl at the edges of Greater Toronto, and its new Metrolinx agency is dedicated to solving the area’s transportation problems.

There are good reasons for all this attention. While Toronto’s inner suburbs are faced with economic and social challenges, the outer suburbs beyond the city’s borders have experienced extraordinary growth in recent decades. Their combined population is starting to outstrip that of the City of Toronto itself. The problem is that this growth has been destructive and unsustainable. It is paving over Ontario’s best farmland, and it is making terribly inefficient use of this prime soil — using twice as much land to house the same number of people as Toronto, with a density one-quarter that of the oldest part of the city, and services, jobs, and shopping all at great distances from homes and from each other.

As a result, the average driver in the outer suburbs drives 23.2 kilometres a day, compared to just 6.8 kilometres for drivers in the centre of Toronto. And in Toronto’s core, drivers are a minority — the majority take transit, walk, or bike, whereas in the outer suburbs these options are unfeasible and almost nine out of every ten commuters drive. In a report on “smart growth” for the Neptis Foundation, planner Pamela Blais notes that the longer drivers are on the road, the more road space they need, so that the outer suburbs need 5.5 metres of road space per person, compared to 1.7 metres per person in the old city. The obvious results are massive pollution (the air quality in the outer suburbs is often worse than in downtown Toronto), huge amounts of wasted time, and poor health.

The less obvious result is much higher public costs, as massive amounts of infrastructure such as roads and sewers have to be built and maintained to support fewer people. These costs can be hidden as long as a city is new and growing, but once growth eases off, the costs begin to catch up. That’s what has happened to Toronto’s inner suburbs. Once they were fully built up, they no longer had the cheap land and continuous new development to keep costs and taxes down. Then, in the late 1990s, the provincial government downloaded social service costs and amalgamated them with the old City of Toronto. Suddenly these suburbs faced big-city taxes, but without the amenities and services offered by the old city.

Nor did they have the old city’s lifestyle attractions. In Toronto in the 1990s, like all over North America, middle-class households rediscovered the appeal of urban living and began moving back into older neighbourhoods. In many ways this new appreciation of inner cities is a good thing, because dense urban environments have been shown to be healthier and more sustainable. But while some of these new urban dwellers took over largely abandoned industrial areas, they also took over once-affordable old housing stock.

The effects jump out in Hulchanski’s reports: a steady decline in relative income levels in the northwest and northeast of the city since 1970, as new immigrants and the working poor were pushed into the ageing dwellings of the inner suburbs. What’s worse, these neighbourhoods were not designed to meet these people’s needs. The 2004 United Way study that identified priority neighbourhoods in the inner suburbs showed how lacking they were in community services. And the Toronto Diabetes Atlas showed how obesity and adult-onset diabetes are far more prevalent in these neighbourhoods, where it is difficult to walk anywhere, compared to equally poor but more walkable downtown areas.

There is no going back for the inner suburbs. They have lost the bloom of youth, now being enjoyed at the outer fringes of the GTA. Their only way forward is to move towards the mature appeal of the old city — to become more urban.

Fortunately for the inner suburbs, they have a significant asset. Thanks to the strong planning of the old Metro government (see p. 58) they are twice as dense as the newer outer suburbs (if only half as dense as the old city), largely thanks to clusters of apartment towers. The population of these towers give the Transit City light rail plan the potential ridership to make it feasible. And Transit City, in turn, makes the “Avenues” strategy in the City’s Official Plan — the aim to tranform suburban arterials into walkable main streets lined with mixed-use, mid-rise buildings — more viable. Hulchanski’s maps show that subway lines make adjacent property more valuable, and therefore worth redeveloping. Building additional residences should also ensure that the existing population is not pushed out in the process.

This process of urbanization by adding density and transit is the natural evolution of any urban space. Much of the old city was itself built over again at least once. As the city expanded and transit lines were built, the initial lower-density and low-quality buildings were torn down and replaced by better, higher-density structures.

Unfortunately, the suburbs have been laid out in a way that makes this process more difficult than it used to be. The tower neighbourhoods provide clear urbanizing potential, as do limited parts of the outer suburbs around transit hubs such as GO stations and newly intensifying “downtowns.” But much of the inner suburbs, and most of the outer suburbs, are made up of low-density housing subdivisions with indirect, dead-end road patterns that are deliberately designed to not connect well with neighbouring arterial roads. They can’t become traditionally urban, but while their need might not be immediate, they are still not sustainable in the long-term. For these areas, cities need to open up possibilities that let subdivisions find their own way to becoming more self-sustaining.

For example, a first step is to make subdivisions more walkable. But the obvious solution, to put in sidewalks where they are missing, gets a lot of resistance. When I’ve talked to people who live on these kinds of streets, they’ve told me they don’t want sidewalks because the street feels shared at the moment, a sheltered space where people can walk, kids can bike, and drivers are aware of them.

Rather than putting in sidewalks, such streets could build on this sentiment by being formalized as “shared streets.” These originated in dense Dutch residential areas, but they might well be adaptable to typical winding subdivisions. After all, the purpose of the suburban cul-de-sac design, with its restricted entry points, is specifically to avoid excessive vehicle traffic in residential areas.

The basic steps for creating residential shared streets are simple: narrow the entry points and sign them so that cars know they are in a special zone, and implement a super-slow speed limit (20 kilometres an hour). In Europe, such streets are indicated by a sign that combines together pedestrians, cyclists, children playing, and a car. In his book Street Reclaiming, Australian activist David Engwicht proposes a range of ideas to signal to drivers that space is shared, such as making the entry points an attractive public space by painting the street — an idea implemented successfully in Portland, Oregon by local organization City Repair. A Canadian twist could be to specifically allow street hockey to be played at all times of the day, with appropriate warning signs for drivers (or even painted street markings).

People also need destinations to walk to. Subdivisions are not dense enough to support nearby retail, but they could support itinerant vendors, like people who drive a van to a community at a set time every week to sell fresh fruit and vegetables. Some people already do so, but clandestinely, because City regulations forbid it. What if the City instead actively encouraged this activity? Rather than driving, residents could walk to get fresh produce. Once the habit was established, perhaps vendors would begin offering other staples as well, such as bread. The newly narrowed and beautified entrances to “shared streets” neighbourhoods could include spaces where the vendors could set up, turning them into public gathering places.

Intensification, which would make such projects more viable, could also happen naturally if the City allowed it. Already, many single-family-home neighbourhoods are becoming more densely populated than expected as immigrant families house not just a nuclear household, but a whole extended family. Many also cover their costs by renting rooms to lodgers. Eventually, they may want to expand their homes with an apartment, or maximize the value by selling the lot for someone to build two semi-detached houses. Such piecemeal intensification is a natural process that cities should encourage.

People may also want to start running businesses out of their homes. Traditional planning, with its separation of uses, frowns on this, but the close proximity of work and residential is one of the keys to the success of old downtown neighbourhoods. By encouraging this mix, cities can make more efficient use of road space throughout the day.

In many ways, cities need to get out of the way of people who will naturally want to engage in this gradual urbanization. But cities do need to provide key infrastructure to encourage walking or cycling out of subdivisions to nearby destinations. Where distances to destinations are too far to walk, they may be perfect for cycling, and some arterials have enough space that separated walking and cycling paths can be built to make cycling a safe and appealing option. Cities may even need to expropriate and demolish a house here and there to provide direct walking and cycling paths to malls, parks or transit stations.

These kinds of steps are just the beginning. A much bigger problem lies in what to do with the arterial roads around subdivisions. Unlike main streets in old cities, which serve as a focus for the neighbourhood, suburban arterials divide communities. It’s not just that they are wide; it’s also that they are designed to be fast. That makes them intimidating to cross, which creates a kind of arterial box around each community that discourages walking or cycling beyond its bounds.

The ideal solution is to turn them into main streets in the Transit City/Avenues mode — narrow them, slow them down, built light rail transit, and line them with buildings that connect to the sidewalk. But while this might be possible in the inner suburbs, it’s a much bigger jump for arterials in the outer suburbs. For example, suburban employment districts are spread-out business parks, rather than the concentrated office buildings of central Toronto, which means that not only the origins, but also the destinations of commuter trips may be too dispersed for heavy transit.

As the outer suburbs become fully built, however, these cities are going to realize that once outwards growth has been exhausted they are not sustainable in their current form. Mississauga has recently come to that realization, and is trying solve it by building upwards in its designated “downtown” areas (see article, p. 43). That brings density, certainly, but it’s not clear if it is being matched by the creation of the kind of public and private services that make a really coherent community.

The elusive final ingredient is a “sense of place.” An area the size of the GTA cannot rely on a single downtown for its centre. Many transportation, sustainability, and community issues would be solved if the GTA was truly a series of cities, each with its own centre and sense of identity. It’s a process many of the GTA cities are trying to foster through big projects to create new city centres, but they are not always convincing. The best civic focal points still tend to be based on former small towns with small, tight urban footprints (see Port Credit article, p. 42).

As the young men of Lawrence Heights demonstrated, though, forming a sense of place comes naturally to people; observing our environment and connecting with our neighbours is built into humans’ DNA. The 2008 “Fringe Benefits” exhibit showed how immigrant communities across the GTA are stamping the suburbs with their own identity. But suburbs have been held back from developing the private retail, services, and community organizations that fill out a sense of place by outdated street layouts, misplaced regulations, and bad development habits based on impractical ideals from the last century (see sidebar, this page).

The challenge of the suburbs is vast, but it has to be faced. They are neither sustainable, healthy, nor efficient over the long term, yet they house most of the population of the Toronto area. Major projects such as Tower Renewal, creating new city centres, and ambitious transit initiatives are a necessary component, but only the tip of the iceberg. Cities also have to find ways to enable communities to evolve themselves, to provide their own services, intensify gradually, and develop their own sense of place. The ideal to aim for is a region that is no longer the “Greater Toronto Area,” a downtown surrounded by ever-more distant suburbs, but rather a series of interlinked cities, each self-sufficient with its own strong identity and vibrant urban life.

Other times, it’s more circumspect, like the way Jane Jacobs glamourized the Annex through her writing and her presence, or the way Geoff Polci and Alana Duggan, by opening Crema Café in the Junction, pushed the neighbourhood over the edge it had been teetering on for years, making it the sort of place people would finally admit to living in. Or the way Will Munro queered the city west of Yonge.

As he’ll be the first to tell you, he wasn’t the first. A quick browse through Rick Bébout’s online opus, Lives, times, & place (rbebout.com), or a trip through the Xtra, NOW, and Eye Weekly archives with the search term “Denise Benson” will tell you how long people have been leaving the gaybourhood.

Benson, who moved to Toronto in 1986, didn’t know about George Hislop, Peter Pan, and Charlie Pachter when she started her dyke nights at the Caribou above Sneaky Dee’s, and later at the Claremont where the Starbucks at Queen and Claremont is now, or later still at the Boom Boom Room across the street. And though she did know about various era-bridging forces like Bruce LaBruce, or El Convento Rico on College, the media, including the gay press, didn’t pick up on any trends.

It was only when Will Munro started Vaseline (later “Vazaleen,” after some pointed letters from Procter & Gamble) at the El Mocambo that the whole press machine started to take notice that there was same-sexing happening off Church Street, and that there was this thing called queer which, once you got over the initial strangeness, seemed a little on the sexy side. At least when it involved young people. Within a year of Munro’s starting up his monthly nights, the National Post, the Globe and Mail, and the Toronto Star (in that order) had mentioned it in one way or another. By the time Munro had taken his night to Ottawa for the second time, in 2004, the Citizen ran a 1,200-word story called “Everybody do the Vazaleen.” Meanwhile, back in Toronto, the Star ran a 1,500-word piece in September (i.e., not hooked to Pride coverage) on a new gay generation “finding places to live and play” off the Church strip.

You could say it was timing. You could say it was how genuinely open Munro threw his arms — to men, women, trans, gay, straight, other — and how wide the media’s arms, and the city’s, too, were open to embrace his polymorphous non-disco DJing and band-booking at Spadina and College. Whatever the case, all of a sudden, you started seeing stories using cultural references like Go West, West Side Story, or clever wordplay turning Queen West into Queer West, to evoke this thing that was happening to the city and, apparently, to the sexuality of its citizens.

You might, if you had a mind to, distill it down into the space between two verbs. When asked why she started spinning discs to create a little centripetal dyke space, Benson says, “I created the spaces because I needed them.” According to Munro, 34, Vazaleen got started because, “I wanted a place to hear the music I like.”

As he sits drinking a pot of tea in the queer-friendly café space at the Gladstone, three doors down from his new venture, The Beaver, which he took a share of in 2006 with longtime friend Lynn McNeill (whose family bought the place, and who was the longtime queer punk presence behind the bar at Lee’s Palace), friends drop by the table to say hi. It’s like talking to Al Waxman in Kensington Market. “I’ve always lived in the west end,” says Munro, who moved to Toronto in the mid-90s from small-town Ontario to go to what was then OCA. “It’s where I feel most comfortable.”

And comfortable is just why this next phase of Munro’s queer sphere of influence is probably here to stay. This little café that’s become as much a physical hub as Vazaleen was a social and cultural one. Though only just into his 30s, Munro’s already evolved from the frenetic pleasures of the monthly blowout into the sustainability of a place to hang your very cool hat. It’s an evolution helped along by a recent diagnosis — one he’d rather not dwell on here — that’s brought him a good deal closer to his own mortality than most guys his age. “The Beaver’s a place you can go and just hang out,” he says. “You can get a coffee, or some good food. And it’s a place that queer kids can work.”

According to the website, they’re “the prettiest kids in town.” He still hosts nights there, and he loves the new-old-revived Queer Street West, but he doesn’t want to claim too much credit. He just did what he did, did what he wanted, and the city followed. Tea cold, conversation finished, he gets up to leave, and though I don’t follow, I figure that when he walks down his street, he smiles at everyone.

I used to be a student of sociology, but about four years ago academia began to wear me down and I decided I needed a change. When I began my new career I knew little about trees specifically and even less about nature in general. Like many people I enjoyed camping and walking in parks, but I had never really thought about the natural world or my relationship with it.

I attribute a portion of this apathy to my childhood in Mississauga. Some of my fondest childhood memories are of playing by the creek across from my grade school. My friends and I would search for snakes, make dams, climb trees and do all the other things that kids enjoy doing given the opportunity and the right environment. Then, one day, a deal was made and papers were signed in an office somewhere. Men came and cut down the trees, and then encased the stream in concrete. Shortly after, rows of houses were built on the site where I had once played. My relationship with nature, which had got off to an amicable start (although the snakes we had chased may disagree) quickly began to deteriorate. It wasn’t long before I was hanging out at Square One mall and slumming around arcades, the days of playing in the woods for hours at a time just a distant memory.

Then, at the age of 26, I became an arborist and now again find myself climbing around in trees. My relationship with nature, which I had neglected for years, has been rekindled. I have quickly grown to appreciate the wonders of trees and other living things with which we share this city. The Manitoba maple near my local convenience store that has pushed its way through a crack in the pavement and grown to a height of 50 feet has taken on new significance. Before, I, like many others, might have dismissed it as an annoying “weed tree” that should be cut down. Now, however, I marvel at how a tree that usually grows on lakeshores and stream banks has managed to not only survive, but actually thrive under such hostile conditions.

My newly cultivated insight has enabled me to see with fresh eyes the plants and animals of the natural world that continue to eke out an existence in this, the most urbanized city in Canada. However, this insight has also laid bare how at odds the daily activities of humans are with the natural world. Whether we realize it or not, almost all of our actions have some implication on the living things around us, many of them negative.

A current example is the fate of over 500 trees that can presently be found on the grounds of the Queen Street Mental Health Centre. The sprawling 27-acre site is covered with a multitude of mature trees, many of them healthy and beautiful. I had read about the efforts to save the brick wall that rings the grounds in the weekly newspapers, but had not considered the fate of the trees until one day when I was walking past the site and noticed the large billboard with the map of the proposed development. The new plans call for the demolition of all the buildings and the construction of roads that will put the health centre “back on the grid.” As I scrutinized the map it became apparent that the majority of the trees were missing. I spent the next three hours walking around the grounds counting the trees that stand where proposed buildings and roads soon will be. The total came in at around 560 trees, a sizeable number to lose from the downtown core. As the development has not yet begun the fate of the trees is still undecided, but without some hard work by concerned citizens another pocket of urban green space will likely disappear.

Our city is an enormous ever-changing entity. Nature is constantly being cut down and paved over, but in other corners it continues to fight: trees push up through concrete, vines tear pipes from walls. It is this constant give and take that I wish to chronicle in this column, and in so doing, I intend to shine new light on how our actions affect the wonders of nature that surround us.

There is a need in this city for a certain type of public art not the kind purchased and placed by business or government but the kind that happens spontaneously, that could come from anybody, and that is proof of the living humanity that files onto buses and walks down the street.

Recently I’ve become frustrated by public art of the culture-jamming variety, which felt useful once but now seems incapable of helping the unhappy city dweller break out of the oppressive tedium and one-noteness of city life. Perhaps culture-jamming was never meant to do that, but far from taking a hatchet to capitalism, its techniques reinforce it. Living in a metropolis is partly maddening because of the billboards we pass at bus shelters and the ads in washroom stalls and the ones perched importantly on rooftops that collectively send out a single message: “This is all you should be thinking about; the human experience is the consumer experience.” I think much of the claustrophobia and blandness of city life does come from accepting this message. But what the typical response of the culture-jamming artist ultimately communicates (take the skull painted on the underwear model’s head, for instance) is acquiescence: “You are all I’m thinking about,” it replies. They don’t like the way the king is ruling, but they see no other king.

My desire for Toronto is that its streets be filled with acts that reflect imaginations that aren’t limited by a dialogue about consumerism, but are liberated enough to engage in other conversations for instance, about beauty, language, not-knowingness the things that actually make life interesting and vivid and rich. We need something to counter the ever-narrowing city-dweller’s mind with its relentless focus on Things That Matter and the ordered thinking-through of these things, with acts of public art that surprise and baffle as non-sequiturs do. Only when we’re taken by surprise by something we’re never encountered before are we vulnerable enough to respond authentically, with the part of our mind that is not made up and so is most curious and intensely engaged.

The best public art masquerades as the city, and turns the city into a place where expressions of gaiety and darkness manifest as authorless details. I am thinking of the bicycle tire at the corner of Markham and Barton, where I have been living, that several times over the past few months has changed its position locked to a post, hanging off a street sign, lying flat on the ground. Is an artist responsible for this? Is anyone? I can’t think of the reason someone would be making this gesture, except out a sense of play and mischief. And if no one is moving the bicycle tire around (which, though strange, seems just as likely) then the city is a pretty bizarre and magical place, which is the best thing a city can be, and which makes being a city-dweller bearable, even exciting. As the Situationist Guy Debord put it, “The most general goal must be to extend the non-mediocre part of life, to reduce the empty moment of life as much as possible,” in order to ensure “the future reign of freedom and play.”

One of the reasons humans who have been affected by art continue to need art is that it reminds us of those parts of ourselves that wither and are neglected in the course of things, which happens not because our confusion and wonder and grief are not important and valuable to us, but because they’re less useful. They don’t help us to do our chores. They make our chores bizarre. Polemical public art accepts the central tenent of industrial life: that everything must be for a purpose even leisure, even play while public art that baffles and has nothing to say is a more truly radical gesture. It subverts not simply a specific ad or advertising, but sense and nonsense in general a firm grasp of which is the glue of capitalist life, and of any political regime. While the culture-jammer might scrawl “Shopping is bad,” the truth is that shopping is neither bad nor good, but deeply beside the point, so completely not at the core of what is most interesting about our humanness.

To speak about money for a change Toronto spends eleven dollars for every person, every year, on what the city calls Culture. Vancouver spends twice that. New York: sixty-three dollars a head. We’re lucky that the city bureaucrats would rather have each ordinary citizen take on the task of beautifying and filling our streets and sidewalks with art and theatre and question marks, and we should all be grateful for the fifty-two-dollar tax rebate available to each one of us to spend on paint or clay, as we prefer. As Joseph Beuys wrote, “Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline…Every man is a plastic artist who must determine things for himself.”

Sheila Heti is the author of The Middle Stories and organizes the Trampoline Hall lecture series

Walk through one of the three passageways piercing the unexceptional exterior of the University of Toronto's Earth Sciences Centre, and you will find yourself within a beautiful forest-like setting. When the building was constructed in 1989, it was decided to plant a small woodlot of native trees and plants within its two open-air courtyards.

The northern courtyard includes trees and shrubs that can be found in the boreal forests that cover much of northern Ontario. The plantings in the southern courtyard are intended to represent a Carolinian forest, which can be found in the southernmost parts of Ontario. The plantings were designed by Michael Hough and are now maintained by faculty and students of the Department of Forestry.

The courtyards mark the first time at U of T that a building's surrounding landscape was designed to reflect and complement the subjects being taught within its walls, in this case forestry, botany and geology. The constant chirping of birds in the trees and voices of students who have ducked into the courtyards for a quick break from their classes attest to the success of the initiative. John McCarron, the coordinator of technical services at the building, fondly recollects the story of two cardinals who last spring mated in the northern courtyard and then proceeded to teach their young chicks to fly while students and professors looked on with interest from the many surrounding classrooms and offices.

The woodlot is an example of how, with some imagination, we can create and cultivate a close, healthy relationship with nature within an urban setting.

Posters plastered up in the area entitled Lost Chinatown tell the story of where Toronto’s first Chinatown used to exist � before Nathan Phillips Square and the new City Hall replaced it. They were produced as part of The Missing Plaque Project, with the goal of bringing forgotten or ignored pieces of Toronto’s history to light. Tim Groves, who initiated the project, hopes it will inspire people to go out and explore other parts of the city. (read Groves' column on the potential of posters on page 19).

"I want to put something in the public domain that people can use," says Groves. "Postering is a great way of putting an idea forward to a large number of people."

His first "plaque", called Turning an Eye on the Christie Pits Riot, tells the chilling story of the biggest riot in Toronto’s history, which took place between members of the Jewish community and anti-Semitic groups after a city baseball game in Christie Pits Park in 1933.

Shortly after posting the signs last winter, Groves received a lot of positive feedback from members of the community. Many wanted to help increase awareness of the event and some even expressed interest in lobbying to have a permanent metal plaque put up in the area.

By juxtaposing the content of the poster with the place it refers to, Groves creates an experience for the reader. The 10 by 16 inch posters, which contain around 1000 words, would not be as effective in the form of a traditional hand-held zine.

To be able to stand in the area where a historical event once took place and imagine what it would have looked liked, or how it would have felt to be involved, makes the issues much more immediate and moving.

One summer evening I was walking through Seaton Village and passed through the Olive Street Block Party. Residents had brought their kitchen tables out and were all sitting there, in the street, eating and drinking wine. There were little tables for the children, and a couple of long tables where the neighbourhood potluck dishes were sitting. I felt like I was passing through their dining rooms.

Recently I walked through another block party, this time on one of the streets to the east of Withrow Park. Sort of the same idea, but there was more activity. In contrast to Olive Street's civilized discourse, the Riverdale party was full of screaming children (maybe they were playing, I couldn't tell) and a father and son fighting on a front lawn with what looked like real swords. Maybe they were still angry about the Withrow Park dog poisonings.

When Greece won the Euro 2004 championship this past summer I took off on foot for the Danforth at around 9pm. There had been a big rainstorm that day, and a 100-metre stretch of the Prince Edward Viaduct's curb lane was flooded. Pedestrians had to time their walk in between sets of westbound cars to avoid being splashed. I miscalculated and a honking car with Greek flags nailed me with a tidal wave of water.

The Danforth itself was closed to traffic and packed with people. Around the Chester and Logan area the street was so clogged that it was difficult to walk more than three steps in a straight line. Greek boys were sticking roman candles in planters, lighting them, and running away as flaming balls shot into the crowd.

As I was walking along watching all this, a guy next to me bit into his sausage and a stream of hot pork juice squirted out of it and onto me. Later, in the bathroom of Tim Hortons, a cop spilled his coffee on me. I was wet, dirty and mad at Greece so I left and walked back home to Dupont Street.

The night Canada won the World Cup of Hockey I thought I would make my way over to Yonge Street to see what was going on. First, I passed in front of Holt Renfrew on Bloor where the Vanity Fair film festival party was taking place. The entire building was covered, Christo-like, in a weird pink material with the word "Vinyl" printed on the side. I guess it was an allusion to DJ Culture. Most DJs I've seen don't dress in hot pink though.

They had closed off Bloor and the crowd of stargazers was 10 deep in places. A massive LED television hung from a crane out front, allowing those of us behind the riot fence to see the magic happening inside. Wyclef Jean was performing. I only found that out later: at the time I thought it was a bad Jimmy Cliff cover-band fit only for sad weddings. Also visible on the TV were terrible women in leather pants dancing with their arms over their heads.

Outside, people were being dropped off on the red carpet. The stars and the sycophants and the moneyed nobodies don't use limos anymore, but rather giant black Cadillac Escalades. I never understood the allure of the limo anyway. People don't look very comfortable in them. Photographs of stars sitting low in their seats always look awkward and not terribly sexy. Except for maybe Bryan Ferry — he can pull it off.

Walking the hundred metres over to Yonge was like crossing the River Styx. YSL suits gave way to hockey jerseys. Yonge Street was gridlocked: cars packed mostly with guys crawled along and honked their horns. The police walked down the middle of the street checking for alcohol. Flags were everywhere. Topless women with big cans of Heineken ran down Yonge, followed by packs of Roots-clad frat boys. The women would pose, again with arms in the air, for cameras and camcorders. It was nice of them; it preempted having to hear "show us your tits" over and over.

It got louder as I moved closer to Dundas Square. At 506 Yonge the little guy who runs the Truly Canadian Discount Store was on the floor frantically sorting through a massive pile of flags. Out on the street there was a South Asian family in a minivan crawling along with both sliding doors open. It looked like the entire family — mom, dad, aunt, and untold number of kids — had piled into the van. The driver, the dad, was honking the horn. The kids were waving Canadian flags. Two of the young boys were following the lead of the Roots Army by getting out of the van to kick garbage cans and newspaper boxes along the way. It is good to see our traditions passed on down the generations.

Dundas Square itself was a frothy mix of Canadian youth, the police, and me. I sat down on those big stone benches by the Hard Rock Café to watch. The fountains were working, and some of the boys would push their mini-skirted girlfriends into the water, causing the skirts (and cheers) to go up. Some of the boys would also wrestle each other into the fountains, while others would squat over the nozzles and give themselves public enemas. A big fella standing next to me with a Canada pennant said, "If I could do cartwheels I would."

It's a late Sunday afternoon when I leave my house on Dupont at Spadina — the sun is going down in the west. It looks like it's setting right on Landsowne Street. That's a good name for a sun to set on. Next to my house is a gigantic LCBO. People from small, compact European countries would find it amazing and endless, or perhaps obscene. There is a guy who stands in front of the store all the time asking for money. I usually don't give him anything, but he knows I live nearby and he always says "Have a nice day" and I say something like "What's going on?" but I mush up the words so it all sounds like one incomprehensible word but I nod and look him in the eye too and he seems okay with that. Sometimes he's on my porch looking through stuff.

I turn left onto Davenport, go under the tracks and then head to the right and take Poplar Plains. It's all uphill here, climbing the shores of ancient Lake Iroquois. At this point the streets get wonderfully disorganized. I take a short detour up Glen Edyth drive. I only just discovered it on a winter afternoon this year, when the trees were still bare affording fine views. Glen Edyth climbs up high, rapidly, with only a steel crash barrier on one side keeping the Saabs and Audis from tumbling into the ravine below. Up at the top you can see a cross section of midtown Toronto — the Four Seasons Hotel, Manulife Centre — all from a weird, unexpected angle. Directly below are trees and houses spreading towards Avenue Road. When nobody is around but a few tradespeople working on a couple of lonely homes, I feel like the only person in the city, and it's all laid out in front of me like a damp Currier & Ives lithograph. Nobody seems to live in these big houses, but they're always being fixed up.

I walk back down — Glen Edyth has no outlet at the top (but there really should be a pedestrian passage over to Casa Loma) and I walk around to Russell Hill road. I don't know anybody on this street. There are modest mansions and immodest ones. I secretly covet the immodest ones because some of them are perched high above the road and have grand lawns in front lending them a Great Gatsby look. The electronic gates let me know I'm not invited. The rich are different, and all that. But on sunny Sunday afternoons at around 5p.m. I can stand there on the sidewalk as long as I want and watch, just like Benjamin Braddock did when he was spying on Mrs. Robinson and daughter in The Graduate. I wasn't stalking anything but real estate though, and instead of Simon and Garfunkel I was listening to Glenn Gould's "Goldberg Variations" on my headphones.

It's not a long walk over to Sir Winston Churchill Park, which starts at the corner of Spadina and St. Clair, but has secret entrances around its periphery, including the one I took from Russell Hill road. It looks like a regular park with dramatic hills, but it's actually a giant reservoir covered in grass. The designer dogs of Forest Hill can be seen at all hours playing, pissing, fetching and shitting just a few feet above the city's potable water reserves. I like to stand at the edge of the reservoir and look south. You can survey the entire city from this position. To the right and below is the Spadina Road Bridge, passing over the ravine I often walk through. Near the base of the bridge you can find the Spadina subway escape hatch. It was through this passage that the victims of the 1995 subway crash escaped the superheated tunnels. It's quiet now, but sometimes I like to stand next to it and listen to the subway rush by somewhere deep inside and feel the warm air blow through the grates. I like knowing that underneath all this nature there is an electric railway running, keeping the city alive and well.

Since the park only has a thin layer of absorbent soil above the concrete of the reservoir, it's often a mucky place to walk, and it takes a while to get up to St. Clair Avenue. I walk west to the Loblaws to use the public washrooms where a person can pee without fear of arrest. This is the mothership of all Loblaws: a glass and steel Star Trek spaceport on some utopian forested planet. Inside there is a board that lists all the events that happen there — from Pilates to Salsa Cooking to Passover Primavera lessons or something. On this particular Sunday, there is a children's birthday party taking place in a glassed-in zoo-like room on the second floor. The moms all look fresh and white and wear crisp shirts and some talk on cell phones in the corners. Some of the dads are bored while others are really into the celebration and hold on to their toddlers and try to get them engaged in whatever the woman in the Loblaws uniform was doing at the front.

After watching for a bit, I leave and walk to the east towards Avenue Road. Glenn Gould Park, on the northwest corner, has a nice copper statue of Peter Pan that has turned green and dripped down staining the ground. I continue east to Gould's old apartment building at 110 St. Clair West. The Park Lane is a fine art deco structure. They used to say you could hear him plunking away in his penthouse from the sidewalk where I'm standing. I wonder if he played the Bach I'm listening to now. I have his 1981 recording on, the one he did the year before he died. You can hear him breathing and grunting throughout the recording. Maybe they could hear his grunts down here, too? In the liner notes to his more famous 1955 recording of the Goldberg Variations Gould wrote: "It is, in short, music which observes neither end nor beginning, music with neither real climax nor real resolution, music which, like Baudelaire's lovers, 'rests lightly on the wings of the unchecked wind." That's a lot like walking in Toronto.

"Parkour" brought a freshness to the world too, a new way to look at the city. I'd recently heard of the activity on the internet, the idea of using the city as an obstacle course, just picking a direction and running. Apparently "the art of movement" was invented by David Belle with his friend Sebastien Foucan in the French town of Lisses, a suburb of Paris. Their gang, the Yamakasi, was the subject for an action film of the same name that came out in 2001. It features some of the wall-running, fence-scaling, and rooftop-jumping stunts the sport is known for in Europe, although I prefer the lo-fi videos on the many fan websites for their self-aggrandizing rawness.

"Check this out," Sandy says. He gets a running start, jumps on a crate and launches into mid-air, legs splayed like David Lee Roth. We'd started in an alleyway near Sandy's place — its mix of garages and fences and piles of junk had become a series of challenges and opportunities. I shrug and jump off the same crate and slap the sole of a foot against the brick wall before I hit the ground.

Sandy laughs and spies a long piece of cardboard on the ground, a little soggy from the rain. He gets a slide of a few feet out of it, but my treads just grind it up. Then I see a rusty grilled window, and hop up on the sill, pulling my self along the side of the wall until I run out of grill and then jump with a bent-knee flourish to the ground.

My interpretation of parkour is that it's all about the stylistic flourishes, since I can't possibly come close to monkey-bodied Sandy's moves. He's been doing it and documenting it in his photographs and art for years, although he calls it street gymnastics or speed walking. It grew out of his skateboarding days, which were long before I knew him but definitely affected how he saw the world.

A lot of people who like the sport are attracted by the acrobatics, but for me the appeal is seeing the world in a different way. Like the way another French figure, the flaneur, allowed people to see the beauty in the urban, parkour gives its practitioners (called traceurs) a context in which to interact with their environment that is limited only by their creativity and physical ability.

More limiting is what people are willing to be seen doing in public. As we jog out of the quiet alley and onto College Street I'm suddenly self-conscious — I can't easily communicate to passers-by that my idiotic cavorting is in fact incredibly fashionable and European. But before I become overwhelmed I see a new city sewer pipe about to be installed, as high as my knee. "Ooooh," I say. I hop up on it first, running along the top of it and hearing the hollowness beneath my footfalls. The people on College Street forgotten, I jump to the next section of pipe.

The flyers were meant to be a service, but the underlying message was clear: Women, watch your backs, and stay off the streets.

The female pedestrian's experience has always been different from men's. For women living in cities, safety is a major concern, one that underscores almost every aspect of our lives. Research has shown that over half of Canadian women are afraid to walk in their own neighbourhood after dark, yet only 18 percent of men feel this way . Furthermore, women who are subject to discrimination based on race, sexual orientation, ability, age or income are more vulnerable to violence and fear. In 2002, the Toronto Police recorded about 2,700 cases of sexual assault.

Cities work differently for different people, and women have particular needs when it comes to urban planning. For example, the gendered division of labour dictates that women are more often the ones negotiating strollers and heavy groceries up and down city sidewalks. So, the presence (or lack) of a seemingly inconsequential dip from the sidewalk to the street is a fundamental part of the female pedestrian experience.

As well, lighting standards used to be determined by engineers, many of whom deemed a parking lot bright enough if there was just enough light to see your car key slide into the lock. It was a masculine way of defining lighting standards, one that didn't take into account the woman walking alone to her car in a dark, empty lot.

In Redesigning the American Dream, Delores Hayden argues that early American urban design was steeped in patriarchy. Victorian values of public and private life were implicit in planning. Women's place was considered to be in the home, and it was unladylike for women to be in the streets, going places men were going. "Because the working woman was no one urban mans' property (her father or her husband had failed to keep her at home)," writes Hayden, "she was every man's property." Thus, street harassment, much of which prevails on city streets today, was justified.

Some people � women and men � enjoy being noticed and even whistled at, but not all attention is welcome. While a whistle or a "hey baby," may seem harmless to its perpetrator, come-ons are, in essence, a violation of women's rights to walk undisturbed. Walking is the most equitable mode of transportation: it is universally affordable and allows individuals to travel independently. Take away the right to walk safely and comfortably down the street and you're severely restricting freedom.

And when advertising begins to invade public space, especially in areas with high human traffic, women are mostly affected by the unattainable images of beauty and stereotyped gender roles that are ubiquitous in ad media.

Fortunately, over the past 20 years, female pedestrians and other groups in Toronto have organized to make substantial changes to the way cities work, in order to encourage women to walk.

"It has taken action," says Beth Moore Milroy, a professor at Ryerson University's school of Urban and Regional Planning. "It has required women and other groups to club together and say, 'look here folks, you're seeing this city in a very simple mode, through the eyes of the conventional, fully-abled male, and we need to see the city in a much more complex way.'"

Women have conducted safety audits to investigate their neighbourhoods and have been contributing valuable insight into community development. As a result, the City of Toronto has developed design guidelines that regulate the height and thickness of shrubbery and limit narrow, enclosed spaces to make laneways safer.

Women, who use public transit at twice the rate men do, have worked with the Toronto Transit Commission to implement the well-lit Designated Waiting Areas in the subway and the Request Stop Program on buses. Lighting standards have changed, as has the notion that damaging advertising is acceptable on our city streets. These are steps to ensure that the pedestrian experience remains enjoyable for all.

And, because sometimes extra lights are not enough, we have the service of concerned women in the neighbourhood, who will tape fluorescent orange notices to our lampposts.