Jane’s Walk is a movement of free, citizen-led walking tours inspired by urban enthusiast, Jane Jacobs. We’re hoping you’ll lead or attend a walk that matters to you this year during the May 3rd to 5th weekend.  

Everyone knows something about where they live. Every perspective is important to building vibrant and healthy cities. This initiative is about sharing the stories that bring communities together.

Last year 41 walks were held throughout Vancouver. Can you help us surpass that record by hosting a walk or thinking of three people who would make great Walk Leaders? Send us an email or go to the registration form. We’re also hosting a Walk-shop on April 11th for new and returning walk leaders to connect. Will you join us? 

If you’re not interested in leading a walk, here are a couple other ways for you to get involved:

• Attend the Jane’s Walk festival (May 3-5) and encourage your community to do the same. Walks will be posted at https://www.facebook.com/janeswalkvancouver
• Volunteer during a walk as a photographer, crowd manager, etc. Contact us for more details.
• Encourage your friends and colleagues to lead a Jane’s Walk.
  
• Stay up to date: like our Facebook page, sign up for the mailing list, follow us on Twitter!

The Jane’s Walk Vancouver team is here to help, so let us know if you have any questions.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

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The post Event: Jane’s Walk festival, May 3-5 appeared first on Spacing Vancouver.

I imagine Mayor John Tory, like all good conservatives of his generation and breeding, worshipped at the alter of Michael Wilson, the storied Bay Street investment banker who served as Brian Mulroney’s finance minister during the 1980s and who passed away last month.

Wilson may have been best known, in recent years, for his advocacy of mental health issues, a place he came to following the suicide of his son. But he was also the author of the Goods and Services Tax (GST), which the federal Tories introduced, to a tidal wave of kvetching, in 1990; the 7% tax came into effect on January 1991.

Unless I missed something, the sky did not subsequently fall.

Wilson’s move, motivated by a desire to replace the broken and productivity-destroying manufacturing sales tax, was a rarity: Conservatives, even moderates, don’t like to tax. Stephen Harper’s Conservatives spent their years in power ripping holes in the federal treasury, offering up bespoke tax breaks to politically desirable voter blocks and corporations, and then hacking two points off the HST.

Indeed, if one looks at the past generation or so, the number of times Canadian governments have sought to stabilize or diversify their revenues – decisions that private businesses make all time — can be counted on two hands: the Paul Martin government’s stealthy hike to CPP premiums to prevent the gutting of Canada’s public pension system; occasional moves by various governments to index tax brackets to inflation; the federal Liberals’ 2007 gas tax; the anti-speculation taxes imposed in Ontario and British Columbia; and David Miller’s land transfer tax.

It’s a short list. We’re better at starving governments than providing them with the resources they require to deliver the services Canadians demand. We’re also adept at failing to connect the dots when the public sector begins to buckle.

Which brings me back to our mayor’s stubborn and infuriating unwillingness heed countless warnings and make unpopular fiscal decisions which are not only demonstrably necessary (e.g., Exhibit 358, the city’s inability to clear snow and ice this winter), but will also be praised by future municipal leaders and Torontonians who benefit by them. I know Tory remembers Wilson and his achievements. I don’t know why he won’t learn from them.

Poor judgment is always an explanation. I suppose Tory may be biding his time until the city’s not in the throes of a difficult negotiation with a hostile provincial regime (which is to say, never). Or maybe he just can’t grasp the principle that stewardship is integral to good governance – that you hand the thing off to the next group in at least the same shape as you found it.

I have two suggestions for turning this page, though both will require Tory to get out of his complacent comfort zone and actually show leadership.

The first has to do with framing. There was much talk this budget season about using inflation as a guideline for increasing property taxes. With the exception of the early years of Mel Lastman’s first term and a couple of years of Rob Ford’s administration, post-amalgamation Toronto council has limited property tax increases to the rate of inflation, give or take a few basis points. If more revenue is required, the city hikes its many fees and levies, or lobbies for cash transfers from the other orders. Miller alone pushed through two new tax levies, only one of which survived the meat grinder. It has kept the city in the black for much of the past decade, although, as Gil Meslin brilliantly demonstrated in this tweet storm, the LTT has left the city vulnerable to cyclical downturns in the real estate market.

The economic assumption underlying the rate-of-inflation increase is that the city’s property tax dollar shouldn’t shrink. But the very premise is incorrect in a city that adds 30,000 to 50,000 people per year. If Toronto’s population grows by more than a percentage point annually, the actual amount required to ensure that the city’s revenues remain merely stable is rate-of-inflation plus rate of growth. After all, those new Torontonians use the roads, go the library, sometimes need emergency assistance, and so on; it makes no sense that the accepted baseline doesn’t acknowledge this demographic fact of life.

So recommendation one is that the city – residents, businesses, civil society groups, political leaders, etc. — need to permanently reframe the evidentiary baseline for revenue increases. Rate of inflation means going backwards. That’s become achingly clear.

Proposal two has to do with the importance of creating political space within which a timorous regime can consider a course correction. The most outspoken and high profile advocate for new revenue tools in recent years was former city manager Peter Wallace, who fought the good fight and then decamped for more clear-headed pastures.

But most politicians know that bureaucrats, even those willing to speak truth to power, do not make a constituency. They may provide trenchant and compelling analysis and evidence, but they can’t deliver much in the way of political cover.

As I watched this year’s budget follies, I was struck by all the voices I didn’t hear. Indeed, I think it’s fair to say that most of the Toronto-focused civil society groups that offer up various views on municipal government were completely MIA, even though many of those advocates privately agree that the city is in the grips of a self-inflicted and steadily accelerating revenue crisis.

Let’s name names. The Toronto Region Board of Trade? Silence. Civic Action? Same. Likewise the United Way of Greater Toronto, BILD GTA, the Ontario Home Builders Association, the city’s powerful residents’ association networks (e.g., FONTRA), the hotel and restaurant lobby, arts and cultural umbrella organizations, the universities, etc., etc. Check out the list of people or groups who submitted letters or made presentations to the budget committee. Civil society was a no-show. Really, the only significant counter-narrative came from a research group at Ryerson that produced a timely report showing how the City of Toronto’s tax rates lagged those of most 905 municipalities.

I’m not so stupid as to think that all these organizations agree on the policy fixes. But absent an effort at finding and then promoting some kind of consensus — as happened a generation ago when the United Way, under Anne Golden’s leadership, pushed the city to adopt the poverty-by-postal code approach to understanding the geography of poverty – nothing will change.

It’s dead easy for Tory to ignore the progressive voices advocating for new revenue tools and fiscal stability. My hypothesis, however, is that he’d be more challenged to sideline groups elsewhere on the political spectrum. Indeed, they’re the ones that could deliver enough political cover for him to advance the sort of changes required to put the City of Toronto on a more sustainable financial footing.

In my view, the Toronto 2020 budget season should and indeed must begin now, and in particular among the city’s non-government organizations. They all know precisely what the problem is, and the gravity of the threat that it poses.

You know who you are. Start talking.

photo by Martyn (cc)

The post LORINC: How to reframe Toronto’s 2020 budget debate appeared first on Spacing Toronto.

Author:  Jeff Speck (Island Press, 2018)

When I reviewed Walkable City, the precursor to this book by Jeff Speck in 2013, I was in a much different place in my life. Living at the edge of transit, I was able to walk anywhere I needed, took the Skytrain daily to work or other appointments. I was an avid walker, and would do everything I could to walk wherever I needed, whenever possible. Fast forward six years (which in it of itself is a head spinning realization) and I now live on the vast outreaches of suburbia, where only those with a car survive. The commute time via transit from my home is a whopping two hours and thirty-seven minutes one way, and I now have a three year old, with another on the way. I can’t lose five hours of my day with them and my wife; it just isn’t feasible. I was lucky enough that I was able to purchase an electric car, to assuage some of my guilt, but I even felt it in my health and my weight as the step count started dwindling.

Luckily, at around exactly this moment, I was presented with the opportunity to review Speck’s newest book, Walkable City Rules: 101 Steps to Making Better Places, and it fits as a perfect successor to what was one of my all-time favorite books on urbanism. In Walkable City Rules, Speck has broken the book out into an admittedly arbitrary 101 steps spread across nineteen chapters. Each chapter selects a different urban planning issue and, within each issue, Speck highlights five more detailed aspects to focus on.

The book reads like a manual, and in fact, one of the constant comments Speck received after Walkable City was released, was that it would be easier for individuals and planners to have a source guide they could use to accompany them into committee meetings to prove their points. In Walkable City, the information was in anecdotal form, which was why it was easy to digest. What Speck has done with Rules is added that next step, where the layout and subject depth allow for real change to take place. He lays the roadmap and provides the tools for intrepid individuals to seek out their local planners and try to make an impact in their community.

There are sections such as Sell Walkability, Get The Parking Right, Let Transit Work, Make Sidewalks Right, and Start with Safety to name but a select few, and each one is no more than two pages of content. This allows the reader to get to the heart of the matter. Further to that, each item is numbered.  For instance, in the section Make Sidewalks Right, item 78 is Put Street Trees Almost Everywhere. This then leads to a two page spread on the value of protecting sidewalks with trees and the efficacy of doing so…..or not doing so as in the case on Orlando’s Colonial Drive where he states “compared [to] a segment of roadway with street trees and other vertical objects along it…the segment with no trees experienced 45% more injurious crashes and many more fatal crashes: six vs. zero”. He not only speaks to safety, but also to ecological and financial reasons for each rule, and it is this breadth of topic that allows almost anyone to use items no matter the pushback or argument.

There were certain sections of the book that even I took issue with. At times, Speck was able to sway me and others he wasn’t; the point being that he doesn’t need to convince everyone on everything. At the end of the day, there is more than enough ammunition for the engaged individual to make a case for almost any urban planning change one would like to see.

One often hears that starting a family changes one’s perspectives. This held true for my wife and I. We chose the location we did for the schools, both of which are walking distance for our children (elementary and high school). There are ample studies (including in this very book) about how walking to school positively affects a child’s health and mental wellbeing. However, as mentioned earlier, not all is positive. My wife and I have already planned a trip to council to discuss a number of challenging issues also referred to by Speck. For example, the street design promotes speeding despite the limits posted, there are no crosswalks in the immediate area (pedestrian controlled or otherwise), and there are no sidewalks on our side of the road. All of these items combined add up to a terrifying vision of our kids crossing the streets to get to school daily without any of these basic features.

But with Speck’s book in hand, we’ll sit down at our council meeting, we’ll meet with the planners and discuss what needs to happen. This is how change works, after all…..and this is what Speck is driving at. Walkable City Rules is meant to be solid guidebook for those interested in increasing the safety and ecological working of our streets, the financial bottom line of our cities budgets, and the health of its citizens. Speck has done all the above and more, and we are lucky to have him as our urban champion.

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For more information on Walkable City Rules: 101 Steps to Making Better Places visit the Island Press website. 

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Jeremy Senko is happily lost in the world of theoretical architecture and design. He is forever a student at heart, consistently reading, experiencing and learning about the world he inhabits. More specifically, he recently completed his Bachelor of Interior Design at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, where he pushed the limits (and the patience) of his professors.

The post Book Review – Walkable City Rules: 101 Steps to Making Better Places appeared first on Spacing National.

Cantonese opera is in my genes. Whenever my mother put me and my two younger sisters down for our afternoon nap, she’d crank up the turntable and play an eclectic range of recordings. I listened to classical music, tunes from Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, and Cantonese opera. The recent symposium, “Stories, Struggles and Song: Cantonese Opera in Toronto,” at the Richard Charles Lee Canada-Hong Kong Library, conjured up a flood of memories.

Developed over the course of 300 years, Cantonese opera features folk and historical stories that are dramatized with music, high-pitched falsetto singing, elaborate face painting, glamorous costumes, martial arts, acting, and acrobatics. These operas were not geared to elite audiences, but rather had a mass appeal as a treasured cultural pastime, particularly in the Cantonese-speaking villages of southern China, the place of origin of most early Chinese immigrants to North America.

Brought to Canada in the 1850s, Cantonese opera was central and vital to the cultural life of the Chinese community. This was the era of the so-called bachelor society, when the ratio of Chinese men to women, at its worst, was 280 to one. The extreme gender imbalance was the result of head taxes levied on Chinese immigrants from 1885 to 1923 that made it too expensive for men to bring their wives and children to Canada. The 1923 Chinese Immigration Act, in turn, banned virtually all Chinese immigration until 1947. There were few women, children, and families.

Within a short time, opera flourished in Vancouver and Victoria where Chinese audiences flocked to specially-built theatres, one large enough to seat 800 people. For four to five hours, the opera-goers were transported back to their homeland, escaping the daily drudgery of work, the unrelenting anti-Chinese discrimination, and the painful absence of their beloved families. As student Nina Zhou explained, “It [was] one of the few recreations available to Chinese immigrants in their spare time.” Cantonese opera provided “a hub for many early immigrants expressing their nostalgic longing for the homeland, as a way of preserving their own cultural identity, and as a relief from discrimination and exclusion in a totally strange and new cultural environment.”

With the support of the Shirley Hune 許佩娟 Chinese Canadian Oral History Fund, the significance of this music in Toronto’s early Chinese Canadian community is being studied in the University College Chinese Canadian Studies program under Professor Lisa Mar and research students Jonathan Wu, Nina Zhou, Ailin Lin, and Danielle Lim, who shared their findings from the oral history and archival material about this topic.

A primary resource is the sizeable Beatrice and Raymond Jai Collection, donated by their daughter Julie Jai. Her parents played an important role in the development of Cantonese opera in Vancouver and Toronto. Their photos, manuscripts, musical scores, performance programs, recordings, and other archival material, amassed from the 1930s to the ’90s, will be an important part of U of T’s newly launched Chinese Canadian Archive.

Accompanying violinist Raymond Jai plays for his wife, Beatrice. Beatrice and Raymond Jai Collection.

Cantonese opera slowly spread across Canada as the Chinese people moved eastwards from British Columbia. In Toronto, the first recorded performance took place in 1916; the first Chinese music group, World Mirror, was established in 1919. By 1935, there were three music clubs in Chinatown, including the Chinese United Dramatic Society and the Ship Toy Yuen Dramatic Society, both still active today. They not only fostered Cantonese opera by training local amateurs, but also by sponsoring touring groups from Hong Kong and China. Like the associations whose members shared a common surname or birthplace, these music clubs functioned as mutual benefit organizations. They provided welfare, employment, housing, financial, and other indispensable supports in the absence of settlement services that are in abundance today.

In Cantonese opera tradition, there were only male actors, some of whom played female roles. Even though mixed troupes became commonplace in Hong Kong and China by the 1930s, music clubs across Canada had to rely on men to play both male and female roles during the bachelor society years. My father, Doyle Lumb, arrived from China in the mid-1920s as Toronto’s music clubs were being established. He worked long hours at a restaurant and spent his days off, learning to sing, act, and play instruments. With his good looks, my father was readily recruited for female roles.

The Chinese United Dramatic Society had a 250-seat hall at 98 Elizabeth Street, just south of Dundas Street, for its performances. Other clubs were resourceful in taking advantage of the Sunday closure of Toronto businesses on the “Lord’s Day.” The infamous burlesque Casino Theatre on Queen Street West was rented for Cantonese opera, my father among the amateur actors.

From 1935 to 1945, many of these stage performances took an active role in raising funds during the Great Depression and for the war relief efforts throughout the Sino-Japanese and Second World wars. Off stage, music clubs sponsored parade floats for fundraising and community events. Their opera costumes added colour and fanfare to the festivities. The grandest parade in Toronto’s Chinatown was held to celebrate V-J Day in 1945.

A parade float, featuring legendary female warrior Mulan, was sponsored by the Chinese United Dramatic Society. The Toronto Armouries are in the background. Jean Lumb Collection. 1945(?)

After the war, Chinatown’s most popular art form was almost forgotten. Music clubs became less active as their membership declined. In the 1970s, however, a revival of Cantonese opera began in earnest with the advent of opera films and television, as well as the influx of immigrants from Hong Kong, including fans and professional opera teachers.

Jai remembered these years as a time when Cantonese opera was the “wallpaper of her childhood.” She grew up listening, watching, and performing with her parents for their Yeit Hoy Cantonese Music Club in Chinatown. After her parents passed away, she found that going through their music archives helped her better understand her own identity. She appreciates her mother and father’s significance in history and their “immense talent and effort to help Cantonese opera flourish in an environment where Chinese people were not always a welcomed minority.” She added, “It’s gratifying to see the change now in terms of people starting to appreciate things that we thought were really not part of the mainstream and therefore not important when I was a child. The contribution of Chinese Canadian opera performers is an important part of the diverse cultural heritage of Canada.”

The historical significance of Cantonese opera reaches well beyond Canadian borders. In 2009, UNESCO recognized it as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Guangdong Province, Hong Kong, and Macao subsequently committed long-term resources to build on the knowledge and skills of this centuries-old art form that has been passed on from generation to generation.

The afternoon program at U of T was rounded off with a story, inspired by and loosely based on the life of Gar Yin Hune (née Deer). Bernice Hune is an arts educator and storyteller with a vast repertory of traditional Asian folklore and tales from Canada’s history. Her sister is the donor of the Shirley Hune 許佩娟 Chinese Canadian Oral History Fund. They are the daughters of Gar Yin Hune, who was an actress in a Cantonese opera troupe that toured Canada in the late 1930s. Due to the outbreak of the war and despite the Chinese Immigration Act, she was allowed to stay behind in Canada. Bernice Hune held the audience spellbound with “Shoes for Suyin,” a tale about a young opera performer who joins a touring company and arrives in Canada during the Chinese exclusionary period.

Cantonese opera lives on as a popular cultural heritage among Chinese people around the world and as a medium to learn and understand Chinese culture. U of T encourages community members to contribute more documentation and oral history for its Chinese Canadian Archive.

“There’s really not a lot written about it Cantonese opera in Toronto,” observed Jonathan Wu, a U of T research student and the moderator of the symposium. “There’s still much more to tell and discover.”

The post Stories, Struggles and Song: Cantonese Opera in Toronto appeared first on Spacing Toronto.

Author: Weiss/Manfredi– Princeton Architectural Press (2018)

In considering the evolution of ecological, urban, and social infrastructures, we have been interested in the ambitions and unfulfilled promise of the architectural “mega-project.” We believe this legacy of modernism is a project with new potential to act at a scale commensurate with the magnitude and complexity of today’s challenges. In analyzing the components, processes, and motivations behind such large-scale works, points of reciprocity between disciplines and scales of operation have illuminated the potential for even the smallest project to serve as a catalyst for urban transformation.  

• Marion Weiss and Michael M. Manfredi

The present day architecture project operates on several scales, whether physical or social, and seldom is it the case that a building has the opportunity to tap into the epochal scale of a site. Similarly, as many urban sites in Europe and North America are presently undergoing remediation from their industrial past, the many new social spaces appearing upon them—where once were factories, canneries, and refineries—have been compounded by our current environmental conversations around rising sea levels, contaminated soil, and islands of floating plastic.

The scale of certain architectural projects, as is evident from Public Natures: Evolutionary Infrastructures —this new astonishing monograph from the New York-based architecture and landscape firm of Weiss/Manfredi —clearly demonstrates that architecture and landscape architecture have more than just the ability to heal a landscape scarred by industry: it can provide new, exciting spaces for social interaction, simultaneous with providing a buffer to the fallout of immanent environmental change.

For if there is a new buzzword for our age, it is resilience. How we think about how we are impacting our planet now can change the outcomes in the not too distant future. The four foot storm surge of Hurricane Sandy that hit parts of New York City only a few years ago prompted many local design firms to re-examine the ecology of the Manhattan shoreline, and several projects featured in Public Natures are the outcome of this firm’s concern for the growing need for building in resilience in the city’s public infrastructure.

As highlighted within the book, the founders of Weiss/Manfredi have realized the importance of our present moment, and how large infrastructure projects, like the ones their office have been working on, have the capacity to affect meaningful environmental change, while enriching the public realm with spaces for social interaction. The modern architecture project has been intrigued with the cross pollination of architecture, landscape, and infrastructure for some time, and many of the book’s contributors—including Kenneth Frampton and Preston Scott Cohen—often cite the influence of those like Le Corbusier and Paul Rudolph, whose master plans the modern movement continues to draw upon still.

Several projects are featured, but two in particular are standouts—the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, also the first to be featured in the book, as well as the study for the Don Lands in Toronto. With the former, a stunning full page aerial shot of the sculpture park is featured beside an old black and white “before” shot of the site, taken from a similar bird’s eye view. It as an opening salvo to the book, as is it clearly depicts how important these projects are for the modern city recovering from its Industrial Age hangover.

In addition to these two uber-projects, the firm’s work in Brooklyn and New York are nothing short of revolutionary, especially in regards to their ecological program. In both cases, the Brooklyn Botanical Park and Hunter’s Point South waterfront park are giving to the greater New York area a buffer for the next storm surge, as many would say it is not a question of if there will be one, but when. And in the case of the latter project, five thousand additional residences are anticipated in the area, with the park providing for the resilience such intensification requires.

There are currently several examples of how thoughtful architecture and landscape design have created meaningful benefit to a given city’s citizens—such as the gondola line above the comunas in Medellin, or the High Line going through the old meat packing district of Chelsea—the examples are numerous, and several of Weiss/Manfredi’s project fall into this category.

Out of the ten projects selected for the book, there is a little bit for everyone from everywhere—from Seattle to New York and Toronto. In addition to the descriptive texts, full page colour images and renderings, the book features a compelling exposition between the firm’s founders and several prominent voices, debating the merits of the mega-project and its place in the modern city. This is book-ended by a foreword from former MoMA director of architecture Barry Bergdoll, along with an interview with Kevin Frampton that Weiss and Manfredi conduct to talk about his 1999 essay “Megaform as Urban Landscape,” and the text from which they derive the title of their book.

As they note, “over a decade since that initial shot across the bow, Frampton continues revising and expanding his arsenal of exemplary forms as an anxious fortification of an argument that appears, perhaps by design, to be perpetually incomplete.” The interview than provides an optimistic note to end on, one in which we can say the modern architecture project will likewise never be complete, ever changing even before it is done, and always providing us with the hope that the negative impact the Anthropocene era will wreak can always be undone.

Such then is the reason for the necessity of thoughtful design, with Public Natures providing us with a window into one of our present age’s more thoughtful architectural and landscape firms: one willing to ask some tough questions, especially about where the rubber hits the road between architecture, infrastructure, landscape and art.

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For more information on Public Natures: Evolutionary Architecture, visit the Princeton Architectural Press website.

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Sean Ruthen is a Metro Vancouver-based architect and writer.

The post Book Review – Public Natures: Evolutionary Infrastructures appeared first on Spacing National.

Item: In a development application [download PDF] heard by the Etobicoke-York district committee of adjustment in late February, a builder proposed replacing an older bungalow with a triplex at 54 Westhampton Drive, a quiet street just south of the 401-427 interchange. While existing zoning bylaws permit triplexes in this area, Westhampton has no multi-unit homes, so the planning department ruled that the proposal offends the “prevailing” character of the street and the “established physical character of the stable neighbourhood,” citing provisions of Official Plan Amendment 320. — John Lorinc

If you care about how Toronto’s neighbourhoods should change, Official Plan Amendment 320 should be of great concern to you.

OPA 320 was passed by council in 2015 and approved by the province in 2016, but the policy was appealed to the Local Planning Approvals Tribunal (LPAT) by 57 groups. It primarily deals with how a larger property in a residential neighbourhood could be redeveloped. These parcels, which are unusual in size and not created from assembling smaller lots, are referred to as anomaly properties. They may be larger church properties with parking lots, an abandoned school site or a small local retail plaza.

But OPA 320 also affects so-called “Apartment Neighbourhoods,” where, for example, an owner of a larger apartment building from the 1960s or 1970s with surface lots, might wish to add townhouses or another apartment structure and put the parking underground.

As the Official Plan evolves, such anomaly sites could someday be developed with moderately higher densities than the surrounding properties. For example, in a neighbourhood of primarily semi-detached homes, you might find a blend of townhouses and semi-detached homes with a sprinkling of four-storey walk-ups. And under the 2006 Official Plan, all these forms were permitted in the so-called Yellowbelt zone, which includes all the low-rise residential Neighbourhoods.

OPA 320 has changed all that. It calls for the redevelopment to have exactly the same form of buildings and property sizes as are found the surrounding neighbourhood. What’s more, the larger properties that OPA 320 addresses are the ones that have the least direct impact on adjoining neighbours, as there would be fewer such impacts than on a smaller site. OPA 320 attacks and flash freezes the low-hanging fruit of neighbourhood intensification.

This shift is rather ironic. While the urban thinkers and some members of the public are asking the members of City Council and Mayor John Tory to address the housing crisis and find ways to add density in existing neighbourhoods, they may be unaware that Council had gone in the opposite direction. Indeed, the whole approvals process flew under the radar. The press and the public were almost universally unaware of it.

While OPA 320 was moving through the approvals process, public attention was more focused on the city’s laneway housing initiative. The idea captured people’s imaginations and the proponents are to be congratulated for its success. However, city planners have estimated that when the policy comes fully online, it may generate about 30 to 40 residential units a year – hardly enough to address Toronto’s housing crisis.

How did OPA 320 become City land use planning policy? Jeff Davies, a wise development lawyer, explained to me that the core issue in most local planning disputes — whether before a committee, council, or the Ontario Municipal Board — came down to whether a proposed development was compatible with the neighbourhood.

Through the planning consultants they hired to fight projects, the residents opposed to change in their neighbourhoods would define “compatible” as “the same as.” The developers’ planners countered by arguing that their projects could comfortably co-exist “in harmony” with the rest of the neighbourhood. The musical term “harmony” carried considerable meaning in these conflicts. A project that works harmoniously with its neighbours, like a harmony in music, may not be the same as what surrounds it (i.e., the melody). To illustrate, apply the question to a four-storey apartment next to a two-and-a-half storey single family home.

At the OMB (now LPAT), the hearing officer would generally agree that the appropriate definition of compatibility should be “similar, but not necessarily same as,” and so the project would be approved.

This happened at countless OMB hearings as it was a reasonable interpretation of the Official Plan. Yet residents intent on maintaining the status quo would be furious and demand that the councillor stop these projects.

OPA 320, by contrast, ensures that the “same as” definition will forever ensure that “stable” neighbourhoods will remain frozen in time. And councillors will get re-elected as their reward, even as they go through the motions of trying to find ways to add modest density to neighbourhoods.

After council passed OPA 320, it was instantly applied by the planning department, even while the matter was still under appeal to the OMB (later LPAT). Fifty-seven parties filed appeals. Most were property owners directly affected; they filed appeals even before OPA 320 had been passed by council. Others were residents’ groups and building industry representatives who questioned the merits of the policy. BILDGTA, the development industry lobby, put up a modest fight. But most builders affected by this policy were smaller infill developers who did not have the time or wherewithal to undertake such a fight. The press and the public were largely unaware or uninterested.

The appeals were completed last December. A private planner, David Butler, had been brought in to help mediate the issues, and LPAT has issued its decision. The affected property owners have agreed to individual settlements. The LPAT also considered the broader question: how the amendment will affect larger anomaly properties. The question of what constituted “prevalent” or “prevailing” forms of development was reviewed. Is it what is next door or down a block or two? In the end, the parties agreed to tinker with the wording to suggest that “prevailing“ may be interpreted more widely than what is immediately adjacent, and the LPAT accepted the negotiated settlement. With that, the Amendment was largely approved as originally passed.

Let us consider what will happen if a property owner today decides to propose a slightly higher density on their anomaly property. They would present their ideas to the planning department and be told that OPA 320 only permits what is prevalent in the area. If they decide to press the issue, the application will move through the approvals process with a negative report from the planning department. That means it will be turned down by the local community council and then city council at large.

If the builder decides to appeal the decision to LPAT, they will have a rude awakening. LPAT can only act on an appeal of a zoning bylaw or Official Plan Amendment if it finds that the bylaw or amendment is inconsistent with the City’s OP or other provincial policies. LPAT’s decision on OPA 320, accepted an uncontested planning opinion that OPA 320 is consistent with Provincial polices.

This is where the abolition of the OMB comes into the picture. The OMB was an independent tribunal that kept municipal officials accountable for their actions. Decisions were rendered based on evidence, planning principles, provincial planning polices and the municipality’s own official plan. It was part of a system of checks and balances.

The replacement LPAT system does not have nearly the same level of checks or balances. If an appellant today were to make the argument that OPA 320 is inconsistent with provincial policies and LPAT agreed (regardless of its earlier decision on OPA 320), the matter would be sent back to City Council – the same body that drafted and approved the original version.

How likely is city council to change its mind? The opponent in the hearing is now the judge. Who would go through such a circular exercise? Which infill builder will risk her capital on such an uneven playing field? Where is the impartial review body that could question the legislation on its merits?

Gone.

I believe OPA 320 could have been challenged on the basis that it is inconsistent with Ontario’s Growth Plan. Municipalities throughout the province have struggled for years to rise to the challenge of satisfying the Growth Plan’s intensification benchmarks. While the City might argue that Toronto’s Official Plan promotes intensification in around urban centres, such as North York city centre and downtowns, as well as along the Avenues, that defense isn’t water tight.

• The Avenues policy and earlier versions of it have been in place for several decades, yet it has not really delivered a significant number of mid-rise units along major arterials, as hoped. The economics of smaller mid-rise buildings has proven very challenging and prevented the wide-spread construction of this excellent mixed-use building type.
• Available land around the urban Centres is rapidly being redeveloped.
• Eighty to ninety per cent of Toronto’s OP map is designated as “Neighbourhood Residential,” i.e., subject to OPA 320. If some future growth does not go into these areas, where will it occur?

Before the OMB, such arguments may have had traction. It also had the power to turn aside Official Plan Amendments and rezonings that didn’t conform to provincial policies. LPAT does not have that power.

Council now reigns supreme. At last we have democracy. Or perhaps we have residents’ groups that control their local councillors, thus ensuring the everlasting “stability” of their neighbourhoods. Their motto could perhaps be “Once I enter, please close the door behind me so that someone with a little less money won’t be moving in.” Is that what they mean by “stability”?

The elimination of the OMB, in other words, cemented the status quo across the Yellowbelt. Unless Council reconsiders the matter, OPA 320 is now completely enshrined and protected by the original authors of this regressive policy.

I believe we need to step back and take a fresh look at these important issues.

photo by Gary Wood (cc)

George Popper is a Toronto architect

The post How city hall is keeping needed change out of ‘stable neighbourhoods’ appeared first on Spacing Toronto.

Thank Andy Yan for throwing yet another rock into the placid pond of our taken for granted assumptions. As someone who advocates planning and has called for the city of Vancouver to finally write a binding citywide plan for a decade, he rocked my world.

I was deeply disappointed but not all that surprised to read that, according to Yan, who is himself trained in urban planning, every planning effort the city undertook in the past 10 years has made things worse.

Neighbourhood plans for the West End, Marpole, and Grandview Woodlands, ostensibly produced to allow for the creation of more affordable housing, have done the opposite of what they intended. While land in the “unplanned” parts of the city went down by about roughly three per cent in the one year between 2018 and 2019, land values in recently re-planned areas went up by between five and 25 per cent! In one year!

This is nice if you own your home in these areas and want to cash out, but bad if you want to stay in your house and all that happens is your taxes go up. It’s even worse for renters, because your landlord is now getting taxed an extra couple hundred a month for just your unit, because their property just got assessed as if it was a 15-storey new condo. For years I have been arguing that spot zoning is wrecking this city, and it looks like these area plans have turned into the mother of all spot zones!

To make matters even more horrifying, everything within a five minute walk of the Broadway corridor between Commercial Drive and Arbutus Street also shot up by about 10 per cent in one year — suspiciously aligning with land within striking distance of the proposed new subway line. I guess it’s nice that some land speculators are able to grab all that taxpayer-funded value, but I can’t see rents going down along that corridor any time this century, nor do I think that the city can ever recapture land value increases that are already baked in a full decade before any trains rumble below ground.

Thanks TransLink. Thanks Vancouver Engineering Department. Thanks Vision Vancouver.

What can we do about this? Write our kids a cheque and send them off to Regina for a decent life? No? Well what then? Because any solution to this crisis is going to be hard and will call for us to entertain policy responses that we never imagined would be needed. There might be a lot of ideas out there to solve this crisis, and my own might not be the best. But one thing I know for sure. Business as usual leads to failure, and if you think that failure is not an option, then roll up your sleeves and pitch in.

My best idea is not to throw away planning but to plan for affordability, end of story. The basic goal for any citywide plan, stated by city council loud and clear, has to be the creation of decent housing for our wage earners (who for many of us happen to be our sons and daughters) and for those in need. Anything else is non-essential. All other issues, such as transportation, recreation, utilities, etc., need to be only viewed through the lens of housing for our people.

CoV Changes in Total Assessment Value prepared by Andy Yan. Published with his permission.

CoV Percentage Change in Total Percentage Value prepared by Andy Yan. Published with his permission.

This is not primarily about what kinds of buildings to place, and where. It’s about how can we use the policy levers we have at our disposal, as a city, to ensure that our goal is met. And what are the policy levers? Zoning my friends. Zoning and taxes.

Zoning

If we can all agree, based on Andy Yan’s statistical evidence and what we all know in our gut, that increasing allowable density only reduces affordability, then we should start by not increasing allowable density, anywhere, in the city.

Since we know that the city can increase land value with a stroke of the pen, we should wield that pen like a weapon — with care, precision and clear intent. The rule should be this. We only increase density anywhere in the city in return for social benefit.

We allow increases in return for a rock-solid assurance that a certain number of units, let’s say 50 per cent of them, are permanently affordable at 30 per cent of average wage or are social housing. This will not hurt existing land owners, it in effect freezes land values at their ludicrously high current levels. Simple, clean, no exceptions.

Taxes

Make the land component of our property tax progressive such that people who add units to their homes (we presently allow three units and only a small fraction of owners have taken advantage of this allowance) get a tax break, and those who sit on large parcels of land by themselves pay more. Thus we reward people for doing the right thing. Any extra revenue gets poured back into non-market housing to match federal and provincial funds for the same.

At the same time, we must reevaluate the uses of our present tax dollars. Our city budget is a reflection of our values. Right now it proves that we don’t value housing. We value police, fire, engineering and planning (roughly in that order) but not housing. We say we have a housing crisis. I don’t believe it if you don’t budget for it.

We actually have the tools to fix this problem in a way that nobody gets hurt and a lot of struggling people get helped. The above tools only attack land speculation and reward land owners who give back for social purpose.

Why not do it?

Unless someone comes up with a better idea I am buying my kids that bus ticket for Regina.

Plan on it. 

***

Patrick Condon is the James Taylor chair in Landscape and Livable Environments at the University of British Columbia’s School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture and the founding chair of the UBC Urban Design program.

The post Uh oh. I’m a Planner and Planning Makes Housing More Expensive appeared first on Spacing Vancouver.

Editor’s Note: Spacing is delighted to share the Walkcast podcast series out of Edmonton. Check out the latest episode today.

As Edmonton prepares to look at its snow and ice clearing policies, we catch up with two people who hope things change. Giselle General came to Canada from the Philippines. But, while many people told her how bad winter here would be, they didn’t tell her how to walk. Some interesting things happened as a result. In act two we talk with Bean Gill, who runs ReYu Paralysis Recovery Centre in Edmonton. Bean lost her ability to walk about six years ago. Rolling around in the snow has changed her perspective on where cities lose the plot on accessibility.

The post Walkcast: Why walking in winter sucks appeared first on Spacing Edmonton.

Spacing is pleased to co-sponsor “Right to Walk TO: Justice, equity, and the Toronto walking experience,” a panel discussion organized by Walk Toronto that explores walking – the love of it, our need for it, and its meaning – through a justice and equity lens. This event is a love letter to walking, as well as a critical look at the walking experience our city creates, from different perspectives.

The speaker panel consists of:

• Philip Cote, Young Spiritual Elder, Indigenous Artist, Activist, Educator, Historian, and Traditional Wisdom Keeper
• Nadia Halim, Longtime Toronto Walker and Walk Organizer, Host of the Podcast The Opposite of Lonely
• Daniella Levy-Pinto, Pedestrian Safety and Accessibility Activist

The format is brief presentations by the speakers followed by a moderated panel discussion and Q&A from the audience. We are delighted to have engaged as our moderator Zahra Ebrahim, Urbanist, Professor, and Human-centred Designer.

Event details:

Tue, 26 March 2019
7:00 PM – 9:00
Innis Town Hall
Innis College, University of Toronto
2 Sussex Avenue, Toronto
View Map

See the Eventbrite page for more information and to register. The event is free but registration is required.

The event is co-sponsored by the University of Toronto Urban Studies Program, University of Toronto School of Cities, and public space workshop.

The post EVENT: Right to Walk TO appeared first on Spacing Toronto.

WHAT: Spacing’s 15th anniversary issue release party!
WHEN: Friday, March 15th, 2019 — 7:30pm-midnight
COST: $5 (copy of new issue)
WHERE: Gladstone Hotel, 1214 Queen St W.
ACCESSIBILITY: The venue is accessible (more details)
RSVP: Let us know on Facebook if you’re coming

We are happy to announce the release of our 15th anniversary issue!

Back in early December (our actual 15th anniversary day) we launched Toronto 2033, a book that collects ten sci-fi short stories that imagine what life is like 15 years into the future.

The 49th edition of Spacing is the second part of our celebration — our editors and contributors explore a wide range of issues that will impact Toronto’s future: extreme weather, mega-projects, decolonization, and planning the Maple Leafs eventual Stanley Cup parade.

Join us at the Gladstone Hotel for a bunch of fun activities including your predictions for Toronto in 2033.

Subscribers will start receiving their copies soon. Pop into the Spacing Store to pick up an advance copy.

cover illustration by Mathew Borrett

The post Spacing’s 15th anniversary party! appeared first on Spacing Toronto.

In this episode, we look at housing from a number of angles.

Spacing Senior Editor John Lorinc and urban planner Cheryll Case give us the lay of the land, and a preview of their upcoming book, “House Divided.”

Planner and consultant Sean Galbraith tells us how City bureaucracy can lead to fewer affordable homes.

And Councillor Gord Perks walks us through what “affordability” really means.

Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play, or SoundCloud, or follow our RSS feed.

The post PODCAST: Spacing Radio 032, Housing Toronto appeared first on Spacing Toronto.

 Jackie Shane (b. May 15, 1940; d. February 22, 2019) is gone, and this time it’s true. I say ‘this time’ because after Jackie left Toronto in 1971 rumours of her demise abounded. ‘I heard she was murdered.’ ‘I hear she killed herself.’ The rumours persisted for years. Even some of those responsible for the more recent re-discovery and re-appreciation of Jackie frame her story as a murder mystery or horror film.

None of it was true. Jackie moved to Los Angeles and then back home to Nashville to look after her aging, ailing mother. More the dutiful daughter than tragic victim. So the question is, why the rumours in the first place, and why were we so prepared to believe them?

Queer and trans people of colour know the answer. It’s the difficulty we white people have in imagining black and trans lives outside the necropolitical narratives of pathology.

Rest assured this won’t happen in the wake of Jackie’s recent and real death. She made sure of it. In the dozens of interviews she gave over the past two years, Jackie, in her late seventies and larger than life, returned to centre stage to tell her story on her own terms. She was charming, wise, and unapologetic. No pathology here. So how will Jackie be remembered now?

A few weeks before she died, Jackie gave a final interview to Elaine Banks on CBC Radio. Talking about her decision to leave the Jim Crow South and come north, Jackie explained, and not for the first time in words with both geographical and gendered meanings: “One cannot choose where one is born, but you can choose your home.” She went on to say, “I chose Toronto. I love Toronto. I love Canadian people … [They] have been so good to me … We became real lovers.”

It takes nothing away from Jackie’s own experience of Toronto to nevertheless be skeptical about how white Toronto, both queer and straight, might use Jackie’s memories.

I worry that Jackie’s story will be conscripted as historical evidence for what, in the 2018 anthology Marvellous Grounds: Queer of Colour Histories of Toronto (edited by Jin Haritaworn, Ghaida Moussa, and Syrus Marcus Ware), contributor Kusha Dadui aptly names “the new underground railroad.” Just as the old underground railroad has burnished the myth of Canada as a promised land of racial tolerance and acceptance, the new underground railroad promotes the homonational fantasy of Canada as a safe haven for queer refugees and migrants. Come to Canada, where we will love you and be good to you. Except for when we won’t.

In the fall of 1961, a gay gossip columnist for a Toronto tabloid wrote, “Jackie Shane, the sepia songster …is back at the lively Holiday Tavern to the delight of the many fans she established in these parts during her last stint there several months ago.” During Jackie’s run at the Holiday in May, 1961, an LCBO inspector visited the tavern. He noted in his report that “the entertainment was provided by a colored group billed as Frankie Motley Orchestra featuring Jackie Shane. The group sang and played popular arrangements only.” In other words, they played neither too loud nor too black, at least not while the inspector was in the house.

Located at Queen and Bathurst, the Holiday was popular with black residents from the surrounding neighbourhood, and Jackie played there often. The chief inspector for the LCBO noted that “a negro called at my office to complain about being refused service at the Holiday Tavern.” Mr. Leroy W., the complainant, “felt there was discrimination at the Holiday on this occasion and other occasions when he had been in and they would not let him sit where he wanted.”

Jackie, of course, knew this history; she lived it. In 1968, a catty gay tabloid columnist commented, “Jackie Shane isn’t making the scene … as often these days as he (she, it) used to!” As Jackie told the CBC earlier this month, “at first, there were people who are ignorant and talk and talk and don’t know what they’re talking about. They were curious, but when they got to know me … we grew to love to one another.” Jackie added an important caveat: “I loved them first. I had to. I could not allow myself to be angry.” To love first, even in the face of racism and transphobia, was one of Jackie’s survival strategies. To remain angry would have been to burn out and thereby let ignorance win.

My brief sketch of Jackie and the Holiday Tavern are snippets from research I’m doing in the LCBO records at the Archives of Ontario and in the tabloids at the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives. This touches on a critical conversation currently underway among queer historians about the status and desirability of the archive. Noting that queer Toronto is “gripped by an outbreak of ‘archive fever,’” the editors of Marvellous Grounds argue that queer and trans people of colour are nonetheless often missing from the archive “as a direct result of policing … of exclusion, erasure, displacement and dispossession.”

Paradoxically, it’s also true that Jackie and many other people of colour turn up in the archives as a result of precisely that same policing, which is to say the over-policing by state agencies (like the LCBO) of the places where people of colour gathered. The tabloids also policed, patrolling the borders of Toronto’s emergent white queer community in the 1960s, racializing and minoritizing its ‘others.’

Resisting these archives, the Marvellous Grounds editors opt for a strategy of “counter-archiving,” a method that refuses induction in “an ever more colourful archive whose foundations remain firmly white.” Freed from archival collection and capture, queer of colour histories tend to be public and mobile.

We see something of this in the ongoing Myseum Toronto campaign, which last year plastered Jackie’s story on hoardings across the city and on ad space in TTC vehicles and subway stations. Vintage photos of Jackie flashed by as you rode up and down the Yonge line just as, 50 years before, Jackie worked the Yonge strip as her own ballroom runway. “Miss Shane was walking down Yonge street the other day in full drag,” a March 1963 tabloid reported. “She looked stunning in a beige coat and gray leotards. Her hair was beautifully coiffured and she wore sunglasses.” Jackie strolled “past at just about the time the Ryerson Collegians were finished for the day – I think she timed it.”

To take different example, during last year’s Nuit Blanche in Toronto, Ghanaian-born, London-based artist Harold Offeh curated “Down at the Twilight Zone,” a twelve-hour “living archive” installed on a loading dock. Decked out in homage to Jackie Shane, Offeh and guests such as DJ Nik Red of Blockorama fame, recreated the spirit of the Twilight Zone, the 1980s Toronto club described as “a gay-positive multicultural space … unique for the time and still rare today.”

This locating of history in urban space helps to make sense of why, as the editors explain, “Marvellous Grounds began as a mapping rather than archiving project.” However, it quickly became clear that there is “an unmistakable desire in QTBIPOC communities for history and lineage. Younger folks in the city crave elders, who are missing and dismissed from a white archive that passes itself off as ‘the queer history.’” To those younger folks, Jackie Shane awaits you.

For us white folks, I hear Jackie’s story not as an endorsement of the new underground railroad and white Canadian benevolence, but rather as an historical and archival call to action. We’ve no right to ask Jackie to bear her pain and anger for the benefit of our education. Instead, it is the responsibility of white queer historians to enter the archive and uncover our anti-black / anti-trans histories, and to own them. It is long past time for us to turn white archive fever into productive anger about the white archive.

Active in the Toronto queer movement for many years, Steven Maynard now lives in Kingston, where he teaches the history of sexuality at Queen’s University. He wrote the introduction, about Jackie Shane, to Any Other Way: How Toronto Got Queer, edited by Stephanie Chambers et al. (Coach House Books, 2017).

The post Jackie Shane and archive anger appeared first on Spacing Toronto.

Through his brief career as a city councillor and now as premier, Doug Ford has returned repeatedly to the fantasy that the private sector will happily pay for his rapid transit wish list. All those subways, he’s assured voters who can’t be bothered calculating the difference between a million and a billion, will somehow be financed by air rights, pixie dust and other levies paid by developers, who, we’re assured, will benightedly acquiesce to this shakedown operation with a higher moral purpose.

Of course, the business world has never, ever worked this way, and it’s not going to start while Ford is The Great Leader of the People’s Republic of Ontario. Exhibit A, interestingly enough, comes from Sidewalk Labs, whose leaked preliminary plans for the Port Lands includes an LRT network running in a modified loop along Cherry, Unwin, Commissioners and Bouchette streets.

“This is something that is on nobody’s realistic drawing board,” Sidewalk CEO Dan Doctoroff told The Toronto Star. “We would ensure it gets financed and all we want to do is get paid back out of the increase in value in terms of property taxes and developer charges that are only possible when that LRT gets extended.”

As it turns out, the storied private sector does, indeed, have terms for building transit. Strings are attached, and lots of them, including a curious configuration — a line across the shipping channel from the Hearn Generating Station and north on Bouchette — that hasn’t been bruited previously. Unnamed Tory officials, interestingly, heaped scorn on the scheme, deriding it as still-born.

Most of the public criticism about these leaked plans has centred on the utterly unsurprising expansion of the geographic scale, but we should focus a bit more on that promised LRT, the one that’s “on nobody’s realistic wish list.”

It’s worth noting, first of all, that Waterfront Toronto, the City and the Toronto Transit Commission completed a class environmental assessment for an East Bayfront LRT line back in 2010, which is to say, not recently. The engineering and technical issues associated with threading this second line into the Union Station streetcar loop are difficult and expensive.

As the EA document also suggests, the planning story ends more or less where Quayside and the Port Lands begin, which lends credence to Doctoroff’s claim about the orphaned status of this infrastructure. Moreover, while Trudeau government and Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals last March inked a hefty transit funding cost-sharing deal, which included funds for a waterfront LRT, there’s been not so much as a peep about the fate of this arrangement since the June election. But if the past is prologue, a Ford-led government will want nothing to do with funding LRTs.

Which leads me back to the City. It should be lost on no one that Toronto city council, for all the tedious remonstrances about an over-taxed citizenry, is more than capable of finding funds for expensive infrastructure projects – the Gardiner re-build and the Scarborough subway being the two choicest recent examples, with the latter expedited through an exceedingly modest property tax levy that — shockingly! — did not cause the sky to fall.

It also should be lost on no one that, from a strict return-on-investment point of view, both outlays would be regarded as little more junk bonds by any self-respecting portfolio manager. Extremely high project risk, low-to-no return.

A waterfront LRT, by contrast, is an almost sure bet. The East Bayfront/West Donlands/Port Lands area will be built out at the sort of medium- to high-densities that support rapid transit. No private vehicles will be injured or killed during the construction and operation of said transit, so we can already discount the rhetorical bullshit about the alleged St. Clair right-of-way “disaster.” Lastly, the investment will make the entire area far more attractive to all sorts of investors, not just condo developers. That conferred attractiveness gives the City and Waterfront Toronto additional leverage and revenues to fund amenities like affordable housing.

In other words, apart from the aforementioned issues at the Union Station loop, the operational risk on such a venture is almost nil. It’s like a savings bond.

There are, moreover, several solid historical examples of how investments in transportation infrastructure in advance of development have delivered enormous long-term returns of both the financial and city-building variety.

The St. Clair West streetcar line was built through farmer’s fields in the late 1910s and early 1920s, and immediately triggered a massive building boom. Same story, in two chapters, with the Bloor Viaduct, which initially opened up development east of the Don River beginning in the late 1910s and then allowed new growth into Scarborough in the 1960s, all because the city’s works commissioner R.C. Harris had had the foresight to rough in a subway tunnel under the bridge’s deck. In our era, both the Sheppard subway and the Eglinton Crosstown are attracting higher density re-development along both corridors, and the Finch LRT will do the same once it comes online.

Knowing all that backstory, it’s clear the City needs to be in firm control of the planning narrative. Sidewalk’s proposed alignment – e.g., along a bridge over the ship channel that doesn’t exist – shows how easily public authorities can abdicate their obligation to plan in the public interest by grasping for cash on the barrel head.

Correction: A more recently transportation servicing master plan environmental assessment [page 26], conducted by the City of Toronto and completed in 2017, does show a new lift bridge across the ship channel plus a potential transit corridor extending from the Hearn northwards to link up with a streetcar route that would traverse the Unilever site and link up with Broadview Ave.

So how to get there?

Step A: The City could borrow a page from York Region’s playbook and immediately allocate funds for the technical planning for a Port Lands LRT, even though the broader project funding is not settled. As Markham mayor Frank Scarpetti boasted on TVO’s The Agenda last week, York Region began the EAs for the Yonge Street subway extension up to Richmond Hill almost a decade ago. Why? Easy. To create bureaucratic and political momentum. And it’s worked.

Step B: Mayor John Tory and council should think hard about the future of that Scarborough subway levy, which, as I’ve written previously in this space, represents the one piece of fiscal leverage the city has in the upload “negotiations.” If the province wants to take on responsibility for funding subway capital expansion, it should take on the whole package, including the $1 billion from the special transit levy. Then, the city can redirect some or all of those funds to the waterfront transit line, which will generate long-term returns — in the form of property taxes and other development revenues — that will benefit the entire city.

Step C: If Tory is truly committed to the redevelopment of this part of the city, he or some noisy delegate should become a relentless and irritating champion of the investment needed for this project, in the way that Greg Sorbara did for the Spadina subway extension, the Fords did with Sarborough, and York Region stalwarts like Scarpetti and Bill Fisch have done for the Yonge extension.

These things don’t ever happen without advocates.

Indeed, that’s precisely the breach Dan Doctoroff decided to step into with Sidewalk’s LRT pitch. And let’s be honest: he and Team Sidewalk have read both the politics and commercial logic correctly. The City shouldn’t need to be told twice.

The post Ford, Sidewalk Labs, and all the moving parts on Toronto’s waterfront appeared first on Spacing Toronto.

E-commerce is driving the growth of the last-mile delivery industry, the step of delivery from distribution center to customer. Last-mile delivery is changing in cities around the world as delivery businesses begin to embrace innovative solutions in dense city centers, such as the shift to pedal-powered options.

Shift Delivery is one such growing business, based out of Vancouver. They are the first business in Vancouver to use electric-assisted cargo trikes to make around 4000 deliveries each month—including everything from office supplies to organic food boxes within the city. Ben Wells, the executive director of Shift Delivery, explained that triking is 30% more efficient than traditional delivery in the downtown core, mainly due to ease of parking. This is because City of Vancouver policies allow trikes to park on sidewalks, commercial loading zones, unregulated zones, and regular parking spots. Additionally, trikers are less likely to get caught in traffic jams than drivers, as they can use designated bicycle lanes.

Wells explained that, as a workers cooperative, the aim of Shift Delivery is to provide good jobs over profit. However, at the time of the interview, around 75% of employees were not owners, and employees were paid significantly less than last mile delivery employees using motorized transportation at unionized workplaces such as Canada Post or Staples Business Depot.

I spoke and rode around with Sandra, a trike rider who works at Shift Delivery, to learn about the experience riding the trike. Through this, I learned how transportation professionals can design and improve infrastructure to make their jobs easier, and correspondingly encourage investment in this type of zero-carbon, same-day delivery.

There are a few major differences between delivery trikes and regular bicycles. Their physical and functional uniqueness results in very specific challenges for the people riding and sharing the road with them. Firstly, the obvious: Trikes are wider, taller, and heavier (carrying up to 300 kg). This means that trikes would do more damage than a traditional bike in a collision with a pedestrian or another cyclist. However, Sandra explained that often it is necessary for trikes to use shared pedestrian pathways to get into buildings,

“On a bike you can kind of be on the crowd, but on a trike we need more space. But, sometimes [shared pathways are] the only option to get up to a building.”

Their size, and safety features such as braking and turning lights, make trikers feel more legitimate taking up a full lane of road than they would on a bicycle. But their maximum speed of 28 km/hour means that on some urban roads the bike lane is the safest and most practical place to be to avoid holding up car drivers, who will sometimes make dangerous maneuvers to get around a trike. Therefore, the geometric design of bike lanes within the city is important. In Vancouver, minimum bike lane widths that can accommodate trikes aren’t always used, and obvious left turning options aren’t always available. According to Sandra, intersections are a key area that can be improved,

“Sometimes being stuck in a protected lane prevents you from getting into an intersection to make a left turn.”

A cargo trike fills up the entire side of a bi-directional bicycle lane on a well-travelled route in Vancouver.

Making transportation infrastructure more inclusive to diverse city users will also have a positive impact for people riding trikes. Sandra suggested that the needs of trike users are often similar to people with disabilities, children, and seniors. For example, trikers often use accessibility buttons to open doors when they are carrying heavy packages. They also use the drop down curbs to move their trike on the sidewalk.

Future legislation may limit the bicycle lane to vehicles that require pedalling to move forward, explained Jeff Leigh from HUB Cycling. According to Jeff, there is a broader shift of mentality in bicycle planning to accommodate the thousands of commuter cyclists in Vancouver. “We used to think about bike lanes as a certain width so that the handles didn’t hit [the edge of the lane]. Now you have to consider overtaking. Now you’re looking at daily volumes. Lane widths are going to be governed by bicycle traffic flow.”

While Jeff doesn’t think that Shift’s professionally trained trikers are creating problems in the bike lanes, he foresees a future where the trikes are excluded from bicycle lanes due to their throttle mechanism.

In summary, there are a few things that designers and transportation professionals can do to incorporate a future with a growing number of delivery trikes.

1. Consider the width of a Trike (approximately 1.2 meters) when deciding the width of the bike lane
2. Create bike boxes at intersections with left turning.
3. Turn car parking space(s) into a trike/bike parking and loading zone
4. Consider street and building accessibility for people with different abilities, children, and seniors.
5. Build bicycle infrastructure along direct routes in the city.

If you’re interested in learning more, think about doing a ride-along with a trike courier. As Sandra put it,

“Getting to be out there on the bike routes and travelling around the city on wheels is fun!”

***

Sylvia Green (@yourcitymotion) is a Plangineer, active transportation researcher, and community organizer. She has worked on infrastructure, transportation, and research projects in Canada, the United States, and Norway.

Sylvia wrote this article before she began working at the City of Vancouver. The views expressed in the article are the author’s own and do not reflect the views of the City of Vancouver.

The post Designing streets for a new kind of delivery vehicle appeared first on Spacing Vancouver.

Community Housing for Resilient Communities
WHEN: Monday, April 01, 2019 – 3:00 pm – 6:00 pm
WHERE: Victoria Conference Centre, Sannich Room (at Level One), 720 Douglas Street Victoria
ADMISSION: The event is free for the general public, but RSVP is required due to limited seating (150 people). Register here. 

Community Housing for Resilient Communities is a rare public event that features nine speakers from the community housing sectors of British Columbia and Quebec. They will share their inspiring stories about how they are acting to increase local control of urban land development to ensure our communities remain inclusive,diverse and resilient through development of housing as community-owned assets.

At this TED-talk formatted event, each speaker will discuss how they got involved with the community housing sector, demonstrate the innovation of their respective organizations and provide insight about how they hope their work will benefit not only the residents in the buildings of their organizations but also the broader community.

This event is part of the Canadian Housing and Renewal Association’s 51st National Congress on Housing and Homelessness. It is being put on by BC Housing, the Real Estate Foundation of BC, Vancity, CMHC and CHRA.

The event is free for the general public, but RSVP is required due to limited seating (150 people).

***

Find out more about the Community Housing for Resilient Communities event here.

The post RELEASE: Community Housing for Resilient Communities, April 1st appeared first on Spacing Vancouver.

A series of exposés in recent days, in both The Toronto Star and the National Observer, revealed that Sidewalk Labs has retained a small army of lobbyists to sell what looks like a high stakes and very political quid pro quo deal: the Google subsidiary will finance the LRT and other high-tech infrastructure in several precincts in the Port Lands in exchange for a generous cut of future property tax growth, development charges revenue, and the freedom to design a smart neighbourhood and technology test-bed.

This, it would seem, is Sidewalk’s long-anticipated business model. (The company responded to the stories by saying the leaked plans aren’t finalized.) These revelations remind us to pose hard questions about how we got here and where we’re going next, including if we’re going anywhere at all with Sidewalk Labs.

There’s a lingering question from the beginning of this saga that demands an answer. In a January 2018 staff report, the City wrote: “The Framework Agreement between Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs was not shared with governments prior to the Sidewalk Toronto announcement”. How is it possible that an agreement of this significance wasn’t shared with the three levels of government represented through the Waterfront Toronto board? This is a problematic and possibly instructive fact that has been normalized by the passage of time but shouldn’t be.

How will the MIDP be assessed?

Fast-forward to today and the upcoming Master Innovation and Development Plan (MIDP), the final deliverable of this $50 million USD process. It will be hundreds of pages long, full of details about concepts that have been shared at public meetings. Judging by what’s transpired so far, the plan will likely be a wedge for privatization and governance in a range of areas. The MIDP will likely try to make Sidewalk’s approach palatable through job creation claims, a familiar lobbying tactic to anyone that knows the innovation sector. The tall timber piece plays heavily into this pitch.

In a recent op-ed in Spacing, councillor Joe Cressy, who is Mayor John Tory’s designate on the WT board, wrote: “I vow to see that the public’s interests are thoroughly protected as we review all aspects of the proposal for Quayside. Jane Jacobs used to say that communities have a right to say `no’ to things that are going to harm them, but a responsibility to say `yes’ to things that will help. That’s how I’ll approach the Sidewalk Labs debate.”

In the Star on Saturday, Cressy seemed to up the ante: “We have set out an objective to transform 12 acres of publicly owned real estate into a livable, affordable, sustainable neighbourhood. That needs to be done in a way that is not only appropriate but financed in a way that is in the public interest, not in the most convenient manner possible…We have the absolute right as the city and Waterfront Toronto to say no if we aren’t satisfied with the deal.” (Under the Plan Development Agreement released last July, WT’s board can seek to have any of its three government shareholders approve the MDIP.)

The thing that neither Councillor Cressy nor Mayor Tory talk about, however, is that the plan is not going to be made public immediately upon submission to WT. WT is going to review it with the three levels of government to suggest edits before Sidewalk Labs finalizes it and shares it with the public this summer.

So the fix is essentially in. WT and the governments can correct what they perceive as any major problems with the plan before it goes public, again helping obfuscate what Sidewalk Labs’ is seeking to do, again blending the role of Sidewalk Labs the corporation and Waterfront Toronto the public steward.

Setting that process flag aside, here’s another one: WT says it will use metrics related to categories laid out in the original request for proposals to assess the plan: job creation and economic development; sustainability and climate positive development; housing affordability; new mobility; and urban innovation. But WT officials are grading their own homework. Agency officials and all levels of government have been providing input on the plan all along, how could they now be independent enough to assess it critically?

According to University of Toronto criminologist and urban law expert Mariana Valverde, the development of this plan falls short of the norms and laws used by world-leading smart cities. “In the Toronto case, the tail is wagging the dog in a way that European cities would consider completely illegitimate and dysfunctional.”

In terms of the City’s formal assessment of the plan, the buildings, urban realm and transportation will either be made to conform to existing municipal regulations and master plans and policies or there will be a process to follow regarding exemptions. The City will do that job and do it well. This isn’t the problem.

Rather, the problem is a regulatory vacuum and questions about the RFP. Toronto residents didn’t ask for this financing scheme, nor did they ask for a test-bed neighbourhood. Where in the approvals process will the lack of social license for this project be discussed? The framing of the approvals process skips this fundamental question entirely.

What’s more, the approvals process won’t trigger an assessment of a wide range of potential liabilities that the City is taking on with this test-bed. What’s problematic about Cressy’s pledge to closely review the MIDP is that he (and others in government) talk as though there is already some well-developed regulatory assessment for this type of project. There isn’t.

We don’t have a system of democratic governance for projects where technology is deeply integrated into the physical environment. Toronto doesn’t have democratically informed and up-to-date guidance for municipal digital infrastructure, which might include policies on data governance, digital rights, procurement, hardware (such as sensors), intellectual property, sustainability metrics, and more. And not just as they relate to personal data, but all kinds of different data, data that would be used to assess environmental and resilience initiatives as well as infrastructure.

“Digitization adds a layer to all of our existing relationships, the Quayside project isn’t a regular development contract,” says Sean McDonald, co-founder of Digital Public: “Consider the way land titling evolved to include mineral, water, and air rights as advances in technology and law made them exploitable. What’s the digital equivalent – and how are we making those decisions?” There are no established accountabilities for public and private actors in this context.

Sidewalk Labs and the City may say there is time yet to create policy, but Sidewalk Labs should not be at the table influencing those discussions as they’ve been doing on other fronts already through their lobbying activities with all levels of government. Sidewalk Labs should not be co-authoring Toronto’s digital infrastructure policy. Trading air rights may be standard business in the Manhattan land deals Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff built his career on. But as his domain expands into the digital/smart infrastructure realm, are public authorities going to enable the regulatory capture that the tech sector excels at, where governments let the rules be dictated by the beneficiaries, in this case Sidewalk Labs?

Where do we go now?

Rather than attempt to evaluate a plan against criteria that don’t really exist, we can ask a more political question: should we just shut this project down? Along with a test-bed no one asked for comes an under-discussed moral question for this city and its residents: Does Toronto want to be the enabler population for more Alphabet products to be created and sold to city governments globally? Does Toronto even want to be party to profits from Alphabet products? Though as a recent piece on intellectual property points out, even that proposition may be faulty. To be clear, there is no public plan for this yet, but the prospect of WT sharing in IP development wealth has been discussed and normalized without serious debate.

As the Star’s exposé indicated, it’s only a matter of time before pilot projects are launched outside Quayside. The water will keep getting warmer, and issues will slip past our under-developed regulatory and policy filters. WT still has time to stop this particular project and hit re-set.

What have we learned?

In contrast to its previous planning processes, WT allowed a corporation bidding to build on public land the right to run a public engagement process while providing little transparency regarding business plans and infrastructure, and inadequate opportunities for residents to solicit questions or express concerns. Sidewalk Labs, moreover, has held closed door meeting with unnamed individuals Doctoroff has described as the “academic, business, civic, and cultural leadership of this city.”

The process has been out of step with how progressive cities around the world are approaching tech-enhanced districts. As Anthony Townsend, author of Smart Cities and a leading expert on the topic, has said, “Most cities are exploiting the ability for technology to bring more voices more frequently into planning discussions, especially to weigh the new and complex tradeoffs posed by digitalization. Sidewalk’s efforts in Toronto seem to be heading in the other direction.”

If Sidewalk’s deal does end up going sideways, as the provincial government has threatened, we should learn four key lessons from the botched process we’ve witnessed since October, 2017.

Consult first, then procure: If residents want a living lab or a test-bed, they need to agree to it and set the terms before vendors are involved. Have all the digital infrastructure and digital rights policy in place for a proper regulatory approvals process.

Make small scope procurements: This deal’s omnibus structure should have been cut into several smaller specific pieces, whether for financing or anything else.

Require governments or government agencies run public consultations. Vendors cannot be invited to use them for marketing and public relations.

Make tall timber and other low-carbon features a requirement on the next go. The ideas aren’t proprietary and Waterfront Toronto can get the jobs and industry off the ground if they want to.

Bianca Wylie is a technology advocate and a writer. You can follow her on Twitter @biancawylie

The post Did the Sidewalk Labs plot just thicken, or is the story coming to an end? appeared first on Spacing Toronto.

Via StreetFilms:

In 2015, the newly elected city government of Oslo, Norway, announced its intention to make the downtown car-free by 2019. I immediately put it on my list of places to check out for Streetfilms. Last fall I made the trip, not knowing exactly what I’d find.

There are a number of reasons Oslo is looking to shift away from driving and get cars out of downtown. It is one of the fastest growing cities in Europe, and leaders see more efficient streets and transportation as essential to managing this growth. But the biggest factor is that air quality in Oslo and many places in Norway is deteriorating. In winter, especially, air pollution from diesel vehicles can reach dangerous levels and keep vulnerable children and seniors restricted indoors.

Oslo already has car-free blocks and car-light pedestrian zones that are full of people even late at night. And I knew it was a good sign when I stepped off the bus from the airport and immediately stumbled upon construction of a new rail line. But to make such a large area car-free entails going above and beyond a few projects here and there — it takes a comprehensive strategy.

So Oslo is working toward its goal on many fronts. The city has been aggressively removing car parking, for instance, and by the end of 2017, expects to no longer have any on-street parking in the city core. Off-street parking is also being addressed — all new developments are required to be car-free.

Ruter, the local transportation authority, plans to absorb all travel growth with buses, trains, and trams in addition to shifting some current car trips to transit. Car-share services are beginning to proliferate as more people go without a personal motor vehicle. Oh, and there’s this nifty plan to help people pay for electric-assist cargo bikes!

Bike lanes are getting built or upgraded throughout the city. You won’t find ample, Copenhagen-style protected bike lanes yet, but the on-going removal of car parking is clearing space for many wide, red curbside bike lanes. Despite the lack of true protection they feel safe, and unlike in the U.S., you will not find cars parking in them. Over four days, I probably could count the number of cars I saw blocking a bike lane on one hand.

The city’s bike-share, Oslo Bysykkel, has recently been completely overhauled with more stations, better bicycles, and a more convenient user interface. You can unlock your bike by smart phone as you approach the station, just take it and go.

Will Oslo’s city center go completely car-free by 2019? Momentum is certainly on the city’s side. So sit back and take in these scenes of a city making ambitious changes to its streets, as well as interviews with public figures like Oslo Mayor Marianne Borgen, who discusses why reducing the footprint of cars is so important to the future of her city. I hope you enjoy watching this Streetfilm — I think it carries important implications for other cities around the world.

The post Video Vancouver: Oslo – The Journey to Car-free appeared first on Spacing Vancouver.

By Cameron MacLeod

There’s been significant discussion on changing the regional transit org chart recently. Unfortunately, this hasn’t been accompanied by a realistic discussion of operating budgets and the costs of ongoing maintenance—equally high priorities.

Moving name plates on offices and expanding the HR team will not result in improved transit for riders. Any talk of “uploading” should wait until municipal and provincial leaders show they’re serious about tackling more urgent needs, because every day of “discussion” and “negotiation” is another day of construction cost inflation, crowded platforms, and increased maintenance needs.

It’s common to imagine an innovative hack to solve our transit woes, like claims that autonomous vehicles, hyperloops, and waterfront monorails will replace high-priority mass transit. Simple geometry shows they cannot. Our transit challenges are simply about money: to build, maintain, and operate.

The TTC spends $1.4 billion per year to keep its immense interconnected system functioning. Elevators, escalators, buses, streetcars, trains, and pavement all compete for those funds, but no politicians hold photo-ops with fresh pavement or re-covered bus seats. This creates a bias toward building shiny new stations over proper maintenance of the existing system.

Last month a TTC report laid bare the problem: they need $33 billion in the next 15 years for capital spending, but they only have about $10 billion. Significantly, over 75% of the need is just for State of Good Repair to maintain current operations: it won’t expand the system or even add legally required elevators.

The operations funding picture is also troubling. The TTC spends $1.8 billion per year operating their integrated services. 70% of the money comes from the farebox—the lowest subsidy rate in North America. Small ridership interruptions trigger budget cutbacks and service reductions, leading to less-frequent and less-reliable service, further reducing ridership. Without predictable revenue stream, every budget is a Council negotiation.

TTC Highway 407 Station Platform (Photo: Timothy Hutama)

Counterintuitively, system expansion makes the TTC’s budget more difficult, as new service requires more subsidy. The extension to York University and (at the insistence of the provincial government) Vaughan carries two-thirds the ridership of the King streetcar. It serves York well, but it also costs the TTC an additional $30 million annually. Nearly half (about $12 million) is for operating costs outside the City of Toronto (which the City has to cover).

The new provincial government promised to add $160 million per year to the TTC’s capital plan. It sounds like a lot, but it isn’t.  Over 15 years it’s just $2.4 billion, only about 15% of the $16 billion of unfunded subway-related work required.

Some argue an org chart change – a multi-year process, as complex integrated contracts and relationships are split, and new overhead and red tape are added – would bring more financial resources to the table. But these resources are not targeted at protecting the existing system. MPPs are interested in suburban expansion possibilities in their ridings, but not increased provincial taxes to support existing service.

Moreover, Metrolinx has no experience running a subway, or indeed running local “last-mile” transit at all. As the GO network developed, it has favoured parking garages over local integration, reinforcing car ownership. They also have no experience with a system as large and complex as the TTC: their hub-and-spoke model requires riders to visit Union Station for most connections. Metrolinx is a small provider – it carries fewer passengers per day on all its GO buses and trains than the TTC’s streetcars alone.

Finally, whatever resources might be on offer, they should not be considered transparent or predictable. While Toronto is familiar with poor transit decisions made publicly at city council, Metrolinx and Queen’s Park make their transit decisions behind closed doors, often by ministerial fiat, without even the opportunity for public deputations.

And the decisions leave a lot to be desired. The province has:

• forced Scarborough to accept experimental Line 3 technology under threat of funding cuts;
• removed the Relief Line from provincial plans;
• filled in the under-construction Eglinton West subway;
• forced the TTC to accept PRESTO under threat of funding cuts;
• approved a subway extension to the Minister of Finance’s riding;
• created a high-cost, low-ridership airport rail link;
• campaigned in a byelection to convert a fully-funded 10km seven-stop light rail line to what is now planned to be a single subway stop at over twice the cost, while reducing their funding commitment;
• approved a GO station in the Minister of Transportation’s riding; and
• converted a popular GO Kitchener line express train into an earlier, slower trip.

Given the challenges we face, and the province’s record of backroom deals, cost increases, hidden reports, refusal to provide sufficient and predictable funding, and partisan meddling with routes and stations, uploading is the very opposite of what the GTHA needs. Metrolinx should be downloaded, for its own protection.

Cameron MacLeod is the Executive Director of the transit advocacy group CodeRedTO.

The post CodeRedTO Op Ed: Does Toronto transit need an upload? Or a download? appeared first on Spacing Toronto.

A new piece of public art has been added to Toronto’s public art landscape, one that seeks to comfort, cajole, and seduce. This new piece is Shary Boyle’s ceramic sculpture Cracked Wheat, which greets passersby in front of the Gardiner Museum. Boyle has worked in a variety of mediums, including sculpture, performance art, overhead projection, painting, and drawing. Her art is often fanciful and probing, creating creatures and images that are both oddly familiar and remarkably alien. This pairing of the familiar, fanciful, and cosmological in Boyle’s oeuvre disrupts both metaphysical and political boundaries.

In her new piece, Boyle creates a historical palimpsest using a variety of ancient and modern traditions from around the world. In the artist’s statement, Boyle deconstructs the different methods and artistic traditions at work in Cracked Wheat. While the gold cracks serve as an homage to the 16^th century Japanese tradition of Kintsugi — the art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer mixed with powdered gold — the Canadian Wheat pattern offers a nod to a mass-produced tableware design popular in 1960s Canada. The polished bronze of the sculpture’s legs refer to the 18^th century tradition of ormolu and the flask — the body of the work — was inspired by early Renaissance alchemical drawings.

I had the chance to interview Boyle about Cracked Wheat and her playful, subversive style.

Sarah Ratzlaff: It almost feels like public art is in stark contrast to ceramics because ceramics are so often placed in domestic settings, whereas public art is very exposed. I was wondering how this change of setting influenced your conception of the work and its creation.

Shary Boyle: Because the Gardiner is a ceramics museum, I think they had a requirement that the piece consist of about 80% ceramic cladding. Ceramics are not typically an outdoor material in Canada, particularly because of our extreme climate. Extreme temperatures cause expansion and contraction in the materials, which causes them to crack. So this was an amazing material challenge that the Gardiner proposed to the artists. Materially, I actually reference colloquial tableware in the piece itself, and the history of a Canadian vernacular of affordable tableware.

SR: Did you make that decision because it was going to be a work of public art?

SB: Yes, I did. With public art you really want to consider the institution you are responding to. The Gardiner has a really fantastic international collection of ceramics from all around the world. However, they don’t have any vernacular ceramics, and that would just be how you speak about everyday, common ceramics that you find in the home. Instead, the Gardiner either has objects of great historic significance or great ritualistic significance, really high-end, expensive, exquisite collectable objects, something for a certain class of monarchy. I wanted to talk about ceramics in general in a very local way, in the same way that most people have a day-to-day relationship with them. I wanted to make something approachable…something a little more common. I wanted to give it a humanistic feeling.

SR: While you have this local aspect to the work, you also take from this huge variety of traditions from all over the world. So in some sense it’s the local and global all interwoven in this one piece.

SB: Yes. I also wanted to use this decal wheat symbol, which was another common decorative tradition in Canada during a certain time. Canada was primarily settled through agriculture, and agriculture and wheat are frequently associated with the Canadiana. But we often forget that wheat is one of the main food sources in the world internationally, so I wanted to also reference wheat as this basic, universal thing. Canada was first settled by Europeans and then people from all over the world, and I wanted to make something inclusive and approachable that many people would associate with Canada.

The crackedness of the piece is also really important to me — the fact that the piece isn’t whole but that it’s been broken. It has a lot of politics in that for me. As an artist I am unable to use a symbol of Canada without referencing the colonial impact and the breakage, and this idea of the nation being deconstructed, our kind of idea and ideals being deconstructed.

SR: I found the shards really interesting as well. You mention the piece itself as being history on legs, because you have so many different layers of traditions in the work. I think you can look at the shards as symbolizing history in one of two ways: one in a positive sense and the other in a negative sense. On the one hand, history is constructed and therefore vulnerable to rupture, and that’s a positive thing because other histories can come to the fore. But you can also look at the breakage as the broken history of people who have been subjugated.

Along that line of thought, I was wondering if you feel that ceramics as a medium has a certain power to express history or historical narratives.

SB: I think so, because it is an organic material that is still connected to minerals and soil, and that is just very obviously symbolic of the earth, right? Ceramic is the first synthetic material that humans ever invented, and with the use of heat it was created in a sort of alchemical way. So ceramics are ancient. It’s one of the very first substances that humans made art and functional ware from, so of course it has a lineage in every culture.

SR: It’s interesting that you mention the alchemical, because in other interviews you’ve also brought up alchemy in relation to ceramics. I think this is an incredibly poignant word because you are in a sense quite literally engaged in alchemy — you take one substance and turn it into something that looks radically different. Could talk about the role the alchemical plays in your work?

SB: There is a reference to certain alchemical drawings in Cracked Wheat in that early alchemical drawings in the Renaissance would often feature images of a flask with arms or legs or a body emerging from it, almost referring to the body as a vessel, as well as transformation. In fact, the person who is credited for cracking the recipe for porcelain in Europe was an alchemist, and also kind of a con artist. So alchemy is always part of the story in my mind, especially when I think of porcelain, which is the first kind of clay I used when I worked in ceramics. I’m of European descent so working with that kind of material is appropriate, because it is the kind of clay and material I was initially interested in and it’s what I encountered in my working class home.

SR: Another striking motif is the act of combining together different species and entities, like in your sculptures Loony Tunes and The Dandy Widow, for example.

SB: There is a bit of that. The zoological thing isn’t that interesting to me specifically, it’s maybe just about not observing proper boundaries. Not being interested in the discretion between two different arenas that people usually consider separate. Whether it is life and death, or childhood and age, or animal and human, or plant and animal, or night and day, or space and earth, or water and land — those are all sort of things that people categorize and make distinct. I just don’t feel that the boundaries between them are that strict for me. There is also kind of a politic in that because ignoring those distinctions is kind of an equalizer. My work has often been described as dark or creepy or grotesque or frightening or unsettling….

SR: But on the other side of that there is a real playfulness in your pieces

SB: Yeah, especially with this piece for the Gardiner I was very interested in making something that was funny and tender and kind of approachable for the completely uninitiated. I feel like the streets are so hard and cold, and Toronto is even known as a city that is not that friendly. Ceramics are also often seen as very stuffy and boring for people — people may not be that interested in exploring what the history of ceramics has to offer. Using humour can really be a way to seduce people into stopping and reconsidering subjects that might be more complicated. If you give people something fierce and hard then people might just avoid it. There are many ways that you can seduce as an artist. Humour is one way, beauty is another, sexuality too. And then you can plant the seed of other deeper ideas through that.

SR: I have a theory that whenever life and death are paired together it is inevitably presented in a way that is playful, like, for example, in magical realism. The topics do not become less horrific or upsetting in this form of presentation, but they are still somehow playful.

SB: I wonder if playful too is just another word for saying celebratory or joyous, because playful is like celebrating life. That’s what children do, right? They are so alive because they are just playing; there is no goal or purpose for what they are doing. They aren’t being productive in society, they are just activated with energy and that playing is for it’s very own sake. When you are thinking about death it makes you aware of the brevity of life and the preciousness of life and the extraordinariness of life, so it doesn’t surprise me that playful humour and electric energy would be associated with death, because it’s just the other side of the coin.

Sarah Ratzlaff is a recent graduate from the University of Toronto with an interest in the philosophy of art and public spaces. Follow her on twitter @ratzlaff_sarah or email her at ratzlaffsarah@gmail.com

The post Alchemy at the Gardiner Museum appeared first on Spacing Toronto.

As the province contemplates major structural change to Toronto’s transit system, I want to offer London’s rocky history with transit governance as a cautionary tale.

It is a favourite pastime in some transit circles to compare Toronto to London. For example, John Tory has compared his SmartTrack plan to the London Crossrail project, and even made a special trip to London on this premise.

He wasn’t referring to the fact that Crossrail is at least two and a half years behind schedule so far, or that it’s been refinanced several times and is now £2 billion over budget, or that he thinks SmartTrack’s relative handful of potential riders compares to a line that will carry 1.5 million additional riders.

It is true they are both rail projects. Although, if we are being precise, SmartTrack is a station project, not a rail project.

I digress.

One area in which I think Toronto should aspire to be like London is in its transit agency, Transport for London (TfL). I’ve written elsewhere about how I admire its comprehensive oversight of mobility, and its ability to regulate and coordinate not just trains and buses, but cars, taxis, cycling and the pedestrian realm.

More than that, however, because TfL is an agency of the Greater London Authority, TfL is a good solution to the complexity of coordinating mobility across many jurisdictions within a metropolitan area the size of Greater London.

We are moving in the opposite direction. Metrolinx is not TfL. The subway upload will not create anything like TfL. Rather, they are the disaster that preceded it: Margaret Thatcher’s London Regional Transport (LRT).

Margaret Thatcher dissolves London Council & creates London Regional Transport

Thatcher created the LRT organization in 1984, replacing the London Transport Executive, an agency of the Greater London Council since 1970. The LTE had been made up of local government agencies, which were severely underfunded by the central government.

The new LRT was a state-owned agency directly overseen by the Secretary of State for Transport. The explicit goals of uploading London transit to the central state were cost reduction and privatization. In 1985, the system split the subway and the buses into separate entities under the umbrella of LRT as a holding company.

The upload of London’s transport was followed by the Local Government Act of 1985, which demolished the Greater London Council, reducing local government in the London region to its boroughs. Sound familiar?

Funny how they used the word “regional” in the name of the new transport agency, in the same moment they eliminated the “regional” government for the same area. The “London region” became a free-form economic and transportation space lacking clear borders, no longer a political jurisdiction with the capacity to govern itself.

The upload led to tragedy

Thatcher’s central government did not take good care of their new baby. According to Alex Williams, TfL’s current Director of City Planning, “The tragedy of the King’s Cross fire, in 1987, which killed 31 people and injured 100 more, brought home to everyone the extent to which a significant part of London’s transport network had become obsolete, dirty and unloved.”

Desmond Fennell led the formal investigation into the fire. His report (Investigation into the King’s Cross Underground Fire, Department of Transport, 21 October 1988) supports Williams’ present-day comment. The report noted, “It is apparent from the evidence given by the Chairman that whereas financial matters, namely productivity and budgeting were strictly monitored safety was not strictly monitored.” (p. 27) It is fair to say that Fennell was not impressed with the agency’s management: “It may be an indication of the compartmental approach to management within London Underground that no up-to-date or complete chart showing the level of responsibility at which decisions were being taken was available.” (p. 34)

In 1992, the LRT started privatizing the bus services. Competition led to unethical, even criminal behavior on the part of bus companies, who increased congestion and endangered passenger safety in their battle to win ridership. (In deregulated areas outside London where ridership is lower and there hasn’t been competition, there have been fare increases and reductions in service, à la Greyhound.)

Most importantly, riders lost out: connections were far from seamless and the system as a whole was less reliable.

One legacy of privatization is that today London has 33 different bus operators, but they are all regulated by TfL. One important thing they insist on (are you listening, Metrolinx? I’m making a point about the Crosstown here) is that the buses have the same livery. To the rider, a London bus is a London bus and it’s all one system.

Now, tell me again why we are so stymied by 14 different local transit agencies? Because there is no formal process for coordination. The province could step in and impose something, but it makes no sense for the province to regulate the fare structures and routes of the local transit agencies of the GTHA.

However, it makes a lot of sense for a metropolitan-level organization, with representation from the municipalities and their transit agencies in the GTHA, to do that. Get the people who need to coordinate with each other around the same table–just as 13 municipalities in the Edmonton metropolitan area recently decided to do. Indeed, it’s what most metropolitan regions in Canada and the US do.

Those who study integration will tell you that it cannot be imposed successfully from on high. Research by Charles Rivasplata, a senior transportation planner with the San Francisco MTA, has shown that “the integration of transit is more easily achieved where operators sense that authorities want to engage in horizontal integration and do not have a hidden agenda.”

As a transit agency, the TTC is a model for the region and could be at the heart of a new group in the GTHA. Instead, get ready for an onslaught of “the TTC is a mess” messaging and how it can’t build or plan or maintain its system, as if the problem is the city and not because it’s the least-subsized transit agency in Canada or the United States (see chart below).

TfL receives 40% of revenue from fares, not 70% like the TTC does. As in most European cities, central government funding comprises a significant portion (23%) of the TfL operations budget (sadly, this has just been eliminated).

Source: CodeRedTO Mixed Signals report, November 2018, available at CodeRedTO.com

While we’re at it, let’s pretend infrastructure megaprojects haven’t gone over schedule and over budget while under-delivering on benefits on every kind of project, public-built or private-built, in every country, all over the world, for at least the last 50 years. Entire books have been written on megaprojects and risk.

TfL is responsible for the Crossrail project, so clearly metropolitan oversight is not a magic wand for megaprojects. But let’s not pretend, either, that another level of government will do better. There is zero evidence of that, and the list of provincial or Metrolinx’ mismanaged projects is long.

What was at issue with the UK’s LRT and what is at issue in the proposed upload is not who pays; it’s who makes the decision. Thatcher intentionally removed the London region’s ability to act as a region, to make decisions for itself. Metropolitan transit governance is about democracy. Capital can come from the province or the federal government, among other sources; the decision-making should belong to those who live with and are accountable to those who use the system on a day-to-day basis.

It isn’t “regional integration” to disassemble the TTC and expand an overloaded subway line into another city without giving Toronto a say.

The province has adopted the line that the TTC is an important “regional transit service.” The TTC isn’t regional transit; it’s the City of Toronto’s local transit. One might have made a case for the TTC as regional transit as late as the early 1990s under the old Metro system of government, but the province made that megacity bed and now it has to lie in it.

Local control matters

Why does it matter who decides? As Williams says, “Transport is not an end in itself. Rather, it is a key element in creating fairer, greener, healthier and more prosperous cities.” That’s what city governments do, too. Good transit planning creates equal opportunity and access for all citizens. Public transit is about social equity and justice.

After a local referendum on the question in 1998 (72% in favour), in 1999 the UK Parliament passed the Greater London Authority Act as part of a program of, in the words of then-Prime Minister Tony Blair “the decentralisation of power and the granting to our citizens of greater rights to hold government to account.” With the Greater London Authority came the London Assembly, the Mayor of London, and TfL.

Tellingly, the Crossrail project couldn’t get off the ground until the Greater London Authority and TfL came into existence. The national government couldn’t manage it through British Rail, because they were in the midst of privatizing it, and the many boroughs had no way to coordinate and mediate their different interests. To build Crossrail, they created a separate entity, initially co-owned by TfL and the UK Department of Transport, and then transferred full ownership to TfL. Cooperation!

Thatcher’s upload of London transport was a setback for both transit expansion and the maintenance of good service, and it undermined local democracy. It isn’t the path we want to take.

For those of us absorbed by questions of transit planning and governance, it’s interesting to have an opportunity to reimagine the whole system, and figure out the most effective, most productive and most equitable way to do things. These days, there are formal statements circulating and organized events to debate the elements of transportation financing and governance.

It is not yet clear that this provincial government is inviting such a conversation. Because that conversation would lead straight to discussing what even constitutes a “region” and how should it be governed. That conversation would be grounded in serious discussions of democratic practices. That conversation would include discussion of more authority for the City of Toronto and other GTHA municipalities, and more weight to the TTC within any regional authority, whose ridership constitutes over 80% of all public transit ridership in the region. That conversation would prioritize figuring out how to move the greatest number of people, not the most comfortable, wealthy people.

The upload proposal is not that conversation. Hopefully, the city’s discussions with the province consider more productive ways forward. Until then, we are merely spinning our wheels within a Thatcherite retake that demonstrates not the slightest interest in equity, justice or good governance.

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