Book Review
September 11th, 2009
Editor’s note: At Afterword, the wake held for pages books on Tuesday night, a number of folks came up to say what the store meant to them. As Matt Blackett pointed out, the store was crucial to magazines like Spacing and other indie presses. Others talked about what a place like Pages meant to the city at large: functioning as a “cultural centre” as Johnny Dovercourt wrote two issues ago in Spacing. One of the speakers that night was Andrew James Paterson, an artist and writer that has been working in and around Queen Street since the late 1970s (poke around his website if interested, you’ll find some good stuff from this era up to the present day). The following is the text of his eulogy:
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I think of Pages - that home away from home - and I think of so many things. I think of the bookstore’s size - not too big but not too small. That just about perfect size was, I think, crucial to why Pages was a great store and a great environment. It was large enough - there was enough room - for people to feel loose and relaxed - for people to have their private spaces. It was small enough for people to cross the floor.
In that sense, browsing shopping and yes buying in Pages was rather like surfing the net. It was rhizomatic. I could be in the Visual Art Section, and suddenly I would feel an urge to cross-reference something in the Film Section or the Music or Cultural Theory sections or other sections perhaps. I could do this quickly - none of the sections were at any great distance from each other while remaining distinct. One could say that Pages was a rhizomatic bookstore - it was a tree and it was the branches and it was all about connecting dots.
August 20th, 2009
David Sucher’s City Comforts is a little gem of a book. First published in 1995, it’s a collection of the small details that make urban spaces work, illustrated with black-and-white photos …
November 26th, 2008
Local historian Doug Taylor (who is one of my neighbours) recently published his book There Never Was a Better Time, a fictionalized retelling of …
November 9th, 2008
For the past three years Coach House Books has produced the uTOpia series: a collection of essays, articles and photos all about Toronto. Quite a few Spacing contributors have pieces in the volumes and …
July 11th, 2008
I just finished reading Ourtopias: Cities and the Role of Design, a collection of essays that were developed out of the Ourtopias conference hosted by the Design Exchange in June 2007. Through …
May 9th, 2008
What do the novels Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood, Clara Callan by Richard B. Wright, Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels, and In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje have
…
May 2nd, 2008
Alan Broadbent is a businessman and philanthropist who has played an important behind-the-scenes role over the last 15 years in generating a “cities” agenda in Canadian politics and public discourse. He has been a guiding influence behind initiatives such as Ideas that Matter, which gives out the Jane Jacobs Prize, and the “Charter for Toronto” idea. The Maytree Foundation, which he chairs, is involved in a wide range of programs that benefit cities and work on issues faced by immigrants.
With the publication of his book Urban Nation, Broadbent is stepping our from behind the scenes into the limelight. The book succinctly summarizes his thinking about the role and challenges of cities in Canada, developed over years of discussion with experts, advocates, and politicians.
Many of the themes and arguments in the book have been heard before in various reports and proposals generated by his behind-the-scenes work, but this book brings them together in an accessible format, enriched by a more personal voice. It works as a kind of primer about urban issues in Canada, and also as a repository of ideas — some sensible, some radical — about what to do about them. While Broadbent is usually clear about which ideas he favours, he always summarizes both the advantages and the problems with any proposal, giving readers plenty of information with which to make up their own minds.
The essential premise of the book is that, as the title indicates, Canada has become an urban nation, but our self-image and our government structures have not yet caught up to this new reality. Broadbent traces the transformation of our nation from a largely rural one into an urban one, with almost 80% of the population living in cities, over the course of the 20th century.
Particularly interesting is his distinction between two phases of urbanization. With industrialization in the mid-20th century, all cities expanded rapidly, both large and mid-sized. From the 1980s, however, he shows that urbanization has been concentrated in the largest cities, especially Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. He argues that they are becoming a new kind of city in Canada, with distinctive needs, and require new powers and a new way of thinking if they are to sustain their leading role in Canada’s economy. These are the cities he focuses on (he fluctuates between the cities themselves and their larger metropolitan area, depending on the issue).
Broadbent shows the shortcomings of the current model of large-city municipal governance, in which cities of millions of people, with complex social and infrastructure needs, are governed according to rules set out in 1867 when Canada’s largest cities were little more than towns. While there are many individual problems, such as revenue sources restricted to property taxes and fees, the crucial problem is that cities are entirely dependent on provincial governments for permission to do anything new in any field of activity.
April 17th, 2008
So it’s a bit late for this, but I wanted to share a few thoughts from the Toronto: A City Becoming launch that happened on Monday night at the Gladstone. Ron Nurwisah reviews the book itself in our new issue, so I’m not going to address the print version per se. But what I noticed at the panel could perhaps apply as well.
While the event’s panel did offer a bit of enjoyably spirited discussion (the most heated of which involved artist Michael Awad proclaiming that he loves the Island Airport—a brave admission in a room of west-end denizens), the overall feeling for me was that the Toronto this book is addressing is way too insular. This critique can be made of many media outlets (including, to be fair, this one), but perhaps being beholden to it in standing-room-only style was all a bit much.
As architect John Von Nostrand noted during his turn at the mic, the Toronto that exists north of Eglinton is severely disregarded in city planning. Sadly, it quickly became apparent that the area is also disregarded by books about city planning, like this one. Also, although columnist/panelist Linda McQuaig is usually a class warrior par excellence, her adamant dislike for the suburbs did seem to paint the people who live there (and not just their architectural features) with one broad (and ignorant) brush.
March 26th, 2008
For those of you with a city-focused book fetish, you should be looking forward to Spacing’s upcoming issue where we review a handful of excellent books: Toronto — A City Becoming, Concrete Toronto, Greentopia, Transit …
January 17th, 2008
Last Thursday’s post, Lost without laneways, garnered many requests for information regarding the suggested reading I posted at the end of the article. Donald Chong, one of the authors/editors of Site Unseen: Laneway …
