Monday, July 04, 2016

Toronto: the most fascinatingly boring city in the world

The estimable British newspaper The Guardian is having a Canada Week all this week, focussing particularly on its cites. Today's offering dissects my home town Toronto, and is written by Toronto journalist and author Stephen Marche. I thought it a pithy, honest and well-observed piece, some of which bears repeating.
Marche sets the scene by offering up a few pertinent facts about the city, including:
  • Toronto's population surpassed that of Chicago this year, making it the third largest metropolitan area in North America (after New York and Los Angeles). While Chicago continues to shrink, Toronto is growing precipitously, with a population expected to hit 7.5 million within a decade and a half.
  • As recently as 2005, Toronto had all of 13 skyscrapers; now it has about 50, with 130 more under construction (substantially more than anywhere else in North America, including New York). If you approach from the water, almost every building you see will have been constructed in the past couple of decades.
  • Toronto's population is 51% foreign-born and includes people from over 230 countries, making it by many assessments the most diverse city in the world. A UC Berkeley study in 2012 found that, compared to the citizens of other developed immigrant-receiving countries, Canadians are by far the most open to, and optimistic about, immigration. It also found that those Canadians who expressed more patriotism were also more likely to support immigration and multiculturalism (as opposed to the United States, where this correlation goes in the opposite direction).
But it is Marche's spot-on appreciation of some of the ironies and contradictions of life in Toronto that struck me most:
  • "In London and New York, the worst stereotype of a banker is somebody who enjoys cocaine, Claret and vast megalomaniac schemes. In Toronto, a banker handles teachers’ pension portfolios and spends weekends at the cottage."
  • "Diversity is not what sets Toronto apart; the near-unanimous celebration of diversity does. Toronto may be the last city in the world that unabashedly desires difference."
  • "[Black Lives Matter] activists protested outside the police headquarters for 14 days, received a meeting with the mayor and the premier, and then disbanded peacefully. There was no hint of a riot, nor even of bad behaviour."
  • "The streetcars along a single main street, Spadina, carry more people on a daily basis than the whole of the Sheppard line, whose expenses run to roughly $10 a passenger, according to one estimate...Add another contradiction to Toronto’s growing list: it must be the best-run city in the world run by idiots."
  • "Only Toronto would commemorate not building something [a series of panels commemorating the activists who prevented the Spadina Expressway in the 1970s]. It’s proud of what it hasn’t done."
Go, Toronto! If this is what "boring" is, then I'm all for it.

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