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According to the September issue of Toronto Life, the city is \u2013 or ought to be \u2013 in the throes of an \u201cexodus to the burbs\u201d where, as the headline informs the magazine\u2019s soon-to-be-former readers, \u201cThe houses are bigger [and] the people are nicer [and] the commute doesn\u2019t suck.\u201d Inside, the display copy for the article \u2014 written by freelancer Philip Preville \u2013 starts with this little chestnut:<\/p>\n
\u201cScrew Jane Jacobs. We\u2019re outta here.\u201d<\/p>\n
Long before I became a magazine writer, and certainly well before I spent a decade as Toronto Life\u2019s politics columnist, I used to work part-time for Book City, in the Annex. The remainder tables always used to be piled high with copies of a paperback called \u201cThe Death and Life of the Great American Cities,\u201d about which I knew nothing.<\/p>\n
Fairly regularly, a tall but stooped older woman, always wearing a shapeless brown wrap, would come in to browse. Eventually, one of my co-workers told me she was the author of said remainder. Jane Jacobs.<\/p>\n
Only later did I become aware of her accomplishments \u2014 here and elsewhere \u2014 and her truly remarkable celebrity among urban thinkers. But when I think of Jane Jacobs, I often imagine her in person, among the stacks at Book City.<\/p>\n
Now, courtesy of Toronto Life\u2019s inexcusably coarse choice of words, I must summon up a different image.<\/p>\n
The article itself offers up a re-telling of a very old story, which is that some people, especially those who are economically comfortable and have young children, tend to move away from the downtown core. Sorry, but nothing new there. This has been going on, in one form or another, since the industrial revolution and the advent of the Garden City movement in Britain and the United States.<\/p>\n
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But Preville\u2019s story includes this intriguing spin on a Stats Can finding that for every individual who moved from a neighbouring municipality into Toronto, 3.5 moved out. \u201cWere it not for the constant arrival of people from other regions, provinces and countries into Toronto\u2019s city limits\u2026the downtown would be emptying out in a hurry.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is kind of like saying, were it not for the dark and white meat, grilled chicken would taste awfully bony. What are all those newcomers? Hot dog filler?<\/p>\n
The thrust of both Preville\u2019s feature and editor Sarah Fulford\u2019s set-up is that Jane Jacobs\u2019 vision of urban living \u2013 i.e., relatively dense, mixed-income, ethnically diverse neighbourhoods that aren\u2019t partitioned by highways \u2014 is utterly out-dated. Not to mention that the places the article’s subjects moved to (Dundas, Creemore, Cobourg) are not suburbs of\u00a0 Toronto but other cities and towns.<\/p>\n
But the argument is a complete non-sequitur. When Jacobs was writing in the early 1960s, she was responding to the centrifugal conditions created by post-war suburban sprawl and automobile dependency (not to mention white flight). Municipal planners thought that the best way to connect the new subdivisions to the existing urban commercial cores was with highways that, as it happened, would cut through working class neighbourhoods whose residents didn\u2019t really count.<\/p>\n
Fulford somehow manages to blame Jacobs for Toronto\u2019s congestion problems, because, as she argues, Jacobs gave us a legacy of opposing \u201cbig plans.\u201d This is a woefully simplistic argument, of course, and one that overlooks a lot of intervening history, but has the virtue of fitting well with a sensational headline.<\/p>\n
I am not denying that Toronto has nasty traffic congestion \u2013 worse in the 905, by the way, than in the core, where transit is a viable alternative \u2013 and certainly Jane Jacobs wasn\u2019t right about everything. But the city\u2019s most wicked problems are a legacy of a long-standing cheapness that runs deep in our politics, and is currently expressing itself, so to speak, as a complete unwillingness on the part of the region\u2019s residents to pay for the sorts of things a big city needs.<\/p>\n
Incidentally, I noticed that nowhere in Ms. Fulford\u2019s editorial does she call on local politicians to suck it up and approve a local sales tax or road tolls, the proceeds of which can be used to alleviate the problems that are apparently causing all the nice (read: Toronto Life subscribers) people to pull up stakes. After all, Toronto Life\u2019s well-heeled readers don\u2019t want to pay for a grown-up city, either.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"