{"id":7608,"date":"2009-11-02T12:55:46","date_gmt":"2009-11-02T16:55:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacingtoronto.ca\/?p=7608"},"modified":"2013-01-21T14:11:18","modified_gmt":"2013-01-21T19:11:18","slug":"john-lorinc-is-beauty-the-ticket","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2009\/11\/02\/john-lorinc-is-beauty-the-ticket\/","title":{"rendered":"JOHN LORINC: Is beauty the ticket?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone\" title=\"resurface\" src=\"http:\/\/farm1.static.flickr.com\/14\/17739902_d41586d9f3.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"333\" \/><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone\" title=\"john lorinc\" src=\"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/images\/feature-graphics\/feature-lorinc.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"85\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.beautifulcity.ca\/bcbfpetition.asp\">BeautifulCity.ca coalition<\/a> has admirable, but possibly na\u00e0\u00afve, expectations about the civilizing benefits of public art.<\/p>\n<p>The group wants the city to use the projected $11 million windfall from the new billboard tax to finance public art projects in every nook and cranny of Toronto. As BeautifulCity <a href=\"http:\/\/www.beautifulcity.ca\/bcbf\/BCBF-Brief-v10.pdf\">has told councillors<\/a> [ PDF ], &#8220;Economic spin off effects of this historic increase to arts funding helps to ease recession and youth unemployment. Tourism goes up. Torontonians enjoy a more humane, fair and beautiful city.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not persuaded. For years, we&#8217;ve been shaking down developers for a public art contribution, and they, in turn, have been making perfunctory gestures. In general, I&#8217;d prefer better architecture, but one takes what one can get.<\/p>\n<p>Does it make the city more &#8220;humane&#8221;? At the margins, yes, although I can think of numerous public art installations that do little to improve the public realm.<\/p>\n<p>I also question the non-aesthetic benefits BeautifulCity touts. Public art projects don&#8217;t produce steady work. If you&#8217;re an artist, you may get one or a few commissions out of such a program. But the city&#8217;s going to want to spread the wealth broadly, so it won&#8217;t add up to a steady income for anyone, except perhaps the inevitable consultants who turn up to direct the effort.<\/p>\n<p>Let me suggest an alternative.<\/p>\n<p>Teenagers are the one demographic group consistently excluded from public spaces, both by neglect and design. While the city and neighbourhood groups go to remarkable lengths to build playgrounds, we all get nervous when adolescents congregate in parks, which, in turn, rarely offer little more than a slab of asphalt with a couple of hoops.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>We have parks with community gardens and tennis courts, benches for seniors, and fenced off pens for dog owners. Children&#8217;s playgrounds come in every flavour and colour. But amenities designed specifically for youth &#8211; hard to think of examples.<\/p>\n<p>In recent years, however, the city has stumbled upon something genuinely successful, although you&#8217;d never know it from grazing around Toronto&#8217;s parks and recreation website.<\/p>\n<p>Six skateboard facilities and two BMX courses have opened in a handful of locations across the city (all but one in the east end). By most accounts, they&#8217;re busy to the point of overcrowding.<\/p>\n<p>Council has recently signaled its support for a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.toronto.ca\/legdocs\/mmis\/2009\/cd\/bgrd\/backgroundfile-23825.pdf\">city-wide skate park\/BMX<\/a> &#8220;strategy,&#8221; but of course the money&#8217;s not there.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d propose that public space and cycling advocates should be pushing council to earmark billboard tax revenues specifically for the construction of a broad network of skate\/BMX parks, with the goal of making them easily accessible to teens instead of constructing a handful of car-dependent destination facilities.<\/p>\n<p>The city wrings its hands endlessly about &#8220;youth engagement,&#8221; but recreation leadership programs and the like only touch a handful of kids. What teens of all backgrounds need most are interesting, minimally supervised, active spaces where they can legitimately hang out without paying a fee to take a course.<\/p>\n<p>Permanent skate and BMX facilities more than do the job. Councillor Janet Davis, who chairs the community development and recreation committee, says she&#8217;s seen young people take responsibility for these parks, and involve themselves in the planning, design and even management. There&#8217;s also a public art component, in the form of legal graffiti.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s even a safety angle. Based on her experiences with a three-year-old skate park in East York, Davis says the boarders feel so much ownership that they actually discourage gang activity and loitering. Contrary to conventional wisdom, those all-important eyes on the street might actually belong to a 17-year-old.<\/p>\n<p>BeautifulCity is absolutely correct in demanding that council reinvest a public space tax in public space. But in the name of equity during a period of economic hardship, let&#8217;s ensure that all this money goes toward creating engaging public spaces for those who&#8217;ve long been excluded, simply by dint of their age.<\/p>\n<p><em>photo by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/wvs\/17739902\/\">Sam Javanrouh<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The BeautifulCity.ca coalition has admirable, but possibly na\u00e0\u00afve, expectations about the civilizing benefits of public art. The group wants the city to use the projected $11 million windfall from the new billboard tax to finance public art projects in every nook and cranny of Toronto. As BeautifulCity has told councillors [ PDF ], &#8220;Economic spin<a href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2009\/11\/02\/john-lorinc-is-beauty-the-ticket\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"sr-only\">&#8220;JOHN LORINC: Is beauty the ticket?&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4051,"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":[21757,4],"tags":[315,13537,408,17,2704,1030,663,19,391,496],"class_list":["post-7608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-communication","category-culture","tag-artist","tag-car-dependent-destination-facilities","tag-councillor","tag-graffiti","tag-janet-davis","tag-john-lorinc","tag-sam-javanrouh","tag-toronto","tag-usd","tag-york"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>JOHN LORINC: Is beauty the ticket? - 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\/2009\/11\/02\/john-lorinc-is-beauty-the-ticket\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"JOHN LORINC: Is beauty the ticket? - Spacing Toronto\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The BeautifulCity.ca coalition has admirable, but possibly na\u00e0\u00afve, expectations about the civilizing benefits of public art. The group wants the city to use the projected $11 million windfall from the new billboard tax to finance public art projects in every nook and cranny of Toronto. 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