Skip to content

Spacing

Canadian Urbanism Uncovered

Streetscape

Hume lays into City’s street furniture plan

By

Read more articles by

The Toronto Star’s Christopher Hume pulled no punches in his column today. He demands that the City refuse all street furniture submissions because they do nothing to making Toronto’s streetscape less cluttered of physical and visual obstacles. Some excerpts:

None of the entries — from Astral Media/Kramer Design, CBS Outdoor/Elements and Clear Channel/Zeidler Partnership — is worthy of being on the streets on Toronto. Indeed, they would only make a bad situation worse and set back the cause of cleaning up the city by years.

In all cases, the problem begins with the designs themselves: They are inappropriate, disconcertingly trendy, overdone and overpowering. They would only increase the rampant commercialization of the public realm.

Enough already. Yes, we know that advertising will be ubiquitous in a city as impoverished as Toronto, but there comes a point of diminishing returns, when less is more.

The city is inundated with ads and the last thing we need is to make a bad situation worse.

Interesting, too, that at least two of the three bidders — Astral Media and CBS Outdoor — are deeply implicated in erecting illegal billboards throughout Toronto. According to some estimates, between 1,500 and 2,000 outdoor ads at any one time are in violation of the law. The media companies know exactly what they’re doing, but there’s too much money to be made for them to bother with such niceties as legalities.

Councillor Joe Mihevc says they operate “in a rogue manner.”

…

The fear of being without a contract — and of having to cover the maintenance costs of Toronto’s existing street furniture — seems to the driving force behind the city’s unseemly haste.

Given that the contract would be in place for 20 years, it might be worth getting something decent, something that would enhance the city as well as provide garbage bins, benches, bicycle racks, bus shelters and the like.

If these amenities are as important as the city believes, then it has no choice but to start again.

There is no shame in this. Indeed, the city went through a similar process back in 1995 and decided against the submissions.

Other links of note:

• Star feedback from readers: page 1, page 2
• CBC Metro Morning interview with TPSC [Real One Player]


Recommended

9 comments

  1. And doesnt it make you feel better that Councillors are getting donations from CBS and Clear Channel (and Pattison Outdoor).

    This whole process is bad design and bad democracy.

  2. I encourage people to keep writing to the Mayor and their city councillor (click here to find out who your councillor is and how to contact him or her).

    I can now say with confidence that, in terms of square footage alone, the Coordinated Street Furniture Program would increase the amount of advertising on our street by almost 12%. And keep in mind that ALL of the advertising (with the ironic exception of Clear Channel’s “secondary advertising structures”) would be illuminated, perpendicular to the sidewalk, and stretch six to eight feet off the ground. Plus, all of the “information” pillars (of which there would be at least 120) would play video ads at you.

  3. Hear, hear! I was incredibly disappointed when I saw these designs. Where’s the artistry? Where’s the imagination? Where’s the quirkiness that is Toronto? Where’s the small local consortium of talented citizens among the bidders? In short, where’s the innovation in process and design?

    For the sake of the citizen who will have to live with these eye-sores for the next 20 years, don’t let city council pick one of these duds! Let the current contract expire. Let some decent designs be put forward. We can and should expect better.

    Two of our worst corporate citizens have put their indiscrete billboarded posteriors forward. Let’s give them a good swift kick and call for another round!

  4. Hume’s column today is written in the poetic, stately manner of groundbreaking judicial decisions that will be cited for years to come.

    Who will sit in front of the bulldozers when they come with their steel, glass and advertisements?

  5. Hume’s article was RIGHT ON. So we really want to blanket the city with these trendy structures?!

    The thing I hate most about the bus “shelters” is the roof that arcs up thereby providing very little protection from the rain or snow. Oh, but that doesn’t matter because its main purpose isn’t to shelter but to display advertising (for people driving past).

  8. Follow up to my first post: Essentially shortly after March 29 2006 a list of potential bidders for the Street RFP was posted online. Therefore the potential bidders were known before municipal election and candidates could have avoided taking donations from those companies.

  9. We have these kinds of bus shelters here in Auckland, NZ.

    They are, as Mike Jones correctly surmised, merely props for the large advertising poster. They let in the rain (it’s a rainy climate here), they leak badly and you can’t get shelter.

    I sincerely hope that TO is not blighted by the same ‘design’ masquerading as ‘bus shelter’.

    Cheers,
    Christopher.