Behaviour
March 5th, 2010
The following is a reprint of my recent Psychogeography column in Eye Weekly. Photo by Smaku.
Toronto is a city of neighbourhoods, we’re told. When they work well, they feel like a small town and, when they work really well, we might feel like Al Waxman in the opening credits of the King of Kensington, walking down the street like we own it. That’s all fine, but it gives us a false sense of the size of the city. Sometimes it’s good to be reminded of just how big Toronto is.
Try standing over an expressway. Anytime is good, but late afternoon when the rush is at its peak is best. The bottom of Dufferin over the Gardiner, right before the Canadian National Exhibition arch, is good, as is the top of Avenue Road where the 12 lanes of the 401 have been called the busiest road in North America. Every second, dozens of individual people pass by, each going to an individual home, some filled with more individuals, each with their own network of friends and coworkers. It’s a web that doesn’t stop growing, and watching the traffic and thinking this way gets overwhelming fast. Where do all these cars park? How many pairs of pants does everybody own? The numbers add up meaninglessly high.
Another rush-hour place to feel this more intimately is the Union Station basement at 4:45pm on any weekday. Try standing still in the middle of the thousands of GO Train passengers. It’s like a flash-flood mudslide and, if you don’t watch out, you’ll be swept up and taken away to Pickering or Newmarket. The mental aggregate of all this is confounding — we can see all these people, but it’s hard to know where they fit into “the city we know.” It’s too much.
March 5th, 2010
EDITOR’S NOTE: Josh Fullan, who teaches English and Civics at the University of Toronto Schools (a private high school affiliated with the University of Toronto), organized the Jane’s Walk School Edition featured in the “Walking” column in the Summer-Fall 2009 issue of Spacing. He sent us this follow-up guest column with some further thoughts about what he and his students learned from the project.
On a sunny afternoon last spring, as part of a series of Jane’s Walks led by grade 7’s at the University of Toronto Schools (UTS), some of the kids I teach English to presented in front of a small audience just outside of Robarts Library. The students chose to animate a topic that had bugged them during their wanderings around campus earlier in the month, when twice they had found a conspicuous build up of litter on the pathways and lawns to the west of the giant library. Tossed bottles, loose paper, and fast food wrappers cluttered an otherwise inviting play or hang-out space. As the students addressed their audience, a boy stood on a bench and held up an empty Coke can as evidence. For the kids, aged 12 and 13, the solution to the litter problem was simple: more garbage cans please.
The walk was later featured in a Spacing article seen by a staffer at City Councillor Adam Vaughan’s office, who promptly sent a copy to the University of Toronto and asked them to put more garbage cans in the neglected area. When I told my students about how their observation had sparked this bit of political action, their reaction was again straightforward and enthusiastic: “That’s so cool!”
It is a pretty cool story, but it’s more than that. It’s also an example of the too rare phenomenon of youth engagement and involvement in the process of community planning and improvement.
February 2nd, 2010
In this episode of Spacing Radio, we tackle the obstacles facing pedestrians and explore the forgotten, abandoned places in our midst. We begin with Spacing Magazine senior editor and co-chair …
January 25th, 2010
If you heard Spacing editor’s Matthew Blackett and Dylan Reid on CBC Radio’s Metro Morning today, you might be looking for the feedback web page for our Toronto Public Etiquette Guide.
We’re still …
January 11th, 2010
Social norms vary from city to city. In Marrakech it’s perfectly normal for a shopkeeper to offer mint tea to a potential customer before setting off on a lengthy barter. …
October 23rd, 2009
Is the latest trend to hit the Toronto cycling community…gratitude? CBC Metro Morning, The Toronto Star, NOW, and CTV News have all covered the Toronto Cyclists’ Union’s thank-you cards, designed …
September 24th, 2009
With the expansion of the use of scooters in the city (Vespa is the most famous brand), I noticed a lot more of these scooters parked on sidewalks this summer.
Scooters have the potential to be a good thing. If they are replacing a car ride, they take up a lot less space on the road, and the modern versions use far less carbon-emitting fuel and emit fewer pollutants than a car.
They should not, however, be taking up sidewalk space. At yesterday’s meeting of the Toronto Pedestrian Committee, Sgt. Tim Burrows of Toronto Police Services noted that, as they are considered motor vehicles and are subject to the same rules, it is illegal to park a motor scooter such as a Vespa on the sidewalk (additional note - that means, on any part of the sidewalk, including the boulevard).
Nor should there be any need to. In 2005, recognizing the potential good of replacing cars with scooters (and the difficulty of displaying pay-and-display tickets on them), City Council decided that all scooters could park for free in any on-street parking space (metered or pay-and-display). So scooter riders should have plenty of parking options without taking up space on sidewalks.
The rules prohibiting motor scooters from parking on the sidewalk while at the same time allowing them to park on the street for free are not well-known, either to scooter drivers or to parking enforcement officers. It would probably be helpful to everyone to have some kind of public information campaign on the issue so that everyone knows what the rules are, followed by more active enforcement.
September 8th, 2009
David Miller’s lawyerly silence about the broader implications of the Bryant-Sheppard tragedy is, to use one of the mayor’s favorite terms, unacceptable.
No, …
July 28th, 2009
Editor: Spacing is pleased to showcase films from the NFB’s online screening room. The NFB will be occasionally posting films here that explore our public spaces, Canadian or international cities …
May 2nd, 2009
The French are renowned or notorious, depending on one’s point of view, for their public protests, getting huge numbers of people out on the street at regular intervals to force their government to back down …
