Scarborough in the NOW

NOW city hall reporter (and Spacing contributor) Mike Smith looks at the issues facing the former municipality of Scarborough over the next four years. Notorious for its strip malls, busy roads, and sprawling suburban neighbourhoods, Scarborough doesn’t get the attention it deserves, Councillor Brian Ashton tells Smith: “The suburbs feel they’re not being heard. People choose their communities for different sorts of lifestyles. There’s a feeling that because I choose to live at Markham and Sheppard, all my life choices are evil and wrong and carcinogenic. They’re not.”

Could it be that some Scarberians live where they do because they can’t afford a home for their family downtown? Or that they drive because there are no other reliable options? As Smith reports, even Ashton wonders just how attached Scarborough residents are to the built form of their region. “How we might come to terms with the 50s-, 60s-, and 70s-style subdivisions will be an interesting part of our future,” says Ashton. “Will communities rise up to protect that kind of built form?”

Other Scarborough concerns Smith points out include: transit and the Scarborough RT, citizen engagement, and the borough’s vast diversity. Writes Smith: “the city’s slow progress on communicating in multiple languages means huge numbers of people don’t even know how to vote — likely skewing election results.”

On a positive note, Smith points out that neighbourhood councils “may work better in Scarborough because so many neighbourhoods are built around school buildings, which act as a central focus.” Unfortunately, as I learned when doing reasearch for an article I wrote for Eye Weekly on school board trustees, not all new neighbourhoods in the ‘burbs are built this way anymore. As Scarborough trustee Noah Ng told me in October, many new developments come with signs warning potential buyers that there may not be a school in the area when they move in. As a result, the school board has been spending a lot of time and energy busing students to schools well outside their neighbourhood.

Smith’s point about schools being the central focus of the community also makes me wonder: if having schools in your neighbourhood helps bring the community together, facilitating the work of neighbourhood councils, are school closures downtown going to have a negative effect on neighbourhoods in the city’s core?

Photo from NOW by Mark Coatsworth