Toronto Reborn: Design Successes and Challenges - Softcover

Greenberg, Ken

 
9781459743076: Toronto Reborn: Design Successes and Challenges
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1459743075 ISBN 13: 9781459743076
Verlag: DUNDURN PR LTD, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

An incisive view of Toronto’s development over the last fifty years.

In Toronto Reborn, Ken Greenberg describes the emerging contours of a new Toronto. Focusing on the period from 1970 to the present, Greenberg looks at how the work and decisions of citizens, NGOs, businesses, and governments have combined to refashion Toronto. Individually and collectively, their actions — renovating buildings and neighbourhoods, building startling new structures and urban spaces, revitalizing old cultural institutions and creating new ones, sponsoring new festivals and events — have transformed the old postwar city, changing it into an exciting modern one.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ken Greenberg is an urban designer, teacher, and writer, whose passion and advocacy for the city over the past decades has involved him in virtually every aspect of its remarkable transformation. He lives in Toronto.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

INTRODUCTION
Toronto as Crucible

I arrived in Toronto in 1968, immigrating from the United States inthe period of great turmoil caused by the war in Vietnam.

Although I relocated under duress, I immediately felt welcomed. The cityfelt remarkably malleable, not fully formed. It seemed to be still evolving, opento new ideas and desires, receptive to reshaping by me and other new arrivals. Ihad the sense that this was a place where I could contribute and most fully bemyself. Toronto was on the cusp of a great change, and I was quickly caughtup in the unfolding story of my adopted city. After completing my studies, Iworked as a young architect, and then founded the Division of Architectureand Urban Design at the City of Toronto, running it for ten years under thedirection of three mayors: David Crombie, John Sewell, and Art Eggleton.

Through this stint at city hall and later work as a professional (andengagement as a citizen), I have had a front-row seat as a participant andobserver during decades of remarkable, often inspiring — and at times frustrating— change in this extraordinary city. I shared some of this experiencein my earlier book, Walking Home, published in 2011, in which Torontohad a role among many cities. This book gives me a chance to come back towhat is happening in Toronto almost a decade later in a more focused way.

Each of us has some stressful formative experiences that motivate (andsometimes obsess or even traumatize) us. One of my own subterraneandrivers comes from my childhood peregrinations. Moving from place toplace, often abruptly, changing cities, countries, neighbourhoods, schools(sometimes in mid-year), and friends was disruptive to say the least, even ifsometimes it felt exciting. In hindsight, I realize that this constant dislocationhas led to an intense compensating homing instinct, and, though coupledwith a taste for travel, a need to be rooted in a place. This, in part, iswhat steered me to my career in urban design and to my intense love affairwith Toronto. Like an attentive lover, I have been sensitive to its changesand moods ever since.

I am convinced that something out of the ordinary, if not truly unique,is occurring in Toronto. It feels like the city is emerging from a chrysalis.The processes of continual redefinition and renewal have ever been in playin our city, and there have been other periods of enormous upheaval andgrowth spurts; but in the last fifteen years or so, the direction has alteredwhile the pace of change has intensified and accelerated. Fuelled by a powerfulvortex of market forces and demographic pressures, Toronto has becomea locus for immigration, investment, and development, and our currentspectacular growth shows no sign of abating.

Toronto is being transformed by the simultaneous pressures of enormousand sustained growth; an unparalleled increase in the city’s diversity,bringing an expansion of the talent pool and new ideas; an imperative toachieve greater environmental sustainability; and relentless, often disruptivetechnological innovation. The city is very rapidly becoming more vertical,denser, and more mixed.

All of these factors are present to some degree in other places, but inToronto the first and second — radical growth and an increase in the ethnicdiversity in the population — are at unusually high levels. These forcesare converging to form a crucible in which radical change and innovationare being galvanized. It is rocking the status quo of previous assumptions,familiar ways, rules, and practices, and pushing us out of our comfort zone.The city is at the tipping point, in the throes of a rebirth.

I have come to believe that Toronto has moved to a new level and isat a decisive moment of transformation into a new type of city: changingas much in kind as in scale. The contours of this new city are becomingvisible, emerging from the old established roots — literally arising on theframe, the traces, the memories, and the structures (physical, social, economic,cultural) of an older Toronto. The city is being pushed into this newterritory by an infusion of new, boundary-stretching ideas and forces.

I believe that much of what has led to the remarkable transformationalshift underway in Toronto can be traced back to a critical turning point inthe late 1960s and 1970s, which I described briefly in Walking Home. Atthat time, my introduction to the city and the launch of my career coincidedwith a dramatic series of events that set the stage for what was to come.Toronto was a city on the verge of massive change in line with the anticitypolemic of that era. But then, a dramatic series of events occurred, settingthe stage for a major course correction.

Toronto’s guide to its future in 1969, its Official Plan (like that foundin many other cities at that time), called for a kind of progress inspired bythe principles of what was then the modern movement in city planning.Among other things, it was based on a full embrace of the private automobile,including massive highway construction (with a complete interwovennetwork including the Spadina, Scarborough, and Crosstown Expressways);ripping up streetcar tracks; separating places of living from places of workas much as possible; replacing traditional main streets with shopping malls— the Dufferin, Pape and Gerrard Malls were, in fact, built as prototypes;demolition of major civic buildings — Union Station, Old City Hall, andthe St. Lawrence Market were all considered for demolition — to make wayfor the new; and a call for widespread “urban renewal.” A vast boomerangshape indicating proposed demolition appeared on a city document, hoveringominously over the whole downtown and adjacent inner city neighbourhoods.In other words, a gutting of the city was in the offing, preparingit to be remade in the name of a then widely held view of “modernity.”

To many, these were frightening prospects. A citizen resistance grewout of a unique amalgam of the city’s traditional small c conservatismand a new, left-of-centre coalition, motivated by a sense of civic empowermentand led by an engaged civic leadership. The resistance grew like asnowball, gaining momentum as new champions emerged. In a series ofhotly contested municipal elections, an increasing number of progressivecity councillors were elected, supported by grassroots activism and communitybacklash.

Once they had a majority, the new “reform council,” led by belovedmayor David Crombie, used their mandate to reverse course, rejecting thedominant postwar modernist template. With the unlikely intervention ofthen premier William Davis, they famously put a highly symbolic nail inthe coffin of the Spadina Expressway, which would have eviscerated a seriesof downtown neighbourhoods, and cancelled a whole network of othercity-damaging highways in its wake.

It is hard to overstate the importance of the change. This was a completeabout-face for the city, one that would have far-reaching consequences,setting Toronto on a very different trajectory. The car wassignificantly dethroned as the primary mode of transportation; plans torip up streetcar lines were thwarted, making Toronto one of the few citieson the continent to retain this form of transit. Urban renewal and “blockbusting”of long-established neighbourhoods to make way for tower-inthe-park style redevelopment was halted. Heritage preservation wasembraced, saving a number of cherished structures from demolition —including the St. Lawrence Market, now the throbbing heart of a revitalizedneighbourhood; the glorious 1898 Richardsonian Old City Hall;and the magnificent beaux arts Union Station.

The middle class stayed or returned...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
DUNDURN PR LTD
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1459743075
ISBN 13 
9781459743076
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
336
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Buchbär
info@buchbaer.de

Weberstr. 67
Osnabrück
49084
Deutschland