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Canadian Urbanism Uncovered

Why “Toronto: You Belong Here” Belongs Here, Pt. II

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Back in January, a million miles removed from this sticky-tropical Toronto day, I posted about how much I liked the slogan “Toronto: You Belong Here.” Originally devised as a post-SARS “please don’t flee the city!” campaign by Lastman-era ‘crats, it’s a much stronger slogan, I think, than Toronto Unlimited, with more emotional pull. And it can still be used, with varying ad copy and imagery, to appeal to those “oh-so-hip” Cleveland and Buffalo alt-weekly readers that January’s much-critiqued Live With Culture campaign was targeting.

Following that post, others suggested to me that “You Belong Here” might not be the only gem lingering in the city’s branding past. After talking to a few different people with knowledge of the city’s marketing history and visiting the city archives to look through old tourism brochures, I found that the city’s struggle to identify and self-identify itself in an attractive, accurate way has indeed been a long road. The result was an article in this past Sunday’s Star, which you can read here.

In the wake of that piece, I’ve received some interesting ideas and views from others. Olivia Chow notes that “You Belong Here” had a terrific Chinese translation that “Unlimited” does not: “Toronto: hearts connecting with hearts.” Jostein Algroy, who moved here 8 years ago from Europe, writes “the people who work out these campaigns need to think differently – as I tell friends that comes for a visit – please, don’t compare Toronto to American cities nor to European cities – a mistake I did in the beginning. Toronto is itself. It is ‘strong’ as is and need to be experienced as such.” And Valerie Jones, a Los Angeles resident who recently visited our city, tries her own hand at solving some of our slogan woes by offering a few that “infer the diversity that I experienced [while visiting] and yet express a confident level of pride in the uniqueness of Toronto.” “Toronto: Like No Other” and “Toronto: Free to Be” are a couple of her suggestions.

Whether you agree with those respondents or not, it seems that many people feel the pain of civic branding difficulties, whether they live here or elsewhere. The Next American City‘s spring issue has an article about city slogans; author David Godfrey notes that cities everywhere, “taking their cue from the corporate world, [are stepping] up their efforts to build their brands and sum up themselves in short catchy phrases.” At the same time, many of these “irrelevant new mottos… often fail to represent the true identities of cities.”

Reading Godfrey’s piece does prompt one to give thanks that Toronto is not known as “Always Turned On” (Atlantic City’s latest moniker), “America’s No. 1 Wired City” (Tacoma) or “See Something New” (Cleveland). But it also reinforces disappointment that city planners here and elsewhere would feel compelled to choose blandness over specificity, and novelty over heart.

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5 comments

  1. “Toronto You Belong Here”. I love it!

    It has a great emotional connection for me. I’ve returned to Toronto after years in the States, Europe and Asia, and this slogan describes exactly how I feel towards Toronto.

    After experiencing life in many different great cities and countries, I feel that I am now back in the city that I belong in.

  2. According to my calculations, We were not 1 million miles away in January, but actually closer to 1.8 million miles, or 2.3 million miles by the way the planet flies.

    Close enough though. Also, I easily could have this wrong since I have not done trigonometry in about 2 years. (and yes, I assumed a circular orbit around the sun.)

  3. The trouble with “Toronto you belong here” is it’s eerily similar to Israel’s tourism slogan “no one belongs here more than you.”

    How about, Toronto:
    “Your ticket to the World”

    or “The Centre of the Universe”

    or “where trees stand in the water”

    It actually ain’t that easy is it.

  4. What Toronto needs is a stylish, sexy, romantic image and a slogan to match it.

    I’d love for Toronto to be seen as a sexy city like Paris or Montreal.

  5. “I prefer Toronto” has a wonderfully Canadian understateness about it. Very clever. I don’t think the average Torontonian would gush they _love_ the city, but I can certainly see them agreeing that they prefer it.

    “Picture it your way” reflects something that I think is very true about Toronto, which is that Toronto is a place where people carve out their own niche, while other people more-or-less just leave them alone and mind their own business.

    And I like the fact that “Toronto: You Belong Here” came out of the SARS crisis. If it ever became an enduring slogan, it would have a little connection to Toronto history — something good coming out of something potentially bad. A relic of a time when Torontonians bound together for a common good.