Spacing‘s very own Associate Editor Shawn Micallef is a guest columnist for Maisonneuve this month. He takes on the task of explaining to the rest of the country just how fragile the city’s ego is. A sample:
The truth is that Toronto’s ego actually bruises very easily—a sense of decline over the past twenty years and a lack of mythology for its citizens to seek comfort in means that our civic skin isn’t as thick as the rest of the country thinks it is. Torontonians habitually and chronically undervalue their city and its stories; we think that all the important things happen in London, Paris, Tokyo and New York. Even when comparing cities closer to home, a Torontonian will be the first to say that Vancouver is the most beautiful city in the world and that Montreal is the sexiest and the most fun. It’s a peculiar thing, this cognitive dissonance between what Toronto is and how it is imagined to be—the mythmaking hasn’t been able to keep pace with the city’s evolution into the creature it has become.
