{"id":33793,"date":"2012-10-10T13:41:49","date_gmt":"2012-10-10T17:41:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacingtoronto.ca\/?p=33793"},"modified":"2012-10-10T15:01:58","modified_gmt":"2012-10-10T19:01:58","slug":"qa-with-sean-hertel-a-good-city-is-worth-paying-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2012\/10\/10\/qa-with-sean-hertel-a-good-city-is-worth-paying-for\/","title":{"rendered":"Q&A with Sean Hertel: “A good city is worth paying for”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

“A good city is worth paying for,” said Urban Planning Consultant\u00a0Sean Hertel, who spoke \u00a0at\u00a0“Going to School: A Transit Conference for the GTHA.” Mr. Hertel took part on a panel called “Planning for transit-oriented (campus) development,”\u00a0<\/strong>which was moderated by Toronto’s Chief Planner Jennifer Keesmaat.<\/p>\n

He sat down with Spacing to talk about the changing nature of the GTHA and how Torontonians need to change the way they view their city.<\/p>\n

Spacing: How have suburbs evolved and what did you mean by a more dynamic environment?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sean Hertel:<\/strong>\u00a0I think the suburbs have grown up, but our understanding of them has not. They\u2019re no longer extensions of the city any longer, they are something new- something new happened. They are cities unto themselves and they have their own distinct character apart from the city. They\u2019ve become something different, it\u2019s not suburban, it\u2019s not urban, it\u2019s the new city. \u00a0And we haven\u2019t really recognized that at all. We haven\u2019t acknowledged the authenticity of the suburbs and the fact that they have become the new city. Whereas downtown is the city in history, the suburbs are the city in real time, whether we like it or not. That\u2019s the truth that we have to reconcile our planning and our conceptions of urban space with.<\/p>\n

That ties in with what you were talking about, Toronto being a regional city– why don\u2019t we understand Toronto as a regional city?<\/strong><\/p>\n

SH:<\/strong>\u00a0Yeah we don\u2019t understand the scale and complexity of it. I think it\u2019s beyond our understanding. I worked up in Newmarket for the regional municipality of York and I lived down at High Park. That was my life, my life took me from High Park to Newmarket and to the airport to pick up friends, to the Toronto Zoo to Oshawa to all over. And the planning documents, our conception of the city, the popular media, and the discourse of City Hall doesn\u2019t capture that complexity and it doesn\u2019t capture that scale. People work downtown (Toronto), they live in Hamilton, and they could weekend in Owen Sound. But people think (GTHA)is a lot smaller. I think our infrastructure and social infrastructure needs to capture that.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

How can we create a more collaborative environment between transit planners and urban planners?<\/strong><\/p>\n

SH:<\/strong>\u00a0I think our job as planners, and I\u2019m a land use planner, I think we need to speak to people who wouldn\u2019t normally speak to each other. And I think what\u2019s missing from the conversation is the financiers involved. We need the bean counters, the accountants involved, because they have to write the cheques for the infrastructure. We need to put the engineers, the planners, and the transit providers in the same room. It\u2019s about time these decisions aren\u2019t made by politicians. We have to somehow divorce how we do our planning from the political cycles, because guess what? We\u2019re going nowhere. You have a 25 year planning horizon under the growth plan permeated by six four year terms of council. Its destructive its counter intuitive and it collides with long range planning\u2014 ironically, as we\u2019re required to under provincial legislation.<\/p>\n

The last question is about cost and financing\u2014it was talked about a lot about it today\u2014 how do you want to reconfigure our understanding of financing?<\/strong><\/p>\n

SH:<\/strong> I would like to see us to be progressive and actually put out a compelling vision that\u2019s so tempting, you\u2019d be crazy not to want to be for it. Even if it means a regional sales tax, even if it means a property tax hike, even if it means re-instating the vehicle registration tax. I believe so strongly in planning for transportation and funding it, I wrote a check for what would have been a portion of my vehicle registration of tax after Ford got rid of it two years ago. They still haven\u2019t cashed the cheque. That\u2019s the level of conviction and commitment and passion that I have for this system, it\u2019s worth paying for. A good city is worth paying for. It\u2019s our responsibility to get people talking about (transit funding) and wanting it. Wouldn\u2019t it be amazing to want to be taxed to get something that everyone wants, it\u2019s worth it. And it\u2019s the cost of not doing it, that\u2019s the true cost of inaction, inaction is the true cost.<\/p>\n

photo by Pierre Montpellier<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“A good city is worth paying for,” said Urban Planning Consultant\u00a0Sean Hertel, who spoke \u00a0at\u00a0“Going to School: A Transit Conference for the GTHA.” Mr. Hertel took part on a panel called “Planning for transit-oriented (campus) development,”\u00a0which was moderated by Toronto’s Chief Planner Jennifer Keesmaat. He sat down with Spacing to talk about the changing natureContinue reading “Q&A with Sean Hertel: “A good city is worth paying for””<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4126,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[1404,992,1174,236,20714,21106,21105,22085,21041,6351,19,8015,849,122,496],"class_list":["post-33793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-transit","tag-chief-planner","tag-consultant","tag-ford","tag-hamilton","tag-jennifer-keesmaat","tag-land-use-planner","tag-pierre-montpellier","tag-politics","tag-sean-hertel","tag-social-infrastructure","tag-toronto","tag-toronto-zoo","tag-transportation","tag-urban-planning","tag-york"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nQ&A with Sean Hertel: "A good city is worth paying for" - Spacing Toronto<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2012\/10\/10\/qa-with-sean-hertel-a-good-city-is-worth-paying-for\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Q&A with Sean Hertel: "A good city is worth paying for" - Spacing Toronto\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"“A good city is worth paying for,” said Urban Planning Consultant\u00a0Sean Hertel, who spoke \u00a0at\u00a0“Going to School: A Transit Conference for the GTHA.” Mr. Hertel took part on a panel called “Planning for transit-oriented (campus) development,”\u00a0which was moderated by Toronto’s Chief Planner Jennifer Keesmaat. 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