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Canadian Urbanism Uncovered

Contrary to reports, not everyone hates Toronto

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John Bentley Mays reviews uTOpia: Towards a New Toronto, in today’s Globe and Mail (FYI, 16 of the 34 contributors to uTOpia are also Spacing contributors). He delves into why there is a sudden wave of Toronto-loving and names Spacing as the house organ of this new movement. Read the review here.

Mays writes:

Suddenly, people are in love with Toronto again. They are making music and art and magazines in its busy cultural scenes, haunting laneways in search of marks made by the city’s feral children and finding secrets long hidden underground, busily writing down and talking about what their hungry readings of the archives and the very ground are turning up….
Loving Toronto is no longer an affectation of the intellectual elite or the few. It has become a local mass movement of the mostly young, even a kind of vogue, a romantic game that many are playing. It is also a personal style: curious, impatient with cynicism and anti-Toronto carping, much given to creative loafing and browsing, deliberately amateurish, and doggedly determined to be good-natured in a city famous for its chilly ways. Its house organ is Spacing magazine; its effect is altogether inspiring for us older heads who’ve lived through Toronto’s decades of public debt and public corruption, the destructive neglect of the city’s heart and soul, the wasting of good old buildings and the dead slowness in building good new ones.

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