Cover featuring a colourful collage of multiple buildings with some people and cars. White letters spelling "Messy Cities" peek out from collage elements, with "Why we Can't Plan Everything" below it. In the bottom right, similar, smaller words read "Edited by Dylan Reid, Zahra Ebrahim, Leslie Woo, and John Lorinc."

Messy Cities

Why We Can’t Plan Everything

Edited by Dylan Reid, Zahra Ebrahim, Leslie Woo, and John Lorinc

Coach House Books, Toronto

individual essays copyright © the contributors, 2025

collection copyright © Coach House Books, 2025

first edition

Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Messy cities : why we can’t plan everything / edited by Zahra Ebrahim, Dylan Reid, Leslie Woo, and John Lorinc.

Names: Ebrahim, Zahra, editor. | Reid, Dylan, editor. | Woo, Leslie, editor. | Lorinc, John, editor.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20250165015 | Canadiana (ebook) 20250165066 | Isbn 9781552455036 (softcover) | Isbn 9781770568433 (Epub) | Isbn 9781770568556 (Pdf)

Subjects: Lcsh: City planning. | Lcsh: Urban renewal. | Lcsh: Sociology, Urban. Classification: Lcc HT166 .M47 2025 | Ddc 307.1/216—dc23

Messy Cities: Why We Can’t Plan Everything is available as an ebook: Isbn 978 1 77056 843 3 (Epub), 978 1 77056 855 6 (Pdf)

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Introduction

Dylan Reid

My local park is criss-crossed with paths. Most are paved, and they anticipate many of the natural routes that visitors want to travel. But one is just earth, a wide gash in the grass trodden down by thousands of feet over the years. Its edges waver in and out according to some mysterious algorithm, its surface ripples with tree roots and miniature ravines. Little beaten tracks poke out from it at angles, revealing where its users go next. This informal trail is a connector between parallel paved paths, serving a natural route that the park’s designers did not anticipate. It was created and is maintained by its users, not Toronto’s parks department.

These kinds of informal paths have various names, but my favourite is ‘desire lines.’ To me, desire lines are a microcosm of the concept of messy urbanism that this anthology explores. They reveal how people shape the city, in defiance of how the city tries to shape people. They are created by innumerable feet, each acting individually and yet collectively disrupting the structure and design of the urban environment. Each of us contributes to developing a desire line every time we use one. They are shaped by the grassroots, built from the ground up.

Desire lines also encapsulate some of the characteristics of messy urbanism. Their boundaries are fuzzy and fluid – they pierce through a predefined demarcation, and, unlike a paved path, they expand or contract based on how they are used, as grass is trampled or grows back. That fluidity is chronological too. They may be ephemeral, disappearing completely if the destination vanishes or a better route emerges – or, if the authorities give in and pave it, becoming permanent instead.

Such shortcuts also embody aspects of the public concern with messy urbanism. They may not reflect everyone’s desires. Many consider them ugly – a muddy track that disfigures a landscape. They are not accessible to everyone – it might not be possible to traverse them in a wheelchair, or with a stroller, or by relying on a cane for navigation. The lack of accountability and systematic maintenance means a snowstorm or torrential rain might make them risky, or unusable, for anyone.

Despite their apparent messiness, desire lines follow an internal logic: they are the most direct way to walk from one place to another. As we will see, other examples of messy urbanism reflect a similar type of urban logic, one that is different from what is authorized but that nonetheless shapes how they are manifested. Each example reveals a need that has been overlooked, a desire that has not been satisfied.

The value of desire lines goes beyond providing a convenient path, although that functional service is important. They also create an unspoken dialogue between city dwellers and those who have power, and, thus, remind authorities that power goes both ways. They challenge the conventional and accepted image and structure of the city, reshaping it according to the desires and the needs of those who do not have formal authority or expertise.

They are the paths we take rather than the paths we are given.

Messy urbanism is at once a sign of dysfunction and of vibrancy, of problems unresolved and of people taking action to solve them. It can push against official narratives, or help change those narratives. Generated organically from the ground up, by individual actions with no grand design, messy urbanism offers itself up humbly and is easily dismissed and overlooked. Yet it can have significance if given real attention.

The goal of this collection is to show that messiness is an essential element of the city. At first glance, it’s startling to hear the word messy used in a positive way in terms of urban life. We generally think of a mess as something that needs to be cleaned up. But it is time to rehabilitate the term as the necessary counterpoint to the drive for order. Messiness does not need to be – indeed, should not be – dominant, but order needs to be in constant creative tension with disorder for cities to thrive.

Some forms of mess are undoubtedly undesirable – garbage, sewage, pollution, dereliction. For other manifestations of messiness, the question of whether they are good or bad for the city is contested, a judgment that depends on the eye of the beholder. Messiness is inevitably complicated – it takes more work, both mentally and physically, to manage. And it can take work to create, as well. To be messy can be risky (depending on your identity, and who can safely ‘make a mess’), exhausting (demanding unpaid volunteer labour to address an unmet need), and unending (facing up to constant external attempts to tidy it up).

That extra effort is worth it, this book argues, because messiness brings vitality, encourages creativity, opens a city to adaptation and innovation, and enables individual agency. But messy urbanism needs championing, because our minds and instincts tend to default to the seemingly simpler option of seeking order. As economic journalist Tim Harford writes in his book Messy, ‘we often succumb to the temptation of a tidy-minded approach when we would be better served by embracing a degree of mess.’ The value of messiness needs to be articulated explicitly for us to give it equal consideration.

The tension between order and disorder is an eternal one in human societies, expressed in myth, art, literature, and philosophy. Cities, like all human endeavours, have always experienced this tension. But the Industrial Revolution in Europe intensified it. The population of cities expanded at an unheard-of pace, creating slums and generating waste that overwhelmed traditional methods of disposal. Factories spilled coal dust and other pollutants into the air and waters. But rural people still moved to cities because these new industries and technologies offered economic opportunities and spurred new ideas. As part of the same process, the growth of the bureaucratic state meant governments developed more elaborate administrative capacities for ordering and regulating cities. Municipal agencies built sewers, developed police forces, and began rearranging the urban landscape, most iconically in Paris in the mid-nineteenth century, when Baron Georges-Eugène von Haussman drove grand boulevards through the warrens of medieval streets.

European colonialism, meanwhile, impacted cities in the rest of the world. In some places, such as the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, European invaders destroyed existing urban structures, replacing them with European models. In places like India and Southeast Asia, colonial administrators disrupted cities by building European-style enclaves to separate themselves from the indigenous populations. Despite the pollution and desperate state of many industrial-era European cities, colonialism ‘othered’ global forms of urbanity, implicitly denigrating them as ‘messy’ even while they had their own order that long predated the arrival of imperial armies. In fact, these places became messier because colonialism destroyed existing power structures and deprived local populations of the power to manage their own cities in their own manner.

The twentieth century was marked by a search for urban order that sought to both address the impacts and take advantage of the opportunities of the Industrial Revolution. Proponents of the garden city and similar planning reform movements developed plans that enabled city dwellers to escape the dirt and crowding of industrial cities by building clean and spacious neighbourhoods on their outskirts. Modernists, in turn, inspired by the new capacities of industrial production, advocated for a rationalist, technological approach to architecture and city forms. The 1933 Athens Charter, a manifesto written after a meeting of leading modernists led by the architect Le Corbusier, argued that contemporary cities offered ‘an image of chaos.’ Its recommendations for bringing order to urban development were influential for many decades. City planning became a profession in its own right, one that sought to manage cities both at the macro level and the micro level, from entire districts to individual buildings. Massive infrastructure projects brought new sewers, subways, highways, and planned communities. All of these changes were motivated by a search for control and a desire to eliminate urban mess.

On the surface, such planning ideologies sought to separate living spaces from the pollution of industrial and commercial zones, a separation enabled by the development of mass transit and then automobiles. But underlying many of these plans was a desire to distance ‘respectable’ people from the heterogeneous populations that had long migrated to urban areas for opportunities or freedoms. The construction of expressways through poor, often racialized parts of North American cities became the ultimate expression of this motivation, enabling the middle classes to move easily between downtown jobs and services and distant suburbs while destroying less privileged neighbourhoods in between.

As is often the case, once messy urbanism faced serious challenges, some observers began to recognize its value. In her book The Walkable City, Mary Soderstrom cites a nineteenth-century Parisian, Léonce Reynaud, who articulated the value of the older, messy layers of Paris even as they were being lost to Haussmann’s projects. He argued, ‘[The city] guards invaluable evidence of the phases through which it has passed. The plan, so complicated that one can find no law in it and which at first glance appears to have been drawn by chance, in fact has innumerable causes each with its own value, and which have been worked on by time.’

In the second half of the twentieth century, as modernist planning became dominant, other observers began to articulate alternative approaches. Urbanist Jane Jacobs famously spoke out against the mania for big, centrally planned projects, championing instead organic evolution and neighbourhoods mixed in both uses and populations. The sociologist Richard Sennett, in turn, championed grassroots, horizontal forms of governance and the value that diversity and complexity brought to cities. He encapsulated this approach in his 2011 article for the London School of Economics’ Urban Age project, ‘Why Complexity Improves the Quality of City Life,’ where he praised how ‘[l]earning to interact well with strangers requires a toleration of ambiguity, the capacity to contain frustration, an ability to listen carefully to people whose speech, needs, or desires may seem alien.’

Now, in the twenty-first century, this resistance has expanded into a deep-seated resurgence of the spirit of messy urbanism. Grassroots campaigns to reshape the city, such as Portland’s ‘intersection repair’ movement (where residents banded together to paint elaborate images on streets to slow traffic), have coalesced under the banner of ‘tactical urbanism,’ championing improvised and unofficial interventions to shape the city. This approach, however, is for the most part only available to people with the security and status to safely challenge authority. The official manifestation of tactical urbanism took shape in the ‘pilot project’ strategy for urban change championed by New York City transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan in the first decade of the current century. In that approach, the municipal government itself deploys quick and cheap interventions to test and demonstrate potential changes, most famously at Times Square in 2009, where the city turned traffic lanes into a pedestrian plaza overnight using paint, planters, and folding chairs.

In planning, mixed-use areas have become the preferred orthodoxy. At the same time, the ‘southern turn’ in planning discourse marked a realization that many practices in non-Western nations once dismissed as ‘messy,’ such as street vendors, incremental construction, or extremely mixed-use buildings, might actually be desirable sources of economic opportunity and vitality. In 2016, Sennett and other leading urbanists wrote The Quito Papers and the New Urban Agenda, published by UN-Habitat as a direct response to the modernist 1933 Athens Charter. The Quito Papers champion a vision that ‘embraces the concepts of flexibility and resilience, accommodating heterogeneity and change, in ways that allow people to re-appropriate spaces and places.’

This book aspires to frame ‘messy urbanism’ as an overall banner that encompasses these diverse but related trends, articulating a broad philosophy of how best to enable the full potential of the city. However, this anthology is not intended to be exhaustive – on the contrary, it takes the point of view that a comprehensive study of messy urbanism would be contrary to the whole spirit of this idea. Instead, Messy Cities takes its form from its subject – eclectic and impressionistic, providing splashes of colour that only begin to suggest the shape of the concept. We have not delved in detail into every potential subject, such as the better-known trends of tactical urbanism and pilot projects that have been well-studied already. Nor have we provided a specific definition of messy urbanism. Rather, we want to open a space for thoughtful writers and practitioners with a range of expertise and experience to respond to the question of what messy urbanism means to them – responses that can be in conversation or even conflict with each other. As with a desire line, the aim is for many individual steps to begin to define the outlines and direction of our thinking, developing a pathway that we hope many others will be inspired to build upon.

The inspiration for this book goes back to 2007, when Los Angeles urbanist James Rojas came to Toronto to present at a conference. Afterward, he wrote to Spacing magazine’s Shawn Micallef about how much he’d loved Toronto, a message that was published online with his permission. What he’d loved about Toronto was its messy urbanism – its ‘less-than-manicured quality,’ the way the streets commingled streetcars, bikes, pedestrians, and cars, the way fruit stands spilled out over sidewalks, the way ramshackle Victorian buildings sat side by side with glossy new ones. Rojas’s take was a bit of a surprise, because traditionally Toronto had been seen as overly orderly – ‘Toronto the Good’ in a traditional moniker, or ‘New York run by the Swiss,’ in actor Peter Ustinov’s quip from the 1980s, a line that was not necessarily a compliment but was sometimes taken as such by Torontonians. After all, it was a place where playgrounds had been locked up on Sundays until several decades into the twentieth century, where the city had once tried to regulate which side of the sidewalk pedestrians should walk on, where a favourite urban legend had it that a Hollywood movie production became frustrated because municipal workers cleaned up the trash and graffiti they’d placed in an alleyway to make it look like a gritty American city.

But rapid growth, budgetary struggles, and the forced 1998 amalgamation of the old city with its suburban neighbours changed Toronto by the early 2000s. It was no longer so orderly and well-maintained, but it perhaps gained a greater sense of vibrancy. When I read Rojas’s piece, I felt a surge of recognition as to why I loved the energetic, if messy, downtown neighbourhood where I had moved a few years previously. I wrote about the idea of messy urbanism in the pages of Spacing, but the concept always felt like it needed a larger treatment – one that brought in, messily, many voices and insights from around the world. I was fortunate to find co-editors who shared this vision and had the networks to bring those voices together.

While this collection benefits from examples from around the world, inevitably many of the examples are local, from Toronto. With its experience of a tradition of straitlaced regulation now being challenged and disrupted by rapid changes, and its population from around the world (almost half of Greater Toronto’s residents were born outside Canada), Toronto makes a useful exemplar of messy urbanism. Truth be told, the city was never as straitlaced as it presented itself – there has always been an undercurrent of messiness.

A fine metaphor for this duality is the city’s street layout – the apparent neat, New World grid is restricted to its major arterial roads while inside each megablock sits a hodgepodge of misaligned residential or secondary streets. Meanwhile, the grid is broken up by feral ravines that carve through the city. The valley of the Don River, to choose one example, was once full of industries that rendered its waters foul. Today, it is being reclaimed by trees, shrubs, and wild-flowers growing over the bricks and rebar of demolished factories and abandoned dumping grounds. The ‘Toronto the Good’ moniker, in fact, originated in a nineteenth-century mayor’s campaign against the underbelly of crime, prostitution, and corruption that lay beneath the city’s respectable veneer.

In the second half of the twentieth century, Toronto began to revolt against its straitlaced past. Jane Jacobs, who moved to Toronto in the late 1960s, wrote her later works here and had a direct influence on how the city evolved. In the early 1970s, parks commissioner Tommy Thompson famously replaced warning signs on the city’s lawns with ones that invited residents to ‘Please walk on the grass.’ Toronto can even claim to have originated some of its own urban messiness. Several of these chapters refer to Business Improvement Areas – a kind of eccentric sub-jurisdiction of municipal governance that allows local businesses to band together to levy themselves and spend the proceeds on their main streets. Bias become miniature local authorities, popping up erratically across the city to shape their own individual streetscapes. The concept was introduced by businesses in Toronto’s Bloor West Village in 1970, and it has subsequently been replicated around the world. Toronto has the most of any city worldwide.

Another aspect of Toronto’s messy urbanism is its porousness. The city draws in people from around the world, both temporarily and permanently, who bring connections to their past homes with them. Many of the Toronto-focused chapters in the pages that follow relate the experiences of the city by people from many different nations. These connections also mean Toronto is enmeshed in a global web of cities that can learn from each other, and chapters from and about that global web create a counterbalance to Toronto in this book. Like Toronto, each of these cities experiences a tension between order and disorder, but in each city the specific nature of that tension manifests in different ways. The principle is universal, but the specific experience of each city is unique.

A part of the world that does not figure largely in our book is Europe. It’s a continent that is already heavily referenced in urbanist discussions and thus is not in desperate need of attention. Rather, our contributors have focused on varied and dynamic experiences from cities across the rest of the globe. Nor is there any shortage of other potential subjects left undiscussed in this book. Corporations have long used the chic of messy urbanism, such as pasting posters on construction hoardings, to sell products. In this century, tech companies have sold their services by touting the ‘disruption’ of municipal regulations as part of their appeal, but that commodification of messiness is left for others to dig into. Street vendors are one of the most visible manifestations of messy urbanism, but, in the end, none of our writers took on that subject. And there are many more. But we do examine every part of the city – buildings and infrastructure, streets and sidewalks, parks and yards, shops and services, and the art and signage that animates public spaces, along with intangibles like governance and regulation. Most importantly, the contributors write about the most messy and complex part of any city: its people and their interactions, activities, and initiatives. Messy cities reveal rather than smother the diversity of their populations and the often-contradictory range of their desires, and they open spaces for everyone, no matter their background or training, to participate in urban change.

None of these subjects are dealt with definitively. Each chapter opens up a subject rather than closes it down. While the authors generally celebrate messy urbanism, they also face up to its problems and limitations. They both ask and answer questions: When is mess good for cities? When it is bad? How can we identify its potential and its limits? Readers will find many different styles – personal essays, accounts of local initiatives, broad policy insights, and essays that offer a mix of all of these elements. We hope this kaleidoscope will provide readers with a new lens through which to view cities and will stimulate them to consider and share their own stories and reflections on the theme. Perhaps Messy Cities will inspire some readers to take action, whether in ambitious or modest ways. We each find our own desire lines as we build our cities together.

Reflections

A Farewell to El Gran Burrito

John Kamp and James Rojas

Had it not been for its location next to the chic Metro station at the intersection of Santa Monica Boulevard and Vermont Avenue, El Gran Burrito could have been in Tijuana. Or Fresno. Or the middle of nowhere. It resembled the kind of ramshackle roadside stand you’d find well off the freeway, after driving for hours on an empty stomach without a rest-stop vending machine in sight.

Fronting Santa Monica Boulevard just west of Vermont, El Gran Burrito’s architecture consisted of a simple one-storey building brightly painted in yellow and red, wrapped with windows, and with the words ‘El Gran Burrito’ hand-painted on the facade just above the sidewalk. At its western end, the building’s red-tile roof ended and became a kind of curved awning that extended out to provide shelter for those dining outside. On the awning was painted ‘We serve breakfast at any time | Parking.’

The whole building took up maybe one-sixth of the lot it sat within. The rest of the space was devoted to ample surface parking, as well as seating surrounded by wrought-iron fencing topped with plexiglass, with a few potted ficus thrown in for good measure. Under the extension of the roof, in the outdoor seating area, sat a massive condiment table, offering everything from guacamole (think less Super Bowl– style and more like a sauce) to infernal homemade salsa.

El Gran Burrito’s utilitarian architecture wasn’t an anomaly in Los Angeles, a land historically brimming with unnoteworthy, oftentimes downright ugly buildings that frequently hide gourmet delights, hubs of creative activity, spaces of production and fabrication, and meeting places for people from all walks of life. Whether they’re drab or aggressively bright, gaudy or forgettable, these shack-like structures and the life they generate counter a prevailing notion that architectural splendour is a core driver of urban vitality.

For three decades, El Gran’s flim-flam architecture served as a beloved backdrop to an uncurated cross-section of the city’s populace: Latino, white, gay, straight, trans, self-consciously cool, completely uncool, and everything in between. For more than fifteen years, that vibe, along with the stand’s staggering array of condiments, kept us coming back.

We would often take the bus along Santa Monica Boulevard from Silver Lake to go out in Hollywood or West Hollywood, then catch the bus late at night to go home. El Gran Burrito was a natural pit stop on the return trip – open late, welcoming to everyone, and appearing right around the time you wanted off the bus.

On one particular morning after rather rollicking Cinco de Mayo festivities, the wind was blowing hard and dry, bending palm trees and sweeping paper napkins off tables – weather we normally associate with fall in Los Angeles, not spring. But this wasn’t the moment to contemplate the cosmic and ecological implications of a Santa Ana wind in spring. We were tipsy and had just ordered food, the line of hungry people stretching from the order window to the parking lot.

After dousing our quesadillas in toasty red salsa and smoke-your-tongue-off pickled jalapeños and carrots, we sat down with our friends at one of the tables, sinking into a bleary-eyed but celebratory meal. There we could properly take in the decidedly uncurated scene: a mix of gay rancheros spilling out of the nearby nightclub Tempo, Central American trans folks with their friends and tricks, middle-aged Mexican couples, a smattering of white hipsters, and East L.A. gay kids returning from a night out at Circus Disco in WeHo. The fluorescent lights weren’t kind to any of us. Still, we were grateful to be there. Whether your trip home was sending you east or west, El Gran Burrito was the perfect comfort-food refuge for all manner of urban denizens.

As my friends and I stood up to leave, one of them mentioned that El Gran’s days were numbered. L.A. County’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority had begun developing the land on and around Red Line stations. The idea was to boost ridership, tackle the dire shortage of housing, and generate economic opportunity.

Fast-forward to 2020, and that prophecy became a reality. L.A.’s housing shortage, the cost of real estate, the pandemic, and longstanding plans to develop the land around Metro’s subway stations dealt El Gran a series of blows it couldn’t recover from. By the end of 2020, it had officially closed.

As urban planners and designers, we are supposed to mildly mourn the loss of a place like El Gran but celebrate its redevelopment. We are schooled and trained to think that the best buildings and public spaces are born of grand visions framed by clean lines and filled with exquisite details. Design it beautifully and the people will come – or so the maxim goes. In the case of El Gran, its architecture was far from beautiful or noteworthy.

The area immediately surrounding the restaurant fares no better in the spectacular urbanism department: overstuffed strip malls, half-empty parking lots, gas stations, towering power lines, roaring traffic, booming swap meets, underperforming chain retail stores, and intersections that don’t give you enough time to walk across six lanes of traffic.

Indeed, the restaurant and its surrounding landscape represented – and represent – everything we are supposed to abhor and the general population is supposed to dislike. Add to this skyrocketing housing prices and explosive rates of homelessness and, well, aesthetics and practicality both demanded an end to El Gran Burrito.

And yet we’re not convinced that replacing these design elements with flat, monochrome stucco facades and sleek steel casement windows is a net improvement for the city, its culture, or its public spaces. And what happens when those aesthetics get repeated ad nauseam? You get a sameness in scale and look that makes cities almost indistinguishable from each other.

To be fair, the architects of the new project at the El Gran site have tried to work within the constraining nature of L.A. Metro (the Los Angeles County transportation authority) site design parameters to provide ample public outdoor space adjacent to new retail and the subway station. The site will no longer consist of a wash of asphalt and surface parking, numerous trees will be added, much-needed housing will become available, and the new building’s bright colours of pink and teal are a playful nod to the eclectic nature of the city. However, it was a failing of urban planning, architecture, and urban design policy that the design brief from the start was not to integrate both El Gran and the new housing into one site.

In many ways, this failing isn’t unique to Los Angeles at all. Many American cities have been terrible at codifying a kind of urban design that places intrinsic value on maintaining and/or creating streets and spaces with a mix of building types, ages, styles, sizes, and scales. Buildings deemed historically or architecturally significant might – might – be preserved, but when it comes to, say, a simple two-storey mixed-use building from the early twentieth century, or a less noteworthy building like the one that housed El Gran Burrito, their long-term survival is tenuous at best. And yet the best urban design, the best streets to walk down and be in, contain that mix of the old and new, notable and not so notable, large and small, and so on. They have the grain, detail, and layers of history that make them a curiosity, a visual delight, and that are specific to the town or city they are in. El Gran Burrito and its brethren were and are part of what makes the Los Angeles urban landscape unique.

Now, though, the innumerable quirky, shacky spaces tucked into hillsides and between larger buildings that once made L.A. an intriguing hodgepodge of country roadside stand and megacity are disappearing, along with a sense of possibility and openness in the urban landscape. For us, spaces like El Gran Burrito – or Tiki-Ti, Carnitas Michoacan, or innumerable others – spark creativity and imagination. Their replacements offer a sense of familiarity and finality.

Knowing that these spaces and structures have intrinsic value for the city, for its streets, for its vitality, for its diverse array of residents, how do we codify them into an enduring part of the urban fabric while also encouraging the creation of new housing? This is a question that first and foremost needs to be asked, as right now very few, at least on the policy-making side, are asking it. If we did, we might be less quick to write off spaces and places like El Gran Burrito.

In our case, when we heard that the end was officially nigh for El Gran Burrito, we didn’t cheer as we dreamed of a less cluttered, more pristine East Hollywood. We scrolled through a mental mishmash of its condiment cart, its collection of customers, its expansive menu, and the unprecious architecture that housed so much life and good cheer. Given the choice between the clean lines of Grand Avenue’s growing list of acropolises to high culture and the scruffy realness of a place like El Gran Burrito, we’d pick the latter. We can’t think of anywhere else we could go in the wee hours of Sunday morning that would feel as animated or would unite such a kooky cross-section of people for something as simple as no-frills Mexican food.

These Walls, These Roads

Ameer Idreis

I wait in the bus, every seat taken, bodies spilling into the aisle. The fabric burns like bristles against my legs. When I sat down an hour ago, a plume of dust, beautiful yet suffocating, had drifted up into the air. It’s been circling ever since. These windows don’t open, no matter how hard I try.

The mid-July sun beats down on us, as we’re practically parked on this desert road but for every sudden inch forward that brings with it a short-lived hope that they might process us now. I draw the curtains to keep out the sun and its heat, but the heat is ever-present. It’s far hotter in this bus than outside, where at least a faint breeze might dry our dewy brows. But the curtain feels both like a shield and a blindfold. I’ve lost sight of them – good riddance – the two soldiers in their watchtower. Still, they can see us. They and their guns. No, best keep the curtain open. If something were to happen, I’d want to know, I tell myself.

It’s a busy day. Some of us are diaspora returning, setting out on a pilgrimage to our familial hometowns, counting down the hours until we embrace those we left behind for a life elsewhere. Others are returning home, daydreaming of the comfort of their beds, having ventured beyond the walls of the Occupation and into the outside world. The Jordan River, now barely a trickle, has been humbled by a mightier river flowing in two ways – the river of Palestinians going over it, between their homeland and the world.

No matter how often I make this trip – every other summer in recent years – I seem to forget this journey, lengthy, humiliating, and despairing as it is. Thinking of it now, I can’t help but see the compulsory ordeal as the human-imposed shaping of our lives with the allegedly mundane tools of urban planning. Perhaps you object, but is it not the same asphalt in the road and concrete in the walls? What’s the point of a road if not to move people, and of walls if not to keep people on one side or the other?

Urban planning in Palestine is a complex, multi-tiered system of formal and informal, imposing and insurgent, Israeli and Palestinian. The Fertile Crescent of the Levant is home to some of the oldest cities, towns, and villages in the world. The Levant’s dirt roads and limestone bricks, its mosques, churches, and synagogues, older than time – wave after wave of culture, civilization, conflict, and colonization have shaped the urbanism here. And now we face a brutal and inhumane military occupation – an occupation of stone and concrete, an occupation of place and of people and of time.

I cross the Jordan River, somehow seem to stumble my way through the Israeli border crossing, ordered along by a series of soldiers who demand I tell them why I’m entering my homeland. And at last, I enter Palestine. Now, in Jericho, I scan the parking lot of orange minivans for one that reads Al-Khalil – that’s my destination, my familial hometown in the southern West Bank.

From here, it’s a dizzying journey. Though dotted with endearing shops and fruit stands that tempt you to pull over and buy a promising watermelon or a bag of glistening, gem-like plums, neither the roads nor the terrain they stretch across are pleasant. I count five illegal Israeli settlements on the way, along with a dozen billboards for various other settlements all over Palestine, each with a photogenic, ready-to-move-in family to make you think, ‘Hey! Maybe I could move here and be a settler on Palestinian land too! They sure make contravening international law look fun!’

We approach the first point of interest – if one can use such a term to describe a permanently staffed military checkpoint complete with a watchtower, barbed wire, and combat-ready soldiers. Disappointingly, it has a 1.0-star rating on Google Maps, so I knew not to get my hopes up. I attempt to act nonplussed as we pull up to the soldier. This checkpoint and the hundreds of checkpoints like it all over the West Bank are common sights in headlines. They are everywhere, acting as valves to control the flow of Palestinians from one town to the next. I know the sort of depravity that takes place here – when the distance between brothers goes from mere kilometres to a prolonged infinity, denied access, unable to see one another; when a mother is forced to go through labour on the roadside, not admitted to seek care at the hospital in the neighbouring town. I hold my breath.

I let my shoulders fall and I realize the tension I’d been carrying – neck and shoulders high-strung, bracing, always bracing. We’re let through, heading south to descend into, and then zigzag back out of, Wadi al-Nar (the Valley of Fire). Wadi al-Nar, I figure, is so-called for the scorching heat that seems to collect and concentrate here, but there’s also a biblical connection – the place closest to hell, the place where judgment will be made on every soul. I suppose it won’t be my last time here.

It’s difficult to describe just how steep the valley’s rock face is (if you ski, think a black diamond slope). Between the insurmountable incline, the whiplashing sharp turns, and the sun bearing down, I’m amazed this road is even open. The van sputters, jerking as the driver pushes into the pedal. I imagine the engine failing, the brake wearing out, and feeling the sudden backward pull of gravity as we roll off this mountainside and into the depths of the valley. At least this part of the trip has some more billboards to take in, to distract from the danger of the road – these ones less worthy of Un sanction, merely ads for Sim cards and milk.

Our route feels strange and circuitous. Surely this isn’t the quickest way to the south. Earlier the licence plates were intermixed – Palestinian green and Israeli yellow – but now we form a river of Palestinian cars, trickling across this desert. Somewhere along the way, we’ve separated – they rushing one way and we flowing another.

I pull up a map and trace our route, seeing where we’ve diverged. Those with Israeli plates and permits had continued west along Highway 1 to Jerusalem before turning south on Highway 60 toward Hebron (the English name for Al-Khalil). We, on the other hand, had come off earlier, heading onto intercity Route 417, then Route 4171, finding ourselves at the checkpoint and Wadi al-Nar. We will only join back up with them on Highway 60 just south of Bethlehem. The entire detour was due to who we are and where we are permitted to go – we are blocked from entering Jerusalem, forced to circumnavigate the Holy City. This realization – that this ordeal of a journey was imposed upon us – recast the Occupation for me.

The diverging routes from Areeha (Jericho) to Al-Khalil (Hebron). In dark grey is annexed East Jerusalem. Some routes are differentiated between highway that is open to all (regardless of nationality or permit), the faster route used by Israelis and residents of Jerusalem, and the longer road Palestinians must take. Thus, Palestinians travelling from Ramallah to Al-Khalil must circumnavigate annexed Jerusalem. Note that hundreds of checkpoints and watchtowers are not marked, solely those encountered on this specific route.

I make it to Al-Khalil. This is a secret. I don’t always join family on these summer visits and so, when I do, we’ve made a habit of it being a surprise. I’ve never been a fan of this surprise. It always felt strange to me to assume that I was this delightful present – that my presence was a gift. And yet here I am, waiting in the doorway, like a travel-worn present under the tree. My grandmother’s voice is humming somewhere in the house. I hear the boiling of water and the stirring of a spoon against a teapot. I take in the smell of fresh herbs, the window open, with lush mint and thyme wafting in.

A photo taken in August 2021 in Beit Jala, overlooking Bethlehem. The Israeli settlement of Har Homa can be seen in the middle of the horizon. It was purposefully built to impede the growth of neighbouring Palestinian Bethlehem. Bottom right are walls blocking Palestinian access to Highway 60, which tunnels under Beit Jala, connecting nearby Jerusalem to settlements in the south.

One of my cousins calls her over and she leaves her post by the stove, surely ready to deal with a scraped knee or pull a coin or two from her pouch for sweets. And then there she is, stopping as her eyes find me. Her mouth says my name, before I think she’s even realized I’m here. From thousands of kilometres to but a metre away and then to no distance at all. I’m in her arms. She pulls back and I see her tears and I realize – she’d thought I was gone, lost to what lay beyond the walls and the checkpoints and the border crossing. She’d thought that the relative ease of the outside world would charm me to forget her, to forget family, to forget this land. My presence is a gift. It’s a reminder that though these walls and these roads mean distance and time, we return.

Everyone knows a place takes (and makes) space. Stores and streets and parks and homes – they all require space. Streets roll out, overtaking hills, bisecting fields, turning into bridges to skip over streams and valleys. They lengthen and turn and take on all forms – tree-lined boulevards, waning crescents and cul-de-sacs, bustling main streets, and notorious eight-, ten-, twelve-lane highways. It’s a spectre to behold, to gaze at the city from your window, take in the urban canyon that makes skyscrapers into steep peaks and streets into their inverse valleys, or choose to see the concrete, asphalt, glass, and steel from above in satellite images.

Really, this is no revelation to anyone. After all, some of the messiest, most contested debates of our urban world come down to the question of space and how to use it, from suburban sprawl to high-rise condos to parks. But there’s also the question of time, and once you go down the rabbit hole of viewing place through time’s hourglass, well, I’m afraid there’s no unseeing it. How long is the bus-stop wait? How long is the walk to the nearest grocery store? How many years of work until you can afford a home? How long is the co-op housing waiting list? How about your commute? How late can you stay out? Until the transit service ends? Until you stop feeling safe? How long does it take to build a subway? Hell, how long does it take to agree on building a subway?

In all of these and in so many other ways, a place means space and space means time – time to create, time to navigate, time to contest, and time to revise. And in all places – but pointedly so in places of heightened contention, injustice, and oppression – space and time are warped by those in power.

To say this land is contested is a near-comical understatement. Take Jerusalem, for example. The status of Jerusalem as the capital of either Israel or Palestine is contested, as is the Israeli annexation and control of East Jerusalem (illegal under international law). Israel maintains Jerusalem as its undivided capital and enforces political, military, linguistic, and planning policy to exert its physical and cultural control over the city. A place isn’t merely space – it’s more complex. Yes, it requires space, but also control and belief. Planning turns space into place.

How does this materialize? The Jerusalem Master Plan 2000, for example, explicitly notes the goal to change demographic trends and ‘to maintain a ratio of 70 per cent Jews and 30 per cent Arabs.’¹ To achieve this, it outlines how the city will be shaped. It sets out uneven neighbourhood expansions, giving to Jewish neighbourhoods more land relative to their populations than to Arab neighbourhoods. Jewish residential increases are to be met largely through neighbourhood area expansion (62 per cent expansion, 38 per cent densification), but Palestinian increases are focused on densification (44 per cent expansion, 56 per cent densification).² This expansion of Jewish settlement has since occurred predominantly in the east of the city, confiscating land internationally recognized as Palestinian and constraining the expansion of nearby Palestinian towns like Bethlehem.³ In this way, those in power use strategic disparities in zoning and land allocation to expand Israeli control in the area. Power is used to take land in order to make space for the type of city those in power wish to see.

Places change all the time. Perhaps the only constant is that they change. Change is all around us, and yet we’re not used to it. Something as physically small as a new bench in the local park stops us in our tracks – a happy surprise, a spot to rest, a site for dedication and memorial. Something as necessary as new housing brings out a whole host of voices – a home for future residents and friendly neighbours, yet a rallying point for neighbourhood preservationists and the professionally concerned. And then I come here, and I think how strange it is the way the brutal and the absurd can become so standard that we don’t bat an eye, that we nearly don’t question, that we begin to accept.

The Israeli separation wall, known as the West Bank Barrier, is one such human imposition. Ostensibly constructed solely for Israeli security, the Wall runs to the east of the Green Line (the demarcation line settled on in the 1949 Armistice Agreements), carving into the West Bank and effectively annexing Palestinian land. The effect on both an allegedly viable two-state solution and on Palestinian communities and families, now separated by a military barrier, is profound. The Wall also runs through East Jerusalem, isolating the envisioned capital of a Palestinian state from the major nearby cities of Ramallah and Bethlehem. It walls off select, predominantly Palestinian, East Jerusalem neighbourhoods, pushing them out into the periphery and abdicating municipal services and authority from them.⁴ Inversely, it incorporates illegal Israeli settlements from the West Bank into Israel.⁵ The spatial effects of the Wall are twofold: separation and annexation.

A photo taken in May 2018 in Bethlehem. The Separation/Apartheid Wall has become a site of creative expression of the struggle for freedom, Palestinian resistance, and global solidarity, with artists coming to the Wall to add their art and messages. Metres away from the site where this image was taken is Banksy’s Walled Off Hotel – a boutique art hotel with exhibits on the history and effects of the Wall and the Occupation.

The Wall thus acts as one of many means of settler-colonial exclusionary control over not only Palestinian space, but also Palestinian time. Palestinians face neighbourhood densification, road constriction, detours, and time-consuming surveilled checkpoints. These factors, paired with Israeli settler road expansion that breaks up the contiguity of Palestinian areas, has meant Israelis have both priority and freedom to travel longer distances more quickly, while Palestinians are relegated to a foreigner status that demands they take more time to navigate the physical barriers imposed by Israel.

Foreigners. Outsiders. How do you understand home if home is controlled by another? If home is carved up, shrinking month by month and week by week – streets renamed, communities separated, and towns erased? How do you find belonging and to what do you belong? How can you belong less to the place you live than your parents did, and their parents before them?

Palestinian society, like others in the region, safekeeps ancestry in naming. A name is a declaration of who you are and where you come from. I look at my Palestinian Id card – the one I’m told I must take with me any time I set foot outdoors, lest I be stopped by a soldier in the street or at a checkpoint and be detained. I see on it my four-part name and trace my lineage through it. It begins with me and climbs up my paternal family tree – my name, my father’s, my grandfather’s, and our family name. The ID constrains it to four, but I could climb higher still, citing as many greats as history has recorded. My name is not mine alone. It’s a collective. It’s history. It’s documentation. We are each living testaments to an unbroken chain. Our names unfurl like tendrils of a familial vine, roots firmly planted in the past and in the land.

I think of my parents’ plot of land on a hill north of Al-Khalil. When they first bought it, it was a moment of celebration and pride.

‘This is our land,’ my father says, as we pull off the asphalt and onto a dirt road. He’s been waiting for this moment – to take me, his eldest, to our little piece of Palestine. With an eager – dare I say dramatic – reveal and the twist of a key, he unlocks the gate. The land is a stretch of warm brown dirt – barren, dotted with stone, and surrounded by a knee-high wall and a chain-link fence. Rolling landscape aside, there isn’t much to look at and my eyes quickly grow tired of the sight. I ask what he plans to do with it. I envision a grand limestone villa with a pool and a garden where we would grow plump red tomatoes and foster a small trellis of green grapes. Maybe we could take cuttings of my grandmother’s mint and thyme and grow them in this earth, bringing along their nostalgic aroma and bringing the villa to life. But the vision is cut short.

‘This land is in Area C,’ he says.

I’d heard of Areas A, B, and C – all land in the West Bank is divided into one of these designations and everyone so casually weaves them into conversation – but I don’t see the relevance.

He explains it simply: ‘We can’t build here.’

Area C comprises the majority of the West Bank and is under full Israeli civil and security control (as opposed to A and B, where the Palestinian Authority has at least some level of jurisdiction). To build here is to request permission from Israeli authorities, which is to say, it is near impossible. And so, Palestinians are confined in places where homes and stores and schools can be built. Cities, towns, and villages cannot be shaped by Palestinian people, politicians, and planners. Instead, Palestinians must abide or face demolition, which occurs at an alarming rate, with 1,177 demolished structures (58 per cent in Area C) and consequently 2,296 displaced people in 2023 alone.⁶

I didn’t see the land again that summer despite my father’s repeated wide-eyed invitations. No two weeks went by without him paying it a visit, like checking on a relative, but I saw no reason to. The land wasn’t changing, it wasn’t going anywhere, and frankly I had been underwhelmed. This was the land my parents had worked so hard for? Without a villa to dream up or a future to envision, there wasn’t much beyond dirt and stone. One visit was enough.

But time works its mercurial ways on people as well as place. In hindsight, I attribute the change to learning more about the history of Palestine and its land. Most drastic are the over four hundred Palestinian villages depopulated or destroyed during the 1948 Nakba. Most have since been demolished, sitting in ruins by highways or in national parks, but dozens have been renamed and repopulated with settlers.⁷ Since its inception and to this day, Israel has been transferring Palestinian land and property into permanent public ownership and building new settlements overtop, purposefully overlapping the very communities from which refugees fled and ensuring they have no land to return to. Despite this, it’s our sumūd, our steadfastness in life and on the land, that means we are not erased.

Two years later, I come back to this land with my father, carry jugs of water with him from the car to the now-fledgling fruit trees. He works the land, using a pick to break up the soil and remove the pesky rock, tending so carefully to each plant. I’d never taken him for having much of a green thumb, am frankly a bit stunned, and begin to record him for posterity. He catches me with a chuckle and reminds me that Palestinians are originally fellaheen – tillers of the land.

As he works away, I walk the perimeter of the land, balancing on the wall and surveying my surroundings. Two plots down, I spot a pile of metal scraps reflecting the late-summer sun. I call my father over, pointing to it for clarification. One of our neighbours has set up a makeshift room, no bigger than a shipping container, to house some of his belongings for when he visits his land. As we look over, we understand what’s been done. We can see the bulldozer’s trail, so grinding and erosive that it has dug up the asphalt of the road, leaving a pebble-strewn path in its wake on its way to demolish the structure. It finally sets in. We wouldn’t be building a villa. But we were determined to grow that garden.

A photo taken in September 2021 in East Halhul, just north of Al-Khalil. To the right is my family’s land, growing fig, apricot, plum, peach, and cabbage.

The right to grow and to belong.

The right to the city and to the land.

As I write this, the ‘right to the city,’ first articulated by French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, comes to mind – the right to full participation in the collective act of the city, the right to not only be from or belong to a place but to see yourself reflected in it and to partake in the creative act of shaping where you reside.⁸ For Palestinians, the right to the city first necessitates the right to remain on the land and then to see ourselves in it and in its cities and streets.

We remain. We return.

And so, life goes on. It finds a way through the cracks of any wall. I traversed a militarized border crossing, checkpoints, and a hellish, winding route to be here, to be with family, and to be in my grand-mother’s arms. My cousin makes the journey from Al-Khalil to Ramallah and back for university, and each time she is reminded that she is denied from going into and through Jerusalem. And my mother dreams of the day she boards a homebound plane and lands in a liberated Palestine.

These roads and these walls, they do mean distance and time, and they mean loss and oppression, and they mean injustice and inhumanity, but they will not stop us. Life and hope and freedom find a way to overcome the brutal and the absurd.

Endnotes can be found on p. 321.

Living Loud: The Migration of a Steelpan Soundtrack

Leslie Woo

The Woos are notoriously neat. My father and my aunts and uncles were meticulous and punctual, and had all decided or learned early that every object and every possession had its one true place. Should anything find itself out of place, there would be a surge of energy devoted to tidying, repositioning coupled with the requisite scolding of the disorderly culprit.

My daddy had a small workshop attached to our house in St. Augustine, Trinidad, that probably fit the equivalent of a three-car garage’s worth of stuff into a compact eight-by-ten-foot space. It held every shape and size of lumber, all forms of tools, saved parts of fishing equipment, all arranged around a well-worn workbench. Oh, and the enormously noisy and oversized ShopVac.

Daddy spent his weekends there, when he was not on his friends’ fishing boats out on the coast. His zest for tidy spilled over onto the rigour of military bed making, his system for dishwashing (cutlery first and glasses last), shoe-shining or weekly car washing and vacuuming – all of which were considered family team sports.

My uncle Aiow took this trait to the next level. My cousins Darren and Andrew suffered constant scolding for any bedroom item out of place or not put away – when we visited, we weren’t allowed to play with toys because that would mess up the room. My sister and I considered ourselves grateful that Daddy was so lenient with us and our toy placement.

All five Woo brothers and two sisters manifested various versions of this neatness obsession. Now that I live with a less than neat partner, I have been reflecting on how my own desire for tidy could be so genetically embedded. It’s curious not just because the trait has been passed down through generations (my daughter has shown signs throughout her life – resulting in a career choice of engineering, a very neat and tidy profession – and my sister has had a long love affair with her vacuum) because, ironically or perhaps suitably, we were all raised in what must be one of the most chaotic and unruly countries.

That disorder manifests itself in the bacchanalia of Carnival, the chaos of parang fetes at Christmas, the ad hoc liming – where ‘social capital’ was built (referred to as macco-ing), the informal economy for potatoes, sugar, and any other food in short supply, or the word-of-mouth service referrals. Even the way roads and sidewalks could be occupied on weekends for the sale of doubles or sweaty bags of oranges.

The shops along the colonially planned grid city of Port of Spain overflow with merchandise onto sidewalks; vendors create a second tier of retail between the curb and shopfronts.

Grandpa Woo, who died long before I was born, decided to purchase a small home on the north edge of Port of Spain’s most coveted neighbourhood, Woodbrook, an amalgamation of three sugar estates, ‘Woodbrook was prized for its Victorian homes and its amenities: paved streets and sidewalks; street lights; piped water and sewerage; and underground storm drainage,’¹ something not universally available in the fifties. For the Woos, this was a step up the social ladder from their rental home ‘downtown.’

With the help of my daddy and some of his brothers, the family purchased a place right next door to one of the country’s most popular steelpan groups, Shell Invaders, and across the street from the country’s main cricket venue, the Oval, now also a popular fete venue, and all on one of the busiest throughfares, Tragarete Road. In modern-day urban-planning parlance, they lived in the Edge City.

A steelpan yard, in the months leading up to Carnival steelpan competition, is a place that came alive after the evening meal. Loud noise above 120 decibels (dB) can cause immediate harm to your ears. Urban life also sustains average background noise levels of 60 dB, which is loud enough to raise one’s blood pressure and heart rate, and cause stress, loss of concentration, and loss of sleep.² In Toronto, noise cannot exceed 55 dB at any point, or 50 dB between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. A vacuum cleaner would be about 70 dB and a train passing by is somewhere around 80 dB.³

In Trinidad there are no noise bylaws that we know of, and even if they exist, who really would enforce that? The louder the better. One tenor steelpan can hit 50 dB, and an entire 150-person steelpan band will hammer out in excess of 90 to 120 dBs between eight o’clock and 1 a.m., for months leading up to Carnival Monday. My daddy died at the age of eighty-four, his hearing fully intact – no hearing aid needed. The rhythm of steelpan is what he took everywhere with him. Plinka-link, bhad-am bhad-am, bottle and spoon, sway of the hips, hands in the air … a body in protest against the order that created the orderly waltz and foxtrot.

Cities are like that, two sides of the same coin, chaos gives order purpose; order establishes control of chaos. This tension is healthy. Neither on its own is sufficient. The orderly Victorian-style Wood-brook neighbourhood abutting the disorderly cacophony of all manner of steelpan crammed together practising different tune sections simultaneously nine months of the year.

Steelpan man practises in the Invaders panyard.

Our family gatherings are all manner of noise and chaos, but each potluck dish is meticulously considered and designed. We are a family of artists, filmmakers, architects, graphic designers, fashion wannabemavens, creative DIYers masquerading as engineers, bankers, doctors, and accountants.

My family has mostly immigrated away from the island now. A few cousins and old aunts remain. The two-bedroom, one-bath-room gingerbread house – with no hot water and the small outside one-room ‘bunkie’ – that my daddy, his six siblings, my great-grandparents, and my great-aunt lived happily in no longer stands.⁴ It has been consumed by the steelpan yard expansion and an office building on the other side. It is completely gone. The Oval is still there; the small pie shop four doors down is still there. Only my eldest cousin Gayle’s memories of Sundays filled with extended family, lots of food, and everyone playing a musical instrument remain.

The energy, the vibrancy, the joy of family noise has migrated to other countries and, carried miles and miles abroad, where it has not always been welcomed. When transported to places less tolerant of unfamiliar melodies this messy, loud noise is deemed, through bylaw interpretations, as a public disturbance. When my uncles settled in Canada in the late seventies and eighties, the new life they sought was in the suburbs of Toronto – eerily silent places, neatly packed away, with identical facades and symmetrical gardens. Basements created venues for Carnival fetes, where late-night, muffled thumps of the bass – hot-hot-hot – produced the sounds of gagged celebrants all against a backdrop of meandering cul-de-sacs.

Site of the long-gone Woo family home on Tragarete Road, Trinidad, now the expanded home of the steelpan band Invaders.

It is no wonder that so many from the south who venture to build new lives up north feel a chill not just of winter’s cold but of that silence. It is the thing my mother dislikes most about Canada, because to her it symbolizes death – no life. The quiet. The laws and regulations that preserve silence create a collision of culture.

In my adopted home, Canada, I read about the recent public process to review the City’s noise bylaws. It’s a very niche Nimby point of view that comes out to virtual evening meetings to call for stricter rules and ultimately a quest for quiet. That is the mission of the group No More Noise Toronto, targeting amplified music, construction, and vehicles. Bah, humbug!

I recently purchased a ‘noise’ machine to improve my sleep, with options for crickets, thunderstorms, white noise, brown noise – all forms of noise. I paid good money for that noise and I sleep great with it. Our perceptions of noise differ with age, culture, geography, and, frankly, individual interests (my delight in the hammer of construction sites: brrz-dum, thud, brrz-dum, thud). In a densely populated city, our perception of different sounds falls along a continuum. My noise machine being at one end and the Indy 500 being on another. The good news is we can live with noise. In the same way that the rhythm of our breath or our heartbeat steadies us. Noise is not a hindrance to a good life – it can propel a tidy life, with a syncopation that can bridge oceans and cultures. Ask my family.

Not even the wilderness is silent. It has its own vibrant rhythm.

Endnotes can be found on p. 321.

Planning for an Unplanned City

Jason Thorne

Several times a day, trains leave the central train station in Hanoi, heading to the outer suburbs and neighbouring cities to the south. It’s a scene that would be familiar in just about every major city in the world, except for one thing.

Immediately upon leaving the station, something happens that would be very unfamiliar in just about any other city. The train rumbles through what is locally known as Trân Phù, or Train Street. Train Street is a corridor about five metres wide, lined with shops and cafés, with the rail line running right down the middle. The train passes mere centimetres from the patrons seated at the cafés. There are no guardrails to separate pedestrians from the tracks. No flashing lights. No gates. In short, it violates pretty much every rule in the urban planners’ handbook. And yet the street is vibrant. The shops are full. The homes above are charming. All of this in what would be a dead space in the heart of most other cities.

Train Street may be a rather extreme example of what some call ‘messy urbanism,’ but it nonetheless presents an important question for the future of cities, and the future of the planning profession. Have our rules and regulations squeezed too much of the life out of our cities? Or are they critical bulwarks for protecting public health and safety?

Interest in a more organic and less top-down approach to city-building is growing. This is a good thing. We should always be questioning and challenging our rules and regulations to ensure that they are serving a clear purpose and not getting in the way of fostering the kinds of vibrant cities we all want to see. But how do you plan and design a city that is safe and functional while also leaving room for spontaneity and serendipity? Or a more challenging question for planners: Can you even do so?

The planning profession was born out of a movement to improve public health and safety and remove risks and dangers from nineteenth-century urban environments that suffered from overcrowding, air and water pollution, and a lack of green space. Examples of the profession’s early successes are many: better access to potable drinking water, improved sanitation, cleaner air, safer housing construction. Unfortunately, so too are examples of its failures: racial segregation, class segregation, automobile dependency, environmental degradation, and urban sprawl, to name just a few of the more notable ones. Another victim of modern planning that is gaining attention is the kind of flexibility that has historically allowed cities to rapidly change and evolve to respond to new challenges, such as the current housing crisis.

How can a profession born out of a mission to root out hazard and disorder now reorient itself to welcome back risk, spontaneity, and serendipity as positive forces that can once again help shape our cities and neighbourhoods?

An important starting point is to recognize the limits of planning. The term planning has come to represent all the forces that shape our cities. But any planner will acknowledge the limitations of the impact that planning, on its own, actually has. Equally important are the host of other rules and regulations: building codes, engineering standards, alcohol regulations, fire codes, accessibility standards, traffic regulations, public health regulations, and so on. Each of these, on its own, serves a valuable public purpose. In the aggregate, however, they can also preclude some of the dynamic urbanism that many cities are trying to recapture.

Trân Phù, or Train Street, in Hanoi, Vietnam.

The Café Apartments in the heart of Ho Chi Minh City is a typical nine-storey postwar slab-style apartment tower. It sits on a grand boulevard connecting the city’s 1908 French colonial city hall to the Saigon River. Its counterparts can be found in hundreds of cities around the world. About a decade ago, this apartment tower underwent a very unusual transformation. While many of the residential apartments remain, the street-facing units were converted into bars, shops, and restaurants. The balconies became the restaurant patios. It is now a unique example of a vertical mixed-use entertainment complex.

In many jurisdictions, including Ontario, a transformation like this would be at best cost-prohibitive, and more likely simply impossible.

The dozens of bars and restaurants, as well as residential units, are serviced by a single small elevator and a single narrow stairwell. The landings on each floor are shared by bar patrons as well as residents. Only narrow party walls separate the commercial kitchens from the apartments next door.

The Café Apartments appears to be a successful urban intervention in downtown Ho Chi Minh City. It provides housing and commerce, and serves as a popular destination for locals and tourists alike. All are important public interest priorities that city planners constantly try to nurture. But even a cursory examination reveals numerous concerns, from fire prevention to emergency access to public health.

A similar confluence of competing public priorities arises with respect to other aspects of Vietnamese urbanism.

On the famed market streets of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, hundreds of street vendors animate the scene and provide low-cost food options and much-needed jobs and enterprise. They also entirely privatize the public realm of the sidewalk, forcing pedestrians into the street and making access for those with disabilities virtually impossible.

The wonderfully livable Hẻm alleyway neighbourhoods are the lifeblood of both cities, but even the most urban-scale emergency vehicles would be challenged in accessing them.

There is no question that the streets and neighbourhoods of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City are alive and vibrant. They exhibit much of what contemporary Canadian planners and urbanists hope to achieve in our own cities. But a Canadian planner wandering those streets can’t help but also notice what is missing: some of the very safeguards that we have come to take for granted in our own cities, so much so that they have become invisible to us.

There are signs that the approach to planning in Canadian cities is changing. And this is long overdue. Sterile downtowns, isolation, car dependence, and housing scarcity cannot be the price we pay for clean and safe neighbourhoods. The challenge for the planning profession is how to design for and cultivate into being the conditions that allow for messy or idiosyncratic urbanism without abandoning responsibility for public safety and protecting the public interest. The public interest includes ensuring the provision of those aspects of cities that don’t lend themselves to informality and organicness, such as parks and public spaces, schools, transit, and other services.

Some have argued for aggressive deregulation to achieve these goals. In other words, simply throw out all or most of the rules. This approach, however, contains its own very significant risks. It means a total reliance on market forces and commercial developers to determine the fate of our cities.

Anyone who has spent any time at the planning counter of a local municipality will know that the market, left purely to its own devices, does not always lean toward exceptional or even civic-minded urbanism. Municipal planners can tell many stories of development proposals that seek to maximize private profit at the expense of the public interest. At my former planning counter at the City of Hamilton, I saw development proposals that sought to address drainage by simply directing stormwater to the neighbour’s property, located waste collection bins under the bedroom window of a neighbouring home, and situated access driveways to force cars to queue in the on-street bike lane. The list of design decisions that get made in the financial interests of a single private development – but at the expense of the public realm or the broader community – is a long one. Ensuring that new development contributes positively to the public realm is why many of our local regulations and polices came to exist in the first place.

The Café Apartments, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Interestingly, another Asian city, often celebrated as the poster child for messy urbanism, presents a cautionary tale for the impacts of deregulation. In 2002, the Urban Renaissance Special Measure Law came into force in Tokyo. It allowed for the creation of ‘Special Urban Renaissance Districts’ that would be free from many of the typical municipal planning regulations and restrictions. This deregulatory approach, however, did not expand or enhance Tokyo’s famed urban messiness. Instead, it led in many cases to large-scale land assembly and exclusive megaprojects of tall towers on shopping mall podiums, indistinguishable from similar developments in other global cities. While not necessarily an entirely problematic urban form in a city like Tokyo, such developments are far from the type of organic growth that proponents of messy urbanism are typically hoping to achieve.

In fact, what some perceive as a highly desirable messiness in Tokyo’s urbanism was, in many ways, planned. There are rules and, in some cases, strict rules. These apply to many of the same attributes that Canadian cities seek to regulate: height, density, setbacks, land use. But Tokyo’s rules allow for intentional and planned flexibility that gives local property and business owners the latitude to evolve and adapt their private spaces.

Messy urbanism presents a unique challenge for municipal planners and for the practice of local planning. Planners are responsible for anticipating the long-term delivery of major growth-related infrastructure, such as roads, parks, transit, and sewers. They are expected to be responsive to the priorities and needs of those who deliver local services: firefighters, police, transit operators, waste collectors, and so on. Planners are pulled between the often-competing interests of the diversity of residents and businesses that populate our cities. And municipalities often bear the brunt of the legal responsibility for ensuring public safety. Messy urbanism can be inconsistent with these responsibilities.

Messy urbanism not only poses questions about how our cities are planned, it asks whether they should be planned, at least in the way we have historically understood that term. Exceptional urbanism cannot simply be planned into existence. It also doesn’t magically arise from the unrestrained individual decision-making of private developers and market forces. Urbanism blurs the lines between the planned and the unplanned, the predictable and the surprising, the safe and the spontaneous. If our goal is to achieve exceptional cities and places, then a space must be found in our planning for some deliberate and intentional messiness.

Interruptions

Zahra Ebrahim

My day typically begins at 7 a.m. with a thud on the back door. The sound is that of my ninety-year-old neighbour, Irene, whipping the Toronto Star from her porch to mine as she’s already finished reading it cover to cover. As I get ready, I make sure to leave a lemon outside the door for my attached neighbour, Elizabeth, who texted early to ask if I had one to spare. As I step out the door to head to my first meeting, a few other neighbours are delaying the start to their days while they chat about a range of topics: news of the weekend’s upcoming subway closures, if anyone has an extra laptop charger to lend, a new vitamin regime. I stop and talk for a while, and then speed-walk to catch the subway, only to run into Amyn, the owner of our local coffee shop, who stops me to get the update on exactly where my sister has found a place in his old hometown of London.

This is a typical morning on Edwin Avenue in Toronto. I always make sure to add an extra ten minutes to my commute time, knowing that something – and more likely someone – will ‘interrupt’ my plans. Now, I should say that I’m complicit in this scheduling messiness. Running out of milk or coffee often means jumping the fence in my pyjamas and using the ‘emergency only’ entry code to get into my neighbour’s house early in the morning to forage for some. Or I’ll often be the one furiously knocking on my neighbour Shehnaaz’s door at dinnertime, as I’ve run out of saffron for the kebabs I’m making.

I was recently sharing with some friends and colleagues about this revolving door of daily interruptions in my West Toronto community. They visibly recoiled at the prospect of interactions this intimate in their own living environments. One commented that it was a level of mixing and interconnection they don’t want in their home life because it would interrupt their privacy and personal space.

Those comments surprised me, as these unplanned encounters are part of why I love living in the city, and this particularly intimate type of neighbourhood, so much.

Before Edwin Avenue was home to this symphony of daily interruptions, it was a place of industry. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the street had three factories that made textiles, paint, and rubber products. The homes were built as ‘cottages’ to house the factory workers. At the middle of the block sit four skinny Victorian houses, each about four metres wide, attached on both sides. Word is that they were the homes of the managers. The houses were simply built, wood-frame construction, with modest lot sizes compared to the rest of the City of Toronto. But in the 1970s and 1980s, the factories moved out of town, leaving the neighbourhood with a heavy legacy of contamination that took decades to remediate.

The community is bounded on all sides by railroads, with all of us living in the middle of the triangle formed by the tracks. Over the past twenty years, the neighbourhoods on all sides of us rapidly evolved, many of them seeing a significant influx of young professionals. Many locals say our community was simply forgotten because it was a place that was considered toxic as a result of its industrial past.

The neighbourhood around Edwin was eventually remediated, although many residents stayed in the community through the process. Gentrification has been slower to impact our community, despite our transit-accessible location (a subway station and a regional train hub are both very close). Some neighbours speculate that this slower pace of change is due to the smaller size of the homes (many are under ninety-five square metres, the size of a two-car garage). Small lots seem to appeal less to young parents or couples wanting to grow their families, and are often are the bellwethers of change in communities like ours. It’s a neighbourhood where people stay, because staying is possible. In fact, as the neighbourhoods around us changed, the families here remained, often accommodating adult children and family friends as a result of rising housing costs across Toronto.

Many around Edwin Avenue credit our connections – and all those happy interruptions – to the sizes of our lots. We share resources because there’s only so much space for each of us to store things. Elizabeth has a stand-up mixer, I have a food processor, and we swap as needed. Zoe up the street has a sander, and we have a table saw, so we often share tools. Nor is it always about ‘stuff.’ We swap skills, time, even company. One neighbour helped patch a roof in exchange for some career advice.

When someone is hosting friends for dinner outside, all the doors open, and everyone pours out to chat. Things never go as planned, but in the best way. One of Edwin Avenue’s favourite stories is about the time our attached neighbours had a small backyard wedding, with their immediate family only. However, the nine children of the Colombian family who lived in our house all put on their fanciest clothes and jumped the fence to join the wedding. They weren’t officially invited but quickly became part of a magical, messy memory.

My own experience growing up was a quite different. My parents moved from Nairobi, Kenya, to Vancouver, British Columbia, in the early 1980s and settled in a suburb on the western edge of the city. As an Indian-Kenyan Muslim family, we were more culturally accustomed to living intergenerationally, with family and a slew of aunties and uncles and cousins who weren’t blood-related but were nonetheless part of our community. In the suburb of Vancouver where we lived, the kids ran between backyards on summer afternoons. There was a rotating host for the Halloween street party, and keys were consistently being swapped when families went away.

However, these cordial relationships always had a boundary, a limit to how intimately we knew the dimensions of each other’s lived experiences. For a long time, I assumed that this atmosphere reflected cultural differences, which may very well have been the case. But over time, I realized that it was part of the suburban reality: limiting the negotiations you have to make with others by embracing both the physical and social boundaries of suburban life. I think part of me subconsciously was seeking a more spontaneous, textured experience of place when I moved to Toronto almost twenty years ago.

While I didn’t know it at the time, in moving to Toronto, I was seeking messiness. I’m the child of nineties sitcoms, the ones that included the likes of Steve Urkel and Kimmy Gibbler – the ‘annoying’ neighbours – coming and going as they pleased, participating in family decisions and enjoying staples at the dinner table. I watched these shows with a deep desire for the intimacy of those types of relationships. These neighbours weren’t just about polite small talk but rather embodied a type of chosen family that became enmeshed into their lives. While the story I tell about the move to Toronto is about finding opportunity for my work and wanting a city with a great culture scene and a range of fun neighbourhoods to explore, I was also hoping to build relationships like the ones in those sitcoms: being surrounded by a community that witnessed me in my everyday life, without pretense or judgment, for better or for worse.

On Edwin Avenue, I get to live out this reality, due in part to the fact that we live densely. The elements of our built form and the cozy public realm on Edwin Avenue enable this type of connection. Perhaps it’s the porousness of our houses, or the fact that they’re close to the sidewalk. It’s easy to tell if someone is home by a quick glance at the window. As well, the boundaries between our homes are largely undefined. There are few fences on our street, and the ones that exist are low, serving as a platform for the exchange of objects or even a makeshift seat during a longer than expected conversation.

The shared walls allow the faintest sounds to drift through, in a way that isn’t disruptive, only a reminder that we, essentially, share a house. We often hear the sounds of neighbour Elizabeth’s students next door, attempting to sing a song they’ve always dreamed of performing. This kind of urban form feels like the opposite of the type of density we’re building in cities like Toronto – a density that doesn’t consider the inter-stitial or common spaces required for neighbours to bridge and socially mix, often across difference. We need the density so very much, but we need it to include spaces with less defined boundaries, so neighbours can practise how to be together, not just in their private spaces.

Over the next few years, our extended neighbourhood will continue to intensify, welcoming thousands of new residents to our now very transit-connected community. We see this kind of densification happening all over major cities, including Toronto. I wonder what alchemy is required so that new residents living in all this intensified housing – from formerly single-family homes converted into multi-unit dwellings to new mid-rise buildings, even condominiums – will access aspects of the shared experiences of living on Edwin Avenue.

After all, density in and of itself isn’t a solution, as we know that people living in condominiums often face high rates of isolation and loneliness. How do we ensure that, as much as they’re comfortable, they feel supported and surrounded by people who care for their well-being and are willing to share an ear, a tool, an introduction, or that missing ingredient for dinner? Understanding that everyone has different degrees of comfort with the micro-negotiations and the sharing of space and resources, but also recognizing that is part of what makes cities successful: being practised in sharing what we have and recognizing that at different times we all need different tools and supports to thrive.

Part of living in a city means embracing the messiness of constantly bridging across differences, of embracing the interruptions and that which is unplanned. In a recent study in Toronto, 50 per cent of people in the city say they have regular contact with people outside their ethnic group, while the other 50 per cent never do. That means half the city isn’t connecting across difference. Sometimes I worry that our draw to homophily, to sameness, enables us to get out of practice. Many say that Toronto is the most diverse city in the world, and it seems a shame to live here and not embrace the opportunity to become intimately familiar with people across lines of race, class, and culture. There’s evidence that knowing people with vastly different lived experiences than yours dramatically increases your capacity for empathy for them and others of their background. This kind of connection is not easy work, but it’s part of the social contract I think we agree to when we live in big cities.

When my partner and I moved to the Junction Triangle in 2018, we quickly realized that to talk to people – to embrace the chaos of the everyday on Edwin Avenue – is to honour part of the history of this neighbourhood. It’s a history of neighbours joyfully wedding-crashing, constantly sharing food, and asking each other questions that go deeper than the weather and plans for the weekend ahead. Out-of-town friends and family who come to visit often drop their bags and then pop outside to say hello to folks on the street. You don’t have to live on Edwin to be part of the community.

The strength of the network here doesn’t rely on the frequency of interactions but rather the sincerity and honesty within them. Urban scholars would call what we have on Edwin Avenue a type of social infrastructure – a resilient lattice of connections sustained and nurtured over time. These are the sorts of places, as is well documented, that are more likely to survive crises, stresses, or shocks, specifically because, in those moments, people ensure that everyone is cared for. In a well-known case study about the 1995 Chicago heat wave, survival was credited to people knowing their neighbours and ensuring they had what they needed to be safe and cool during a very difficult time. These ties between neighbours are not just ‘nice to haves’ but are also essential to our survival in cities as we face the tremendous environmental, economic, and social challenges in the decades ahead. I want all residents of the city, regardless of where they live or what type of dwelling they inhabit, to be surrounded by a social infrastructure they can lean on in all aspects of their lives.

They say that when you plant all the same sorts of trees in a forest, the forests don’t survive. They are sustained by the interactions between different types of flora, fauna, and other tree species, in order to realize their full potential. I often feel like Edwin Avenue is a thriving forest, full of chaos, spontaneity, and, well, interruptions.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Packrat City

Tatum Taylor Chaubal

All right, I’ll confess that I’m a packrat.

It’s an identity, a way of moving through the world that I inherited from my father, and from his mother before him. I learned the word at a young age, free from any connotations of shame. The dictionary says it describes ‘someone who collects things that they do not need.’ And sure, I don’t need this wooden ruler my grandfather used for drawing blueprints, or the green jacket with the Peter Pan collar I wore on my first date with my wife, or the square cobblestone we once pocketed from a crumbling street in Prague. Sure, maybe I don’t need them. But I choose to keep them to help me tell my stories to myself.

The line of distinction between ‘packrat’ and ‘hoarder’ is the fear of forgetting. I don’t want to keep everything, or to collect things for collecting’s sake. I hold on to whatever carries meaning for me – the objects, fabrics, or scraps that trigger memories I know I’ll otherwise forget. Sometimes documenting the thing is enough; I’ve photographed countless bits of clothing before taking them to the donation bin, in the interest of filing away particular moments tied to them. But sometimes the association lives in the physical thing, and I can’t part with it.

In a certain light, my tangible memory archive looks like a mess. Just peek in my basement or ask my wife. My dad’s packrat assemblage has more structure – so many labelled boxes – and my grandma left lists of her treasured artifacts and their origins. But I like to think a mess can be elegant when it has an internal logic.

I’ve always preferred an element of organized chaos in my environment. That’s why cities fascinate me – the more bafflingly intricate, the better. After nearly two decades, I still carry a torch for London, where I spent the better part of a year as an undergraduate, discovering my penchant for architectural history. It’s no wonder I would fall for a city that the writer James Geary says ‘reminds me of a brain. It is similarly convoluted and circuitous … London is a glorious mess.’ In the channels and folds and winding roads of that brain, I inscribed memories that made London my own, just as centuries of other people have done. If I were to appear right now in Trafalgar Square, swing up the curve of Charing Cross, and slip into Cecil Court, a passageway pressed between commercial blocks and lined with antiquarian book-shops, synapses would fire – the streets would read those memories back to me.

I care about memories so much that, as a heritage planner, I have made them the focus of my profession. As a field, heritage conservation asserts that memories exist in the present; therefore, they are mutable, and they can be lost if not anchored in a continuing ritual, object, or place.

In Invisible Cities, by the Italian experimental novelist Italo Calvino, versions of Kublai Khan and Marco Polo discuss the dozens of fictitious cities in Khan’s empire that Polo has explored in his travels. My favourite is Zaira:

A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all of Zaira’s past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.

The city of Zaira doesn’t actually exist – or else the city of Zaira, Polo admits, might be Venice. But every city has its own scratches, indentations, scrolls.

That’s why I became a heritage planner. The city ‘contains its past like the lines of a hand,’ and I am a palm reader. For the last twelve years, Toronto has been my Zaira. Toronto has outstretched its hand, and I have interpreted the lines to help us connect to the past and to predict, or even influence, the future. This work has led me to study institutional and infrastructural landmarks, like the Tyndale University motherhouse and the Hearn, a decommissioned coal-fired power plant; areas undergoing huge transformations, like Regent Park and the Eglinton Avenue corridor; and St. John’s Ward, which changed beyond recognition long before my time.

Zaira’s – or Toronto’s – past is written in its landscapes and street-scapes. I came to heritage conservation by way of studying literature, and it’s easy to see sites as manuscripts. Heritage aficionados like to throw around the word palimpsest, an ancient Greek and Roman concept, referring to a reused document where the previous text remains faintly visible underneath the new. It’s a lovely word, and there’s always an appealing efficiency in capturing a very specific concept in a few syllables. I worry, however, that highfalutin vocabulary (and even references to Italian surrealist fiction) make heritage conservation seem like an intellectual pursuit, an erudite realm.

It used to be: in the nascent days of my field, Western philosophers and architects were mostly concerned with the preservation of grandiose monuments, meant to communicate specific messages about collective memory. This tendency translated to advocacy for civic landmarks, like New York City’s lost Penn Station and Toronto’s Old City Hall, during the emergence of the historic preservation movement in the 1960s. All of those efforts were worthwhile. But a city that saves only the most refined and expensive buildings is not a packrat – it’s a fine art collector.

More recently, heritage planners have shifted toward a conservation paradigm that includes buildings not for their landmark status, but for the contextual role they play in the city. These buildings weren’t constructed to communicate nationalism, wealth, or grandeur, but they have other, more subtle stories to tell. The role of the heritage planner is to find those stories and determine whether and how to hold on to them.

I hope our next step is to protect the messy places that further challenge conventional notions of heritage. This outlook also means making sure we’re seeking out the histories that have been systemically hidden – the queer stories, the female stories, the Indigenous and non-white and immigrant stories. We might have to peer closely to see all of Zaira’s scratches, indentations, scrolls. They might be written in another language. The intricacies of a city can lie in overlooked spaces: an artist’s live-work studio, a soy sauce factory, a brick house converted into a grocery store. In the absence of high design, such buildings can become contested in a development-minded city that is focused on progress. But, more than aesthetic objects, these places carry meaning that has shaped our urban identity. If they are lost, what memories are lost with them?

Sometimes, documenting the thing is enough. But sometimes the association lives in the physical thing, and we can’t part with it.

There’s an urgency to identifying heritage places so we don’t forget them, even as the city continues to swell. Sure, maybe in a practical sense we don’t need them. But we can choose to keep them to help us tell our stories to ourselves, and isn’t that another kind of need? After all, a heritage-conscious city isn’t a hoarder. It’s a packrat.

Localities

An Argument Worth Having

Chiyi Tam

I am arguing with a business owner again. We’re sitting on a rickety patio along the dusty and broad Spadina Avenue.

It is sunny. Too sunny for us to be calm.

I’m the community organizer, he’s the businessman. Looking at him, I idly think about the fact that Chinatown comes from the same era as the word Chinaman. This business-owner uncle gives you the impression that he’s as important and foundational as the pavement that makes up Huron Square. Of course, that isn’t true. It’s just how he carries himself.

A passerby asks us where in Chinatown he might be able to find a job. He looks like a young student new to Canada. We both smile and encourage him to leave resumés with neighbours who we know are hiring.

We go back to arguing. Business Uncle blames the existence of our neighbourhood’s social service agencies for attracting vandalism on his property. I tell him his approach to neighbourhood issues is deeply ungenerous and embarrassing. He tells me I have not had to lock up a restaurant at 3 a.m. alone.

We rinse and repeat.

At some point, S, who works at one of our community centres, walks by and waves to me. Her face falls when she sees who I am sitting with. We exchange pleasantries, but I can read her eyes. Why are you even giving him the time of day? He gets enough neighbourhood airtime with his toxic opinions.

Business Uncle turns to complaining about the community centre doing its job successfully. Which is being a resource for affordable daycare, drop-in programs for youth, and hot meals.

I ask him if he has any less-tired takes to talk to me about. He surprisingly does. He’s concerned about the fact that a parking lot nearby has been sold outside the community. He had dreamed it might one day be developed into more seniors’ housing. I sit up and lean in.

We are no longer arguing. We’re dreaming about the future again.

I wonder what his retirement plan is. Is this dream a place he might be able to live perhaps? I can hear his genuine sadness that the owner of the lot sold it to someone with no relationship to Chinatown. He knew ‘that guy.’

‘That guy’ stopped coming to downtown Chinatown in the last fifteen years. Markham is too comfortable. The Chinese food is more diverse, the udon is fresh handmade, the Hakka food more flavourful than downtown.

Like a lot of the property-owning class in Chinatown’s diaspora, he’s emotionally and financially divested and bought property in Markham instead. He gave up on Chinatown.

Business Uncle has not given up on Chinatown, yet. He’s here, on the corner of Dundas and Spadina. You might think that sounds wholesome. But I think our physical location may still be the only thing we have in common.

He thinks he’s different than his friend who sold out. He doesn’t admit how much he’s subconsciously speculating on the value of his property. Sure, his restaurant is cash-flow negative every day. The doors are rickety, the floors need replacing.

A real-estate investment fund bought the even more dilapidated building across the street from him, a narrower lot even, for $4 million. He mentions this more than once, as if he can’t help himself. So Business Uncle could retire a millionaire any day now.

I point out that they’ve left the whole building empty for five years. Creating a black hole of feng shui on this street. He blurts out that if the youth drop-in charity wasn’t next door, his property could be worth more! I just roll my eyes and let him see my face of disgust.

I tell him we will fight to build more affordable seniors’ housing downtown with or without him. He smiles, and I realize the idea conveniently helps with his property values. I clarify that it will be for low-income seniors and see him about to argue with me again. So it wasn’t that dreamy after all.

I ask him what he wants his community legacy to be. There’s finally a thoughtful pause. Then an inhale before speaking …

Sensing we are about to repeat the same beats again, I interject and bluntly tell him he needs to also listen more. That his anti-working-class sentiment is not appreciated. I ask him to text me if he ever gets the contact information for the new owner of the lot. Then at least this conversation would have been useful. And goodbye, for now.

‘An impasse isn’t always a bad thing; it can be a mature way to avoid violent outcomes.’

– a reading of the I Ching, the Book of Changes

We’re squeezed together in a small office in the Chinatown Centre mall. We’re looking at the bylaws and imagining who the members of our future Chinatown community land trust are going to be.

The question Who is our community? feels like a meme. Which is to say that this question feels tired. Futile. It has never-ending permutations of itself. It would be cringe for you to earnestly ask and answer it. I am now paid to be this kind of cringe full-time.

I work for the Toronto Chinatown Land Trust, a new community land trust (Clt). Urbanists would look at us and say we are doing ‘community-building work.’ If you have never heard of a Clt before, you should know that Toronto has a surprising number of them at the neighbourhood level, all dedicated to using community ownership as an immediate tool to prevent tenant displacement and protect affordability permanently.

One way to understand what Clts are is to think of them as nonprofit real estate co-operatives that are controlled by neighbourhood residents. In a classic housing co-operative, the people who live in the building control it democratically. Only residents can vote on decisions. A Clt is similar but goes beyond just one building and beyond one type of voting member, and is concerned with multiple properties (often constantly trying to acquire and build more). Clts use this model to take properties off the speculative real estate market, forever. Which means the people who can vote can be anyone who lives and works in the neighbourhood area as they define it.

Together we deliberate: Which one of our neighbours should have a vote on what we use land for in our neighbourhood? Should business owners get a vote or only each worker in the neighbourhood independently? Should we protect a certain number of board seats for residential tenants in our future buildings?

We take turns imagining the future. A stands up and shows us her drawing of the future street in Chinatown that will be entirely community controlled and operated. H makes the case that we can’t write off every business owner from our voting base – what about the small business owners who don’t steal wages or don’t have any employees? We imagine the kinds of interesting arguments these people will have together one day when we are no longer part of the organization. At some point we call a break, to exchange our slippers for shoes again and to grab a meal down the street. What will our future members build? Or, actually, what will they build first?

Sounds like an argument worth having.

The City of Toronto is hosting a meeting about the future of Chinatown. There are maps printed onto poster boards leaning on easels. There are Post-it Notes.

Urbanism and its goddamned Post-it Notes. An essential component of the ‘community engagement aesthetic’ that will never die. I curse myself every time I pack them into my bag before a meeting.

You are being asked where Chinatown is. Again. Who cares?!

Planners ask the wrong question. It is clear that what they are also asking is where Chinatown isn’t. They need to know where Chinatown begins and ends to make policy. They need to create borders in order to do anything.

I think about Nick’s Jewellery shop, all the way over at Dundas and Dufferin. Vietnamese jade Buddhas encrusted with diamonds and ornate gold bracelets for anyone. Your toxic ex-boyfriend who wears Dickies or aunties buying dowries for their nieces alike. Being in Nick’s shop is being in Chinatown, you can’t tell me otherwise.

Nick Vo of Nick’s Jewellery and I were classmates in urban planning school. Sometimes when I go to his mom for repairs and new earrings, I see him in the shop. He asks me how being a planner is going. He thinks he got a master’s in urban planning and never became a ‘real’ planner because he chose to run the family jewellery store instead. I tell him he’s doing more real planning than the rest of us. I mean it.

I write Nick’s Jewellery on a Post-it Note and stick it at the edge of the poster board because his houseshop isn’t on the map they printed.

I’m giving another workshop on the solidarity economy. Some 101 stuff. I am looking across a sea of laptops and suit jackets.

When I explain what a co-operative or a Clt is, their first follow-up comment is ‘That sounds like a massive headache.’ People are suspicious of the viability of co-operative solutions as a way to live. The word co-operative seems to have an unshakable association with the word conflict. Messy conflict.

Name a type of property ownership that doesn’t involve conflict in some way. I can’t.

From the mundane roommate or family conflict about who hasn’t done their dishes, to the extreme conflict of who stole millions of dollars from the condominium corporation’s capital reserves, the reality is that anyone who has been in any living situation with other people has been in some kind of conflict. There is no such thing as living urban life without conflict, under any model of ownership or tenure.

It is just that I think some conflicts are ‘better’ to have than others.

I would pick a conflict with my co-op neighbour about who to hire for our giant plumbing contract next year over begging my landlord to let me turn on the air conditioner every summer. In one conflict, I have agency, resident control, and shared power with my neighbour. In the other, I have no powers except for what few tenant rights are afforded to me. If the maintenance plan isn’t going well in my co-op or Clt building, I have the power to do something about it, along with my complaints. All it requires is for me to step up.

We should be so lucky, to be in honest, good, generative, community conflict. That is unironically and earnestly my dream of what the most equitable and real utopia of city life is. In contrast, so many generations of North America’s urban policies were predicated on utopia as an abstract idea of perfect safety, a place with absolutely no crime, a community with no conflict.

My friend Keisha teaches me that Thomas More said the ironic root definition of utopia is actually ‘no place.’ An oxymoron. The word itself acknowledges that it is an impossible state.

Yet I have never heard perfect stillness, perfect peace, to be an aspiration for anyone. After all, the people who want to live in cities tell me they like the serendipity, the chaos, the unexpected – the mess.

‘I love fighting,’ Y yells across to me in between fits of laughter. We are all giggling; I’m doubling over on the satin-covered banquet chairs. I’m in Manhattan’s Chinatown, having dim sum with five friends. They are Broadway dancers who moonlight as lion dancers, aspiring directors who spend their days building community in Chinatown; they are New Yorkers.

I’m being teased for exchanging heated words with the waiters about their lack of peanut and hoisin sauce for the rice rolls. The New Yorkers ruthlessly point out that the waiters informed me about their lack of sauces in a normal combative New York tone and that they weren’t trying to start a fight. Too many years in Vancouver has made me soft.

We were reflecting on the joys of being comfortable with rude and negligent service. A cultural affect that unites so many diasporic migrants – no single culture owns this attitude; it’s just a Chinatown attitude. You can try to say it comes from Hong Kong, or Ho Chi Minh’s curbside, or the hawker centres in Singapore, and quickly someone will lay an opposing claim with cultural pride. Imagine that – being proud of your community’s capacity for everyday conflict.

Y explains why she loves fighting. She means something specific. She means she’s a member of the renowned Park Slope Food Coop in Brooklyn. We cackle at her description of sheer urban delight, as you walk into a busy store and overhear on the Pa system:

‘Where is the cheddar, Susan?!’

‘Martin, I already told you it’s in aisle four.’

Delicious.

I think about the shape of Y’s life, our lives. The thousands of other real stresses that weigh on us: affording rent, falling in/out of love, finding your purpose. Bickering in your grocery store is an outlet for inconsequential squabbles. You own the grocery store together; no one is kicking you out. So you dare to have it out, together.

I have come to believe that Chinatown’s ability to weather its storms comes from an organic level of protection – a healthy capacity for community conflict. In all its most dysfunctional and generative ways.

Maybe some types of ‘conflict’ are an indicator of community health. Indicative of people bothering to argue, people who care. What if we saw engagements in conflict as emotional investments? People who feel secure enough in their tenure to fight? Entitled people are entitled because they have security of some kind. A social safety net perhaps, intergenerational wealth perhaps, or perhaps home ownership. How do you foster that feeling of entitlement – or is it capacity for community power – to the many instead of the few?

So many people – people who have never experienced property ownership – go their entire lives without ever feeling or imagining that they can shape the streets and neighbourhoods they live in. That buildings are not malleable, that choices could be made differently. That whatever the shape of things is, they just have to endure. It doesn’t have to be this way.

The veggie grannies on the corner of Spadina and Dundas are shit-talking your ‘fit.

Moments like these make you wonder whether you wish you could speak better or worse Chinese. Better Chinese, maybe even the ability to fluently jump between a few of Chinatown’s dialects, would let you clapback at them. Worse Chinese would let you live in peaceful delusion that your outfit is, in fact, very cute.

The veggie grannies are essential. They also truly, truly do not give a fuck. They don’t want you to do your community-building shit with them. Please stop trying to talk to them for anything other than the price of the greens they brought to sell that day. They’re not here to be ‘community engaged.’

I learned this the hard way. I warned you I was cringe.

At least I’m not alone. Everyone who has tried to do some kind of intentional/wholesome/community thing in Chinatown has made an attempt to befriend the veggie grannies. R once told me he tried to get their consent for a series of interviews: nope. M tried to take their portraits: nope. B tried to do gardening knowledge–sharing events: nope. One time, H just tried to buy their vegetables but also somehow got rejected in the process. We teased H mercilessly about this.

Years ago, I was interviewing people about the future of Chinatown, trying to figure out whether a community land trust would make sense here. I asked people who they believed Chinatown’s community is. I then asked them who Chinatown should be for.

People of all ages, without fail, brought up the veggie grannies, these elderly street vendors of deeply affordable, fresh, homemade foods and homegrown produce.

The threat of bylaw enforcement on our community’s ‘illegal – unsanctioned – non-permitted’ activities comes and goes like seasons. Forever telling us a story that we should feel precarious. Precarious at the whims and conveniences of those who own property, those in power.

But where will our low-income seniors live in the future? For many people in power, our seniors aren’t part of the future.

Tourists don’t survive on Chinatown’s mutual aid. Property owners end up in Markham instead for whatever they need Chinatown for. Young students can order bubble tea anywhere. The people who are essential to Chinatown are the people for whom Chinatown is essential.

People like the veggie grannies.

Dixie Road

Fadi Masoud

The longest day of 1998, June 21, was exceptionally scorching and muggy. I recall the moisture throttling the exhaust fumes of the large parking lots surrounding the Best Western Airport Hotel at 5825 Dixie Road in Mississauga, Ontario. As heat bounced and radiated off an infinite sea of pavement, a sublime endless horizon of flat grey asphalt created a mirage so different from the ones I grew up with in the semi-arid Mediterranean landscape. At one point, the blurred, smoggy, hazy grey-white sky blended into the surrounding Pearson Airport landscape to create the most austere sense of generic place-lessness. This hotel was the first place my parents, my two younger primary-school-aged siblings, and I arrived at when we landed in Canada as immigrants; it was also to become our home for the next twelve weeks. As we looked out of our inoperable hotel room window, Canada seemed different from our initial conceptions of the verdant, pastoral place we thought we were coming to. In our misguided imaginations, Canada was a non-urban nation except for what we had seen, on a handful of postcards, of Montreal’s Old Port or Toronto’s Cn Tower.

What was more bewildering to my parents was the confusion about where we were. Why was there nothing around? Why were there so many massive, empty parking lots? Why such wide roads? There were so many trucks! Where were the people? Where could the kids go to get a popsicle? Was this it? Was this the place we would now call home?

My relatives told my parents we should not live in the ‘city’ and that the schools were bad. That the ‘city’ was shoddy, unsafe, and decadent. Over time, their questions evolved as we began to search for more permanent housing. What is a ‘suburb’ and a ‘city’? Why do all these houses look the same? Why are there no corner stores at the end of the generic streets of cloned housing blocks? Why are the trees so small? Like little sticks! My mother, who would be living alone with three children for parts of the year, had a straightforward criterion for our housing search: that the kids could go to a pharmacy or a convenience store alone, by foot, if and whenever needed – even if it meant compromising on living space. This seemingly simple stipulation proved more challenging than expected in the areas they were told to look: Mississauga, circa 1998.

Eventually, their search took them to the ‘city.’ It was almost six weeks before our first trip along the highways that led to downtown Toronto, down the 427 to the Queen Elizabeth Way, and onto the orange-yellow-lit Gardiner Expressway. Lake Ontario was on our right, and the Toronto skyline crept into view on the horizon. We pulled into a multi-storey parking garage across from the Harbourfront Centre. My mother noted that there were sidewalks here. We saw pedestrians. Some were strolling along the water’s edge, families getting off the Toronto Island ferry; and then, suddenly, a flood of blue-clad Blue Jays baseball fans filled the streets from the brightly lit SkyDome. This area seemed like another planet, let alone another city. My family was beginning to grasp a glaring difference between the physical and experiential circumstances of what people called the ‘city’ and what they called the ‘suburb,’ a difference even more pronounced in 1998. Eventually, we rented a condo in the northern part of Toronto, North York, near a subway station. It was a compromise that seemingly blended both worlds – a ‘walkable’ suburb, one with a mix of uses and with access to transit, parks, and schools.

According to Statistics Canada, 78 per cent of Canada’s population lives in a suburb. While initially designed and planned to be physically homogenous, suburbs are socially and economically dynamic. They are a crucial entry point for most immigrants to Canada, and the contradiction between their monotonous physical form and their vibrant hyper-diverse social milieu defines their landscape. This transformation challenges traditional conceptions of the suburb and asks if we can still do better. In 2008, Canadian urbanist Ian Chodikoff curated an exhibition at Toronto’s Design Exchange titled Fringe Benefits: Cosmopolitan Dynamics of a Multicultural City. He noted:

Postwar apartment towers, townhouses, shopping centres, office buildings, religious buildings, parks and schools of the Greater Toronto Area’s suburbs have collectively contributed to the foundation of a deep and meaningful cultural landscape, enabling a diverse range of communities to be altered and replaced by a new reality – one of global connectivity and entrepreneurship. Relationships developed amongst the variety of social networks found across the Greater Toronto Area are being reworked and enriched by immigrants arriving with social, intellectual and financial capital, contributing to the social and economic benefit of our respective communities.

While the Canadian suburbs are culturally rich, the structural, legal, morphological, and spatial forces that shape them have resulted in climatic, social, and environmental challenges. Suburbs across the country are victims of normative planning and development processes that prioritized the creation of a rapid revenue base through large-scale, rural-to-suburban land-use conversion and rigid, car-centric design standards. Together, these two spatial forces still shape the physical condition of suburban regions more than any other.

Urbanists, planners, and designers have agency over these two underlying spatial forces and must question them to generate more inventive and sustainable suburban forms. The first force that must be tackled is the reductive and incessant separation of land uses (residential, commercial, institutional, conservation, etc.), zoning regulations (setback, height, floor-area ratios, etc.), and property subdivision standards. The second is the hegemonic rule of vehicular transportation infrastructure (minimum parking requirements, street widths, truck and emergency vehicle turning radii, and so on).

While land-use zoning separation and transportation design standards remain crucial for many health and safety reasons, the entrenchment and inflexibility of these standards have long stifled design innovation. However, there is a vast potential for change. Until recently, development standards, bureaucratic processes, building codes, development fees, and planning policies have stood in the way of diverse and complex programmatic uses, environmental and social initiatives, innovative ownership models, and design experimentation. It is no coincidence that some of the most dynamic and beloved areas of urban regions are older ones that fall outside the standardized regulatory underpinnings of typical planning, zoning, and transportation engineering. These places would be considered non-conforming and illegal if they were designed and built today in their current forms: in Toronto, locations such as Kensington Market, the Distillery District, and King Streets East and West.

Cities have come a long way since 1998 in attempting to rectify some of the negative impacts of these forces, through the expansion of multi-modal transportation options, increased density and mixed-use developments near transit nodes and corridors, encouragement of design excellence and green standards, and so on. At the same time, the current housing crisis would make the two-bedroom apartment my family rented in 1998 entirely out of reach today (a real-estate website recently listed it at nearly three-and-a-half times the price my parents paid, adjusted for inflation). As environmental and social pressures mount, there is an imperative and an opportunity for the reconceptualization of planning and design in the places where most Canadians live. The key to solving the challenges of climate change and socio-economic inequity must start in the suburbs.

Critical and interconnected spatial, design, and planning strategies are needed to evolve the suburban fabric. Many of these strategies have already been conceived as design recommendations and solutions. But a radical shift in policy, political courage, and investment priorities is required. For example, a loosening up of land-use regulations in areas once zoned as ‘single family residential’ (the most extensive land use in all metropolitan regions), as well as along infrastructurally serviced commercial corridors (currently occupied by big-box stores, parking lots, and shopping plazas), would allow a mix of uses ‘as of right’ and encourage a diversity of housing and building types, with multigenerational, multi-family units wherever possible.

Technological advancements in transportation, renewable energy, and sustainable food production will substantially impact the physical conditions of suburbs, resulting in more distributed and district-based systems that reduce risk and vulnerability to climate shocks and geopolitical disruptions. The expansion of blue-green infrastructure networks, coupled with multi-modal transportation systems (transit, bikes, and electric vehicles), across all parts of the suburban fabric will mean the reduction of paved roadways, driveways, and parking lots in favour of more permeable shared green surfaces, heavily planted medians, expanded tree-canopy coverage, and multi-purpose public spaces. These would become civic landscapes, parks, and social spaces that hold stormwater, reduce urban heat, increase biodiversity, and clean the air. The final element is the recognition, expansion, and protection of the social foundations that make the suburban fabric rich, such as low-rent, flexible, multi-purpose halls, as well as bakeries, restaurants, supermarkets, import businesses, maker spaces, services, and community educational centres that bring all corners of the globe to Toronto.

It is 2045, and a family like mine lands at Pearson Airport. The tight grip of single-family residential zoning in a sea of cul-de-sacs has been loosened, and a corner store has popped up at the end of a street. A ‘missing middle’ three- to four-storey residential multi-family housing unit has been constructed, offering affordable alternatives that were not there before. Older adults are ‘aging in community’ and living near college students and young children in intergenerational housing developments. People no longer must choose between small, overpriced units in the sky and million-dollar single-family homes – homes that were once separated by eight lanes of traffic from the nearest store.

It is also hotter and even more humid in Toronto than it was in 1998. The parking lot near the Best Western Airport Hotel has been reduced in size. New electric vehicles and trucks zoom quietly by on a narrowed Highway 401. Innovation in clean-energy air travel has reduced emissions by 90 per cent, so it is not smoggy, even though it is hot. The sea of asphalt has mostly disappeared, making way for permeable surfaces that reflect the sun’s rays and absorb rainfall to replenish the aquifer below. The minimum parking requirements have been replaced by new public-realm blue-green standards designed by landscape architects. These new standards, introduced some twenty years earlier, opened the way for a robust, biodiverse, and lush tree canopy. These same trees help clean the air, lower the surface temperature, and house millions of resting migrating birds in the spring and fall. Just as important, a new connected system of green paths and parks snakes around the logistical landscapes of the airport. These well-designed networks of parks hold the stormwater runoff from the intense cloudburst monsoon rain that Toronto has now become accustomed to in the summer.

Across from the airport hotel, a solar-panel-clad logistical warehouse and a new high-tech hydroponic agriculture food depot are growing food year-round to feed the city’s inhabitants. We no longer need California to grow our lettuce. The staff are having their lunch break under the shade of a willow tree – we now all know it by its Anishinaabemowin name, zasgobmish – its root sucking up the excess water and thriving. The workers look up, wave, and smile at the three little kids who have just arrived, welcoming them to their new home.

A Beach Like No Other

Shari Kasman

Back in 2019, bulldozers began dismantling a school in Bloordale, the neighbourhood where I live in Toronto’s west end. Once they finished smashing all the windows, clawing the bricks apart, and destroying the school’s small parking lot, the debris was carted away and a giant hole was left in the ground. This fenced-in lot was later filled with gravel, creating a flat, desolate expanse.

The space was roughly 100 metres in one direction, spanning an entire city block, and it was just as wide as it was long. Currently, it’s the site of a new school, but back then, the empty lot was a waste of space. Plus, the chain-link fence surrounding the gravel obliterated a shortcut the public had once used to get from the busy street to the north, Bloor Street, through the school’s parking lot, to Dufferin Mall, which has a grocery store and a beer store. Coming from another direction, we could cut across the school’s grassy corner, evident from a desire line permanently etched into the ground. The fence was very inconvenient – it made these shortcuts impossible.

In early 2020, a friend began removing fence panels to reinstate the north-to-south shortcut. The authorities would routinely have the fence locked up again, though, because it was property of the school board. For us, this was frustrating.

Then the pandemic began.

Construction at the site had yet to start, and everything in the city had pretty much crept to a standstill. It didn’t seem like anything would happen on this lot for a while.

At times, when the fences were open, I’d visit the gravelly expanse and collect debris from the school. I found all kinds of artifacts – pieces of terrazzo flooring and chunks of yellow stone, for example. I’d walk around the perimeter, in circles, chatting on the phone or daydreaming. Usually, I was the only one there. On rare occasions, someone else would cross through from one end to the other, but nobody ever stopped. It was merely a throughway.

We thought if others had a vested interest in the space, perhaps the school board would be less inclined to continually close this fence.

In May 2020, thanks to what the City of Toronto called its Shared Space Initiative, it mounted signs on bollards that were placed down various streets, including Brock Avenue, to the west of the empty lot. These signs featured an icon of a person, a car, and a bicycle and were meant to tell us this street was a shared space for everyone, but that we should allow for some distance. Apart from the picture of the car, these ‘Shared Space’ signs seemed suitable for the empty lot. It was clearly a good place to practise social distancing outdoors, as per the instructions on how we should operate during Covid. My friend covered the image of the car and posted a ‘Shared Space’ sign at one of the entrances to the empty lot. We began calling the lot the Social Distancing Compound.

The next day, when I was walking by, from the sidewalk I spotted a man lying on the gravel, on his stomach, wearing nothing but a pair of black shorts. I immediately sent a message to my friend saying this space should be a beach – Bloordale Beach. It seemed both catchy and suitable for this Bloordale neighbourhood, despite the site being landlocked. There was actually some sand at the perimeter of the lot. Plus, beaches are idyllic. Perhaps this could be good for the neighbourhood. Perhaps our minds’ images of Bloordale – of pigeons, concrete, and people smoking crack outside a dive bar – could be replaced with palm trees and pelicans, sunshine and surfboards.

My friend suggested we make signs that evening, and that’s what we did. We painted signs and hung them at the lot, posting a ‘This Way to the Beach’ sign on a fence by Bloor Street, suggesting people follow a path to the large, gravelly expanse. Many more signs were posted at the beach in the months that followed.

Bloordale Beach, Toronto.

For most of the next year and a half, Bloordale Beach existed as a gorgeous landlocked oasis, if not in its physical appearance, then in the community’s hearts and minds. The beach offered levity during the most difficult months of the pandemic. With many venues closed, it was a respite for people, plus it was free to use. At the beginning, people didn’t really spend time there, though my friend and I brought beach chairs over once, just for the afternoon, and towels another time, to hang out and enjoy a beverage, and demonstrate the sort of thing a person could do at this beach. It was never overrun with hordes of beachgoers, but eventually others did choose the beach as a place to spend time with friends. One small group of people would sometimes have ‘socially distanced dance parties’ there. It never got at all crowded or rowdy. Everyone seemed very respectful, in consideration for the residents across the street. I added the beach to Google Maps, and it accumulated over sixty excellent reviews.

The beach was also an inspiration to many – five different musicians created songs about Bloordale Beach and an anonymous poet wrote a poem in two parts about it, which they hung on the fence. The beach became a space where people recorded performance art and dance routines that were broadcast over the internet during the pandemic. It was also the location for film and music video shoots.

Bloordale Beach became a place others contributed to, as well. One person collected empty ice cream bins from the store below her apartment and used them, along with a pool noodle and a couple of wooden boards, to create a Barkour Area – a place for dogs to exercise and improve their agility. Someone else once went to the beach for a drink but had trouble opening a beverage, so she created a ‘Bloordale Beach Bar’ sign where she tied a bottle opener to the fence. One mom went with her two kids to set up shells at the beach. In May of 2021, community members created a garden in a section of the beach.

Some men who enjoy drinking all day long claimed the space at the corner of the beach that’s closest to the Beer Store. If there was anyone at the beach at all, it was likely at least a couple of these guys, enjoying the beachy ambience. I began calling them ‘the off-duty lifeguards.’ I introduced myself, asked them to keep the beach clean, and left them with a garbage bag for trash, by a sign that identified it as the place for trash. I also posted signs around the beach indicating that people should throw out their trash. This wasn’t entirely effective but was a decent attempt at maintenance.

The space was closed intermittently, due to concerns from the school board, but their efforts were thwarted, thanks to my friend with his wrench or angle grinder. In fact, the first time they closed the beach was the day after we opened it. My friend made sure it was open to the public a day later. Judging from the intermittent closures, the school board didn’t seem keen on having the beach on their property. For them, it was probably a liability concern, though they never reached out to share their opinions. For the most part, though, they allowed us to have the space. The elected school board trustee for the area, Stephanie Donaldson, said the beach ‘brought a lot of joy at a time when the community really needed it … The people who took a space in transition and brought to it whimsy, art, joy, and a summer garden’s bounty are community champions.’

Early on, I approached the neighbourhood’s Business Improvement Area for funding, as they offered $1,500 microgrants for community initiatives that benefitted local businesses. I mentioned that people had been purchasing things from local businesses to take to the beach for picnics and suggested the idea of having a pop-up from a business or two, or perhaps a movie night where we could sell things from these businesses. They quickly rejected the proposal, saying they couldn’t possibly fund a project that was technically illegal. The Bloor-dale Bia, made up of business owners, is funded by the City, so I understand why they couldn’t support it financially. At the same time, the heads of the Bia were fans of the beach. Meg Marshall, manager of the Bloordale Bia, said, ‘The creation of Bloordale Beach was a welcomed bright spot throughout the pandemic and put the neighbourhood on the map (literally!) for something so fun and unique.’

Despite the illegal status of this project, the local politicians all had positive things to say about Bloordale Beach. I was delighted when, in November 2020, the Bia held a virtual meeting that included a pre-recorded speech from then City of Toronto mayor John Tory, where he praised ‘the imagination and the determination to come up with a beach and a meadow to fight the pandemic,’ and said it ‘set an example that’s inspired many others.’ The Bia kindly sent me the speech, which I posted to the beach’s Instagram page. It was such a surprise to people – they assumed it was a deepfake.

So, the beach was an illegal guerrilla project that wasn’t technically allowed to exist, but was permitted to exist, or was tolerated, yet it was admired by authorities, though it could not be supported financially, due to its status of being on the wrong side of the law.

Because the space was not being used in an official way, it was also not being maintained by the City, meaning there was no scheduled trash collection. At one point, fifteen garbage and recycling bins accumulated at the beach’s south entrance. Because I’d created the beach, I felt responsible for the space and its cleanliness. I drew a ‘No Dumping’ sign with ‘Fine! $$$$$’ written on it, but that didn’t seem to help.

I eventually realized where the bins were coming from. People could return empties at the Beer Store across from the beach, and to do so, they’d steal garbage bins to transport the bottles and cans, later abandoning them by the beach. Then, people walking by would throw trash into these bins, which meant the beach had a problem with a large number of overflowing containers just outside of the fence. I worried that phoning 311 would get the beach closed, so I emailed then city councillor Ana Bailão, asking if she could have the City take care of these bins without impacting the beach. My efforts to get them removed worked, but more bins would inevitably show up. Any time bins would accumulate, I’d send another email. I sent many emails. Bailão also praised the beach: ‘The naming of Bloordale Beach and the focus on the site is a reminder of the importance of public spaces in our community and the creativity that reimagines these important open spaces for residents.’

Since 2007, the Bloor Improvement Group has organized a summertime street festival in Bloordale. During Covid, Big on Bloor Festival was modified. In 2020 and 2021, Bloor Street wasn’t closed and the crowds weren’t there, but the festival maintained its focus on art. In 2020, they had artists decorate cars. I was delighted to see, outside a nearby business, a car parked that was painted with a palm tree and turtle, with the word Beach and an arrow pointing in the direction of the oasis. The beach was expanding through the neighbourhood!

I asked the festival’s organizer if we could include tours of Bloordale Beach in the festival, and if he’d pay me so the tours could be free for tourgoers. He thought this was a great idea. I offered beach tours in both 2020 and 2021. And where does the festival get its money from? Their funding comes from various organizations, including the Bloor-dale Bia and the City of Toronto.

Wearing a Hawaiian shirt and straw hat, I led tours of Bloordale Beach that incorporated fact and fiction. I explained how this beach was a Unesco World Heritage Site, which it wasn’t really, though we had put up signs on the fences claiming it as such, and I offered various facts about other Unesco sites around the world. The participants had fun with the inventive aspect of the beach, asking about the water conditions for swimming or boating. One person brought a flamingo balloon to the beach. Someone else brought a beach ball. Others dressed in beach attire.

One night in the fall of 2020, a row of giant piles of sand was dumped at the beach. One of the regulars told me he saw this take place and assumed I had arranged it. It is a beach, after all. I really had nothing to do with it. Not long after, someone else dumped a pile of dirt and debris at the beach, and whoever did that left panels of the fence open wide. With those panels left open, there was enough room for a vehicle to enter the space, and overnight a burned trailer ended up making its way onto Bloordale Beach. It had burned in the parking lot across the street a couple of weeks prior.

Though the trailer looked intriguing, the Toronto District School Board was clearly upset by this new beach feature. It was another liability concern. Plus, they’d have to deal with removing the vehicle, which would have associated dumping fees. I could understand their frustration. They shut the beach and hired two security guards to monitor the flat, gravelly expanse twenty-four hours a day. For a while, a security car parked at the centre of the beach. I phoned the security company to inquire about the cost of hiring guards. It was $25 per guard per hour, which comes to $1,200 for two guards per day, or $36,000 for the month. Meanwhile, the school board had maintenance staff flatten and rake the piles of sand. So, the beach became even beachier. And they had the burned trailer removed.

The security at the beach was on the premises for about a month. When the guards stopped coming around, my friend opened the beach once again. It was January 2021, and we could enjoy the snowy beach in wintertime. People again used it as a shortcut, and they went cross-country skiing too.

In July of 2021, the school board wanted to close the beach forever. But a couple of months prior, a community garden had started in one section of the lot, and now it was the middle of the growing season. It wasn’t clear if construction would actually begin, so I sent some emails to find out what was happening. Marit Stiles, the Member of Provincial Parliament for our neighbourhood, arranged for a meeting to take place at the beach with all the other local politicians, or representatives from their offices, along with staff from the school board and some of the gardeners. Like the other local politicians, Stiles also spoke in favour of the beach, saying, ‘If you’re going to leave a giant gravel pit just sitting there, you better believe Bloordale is going to make use of it.’ She described it as a ‘commentary … on the shortage of shared space, community space, [and] space to meet and play and garden.’

Ultimately, they allowed us to maintain the beach until late September, so the gardeners could have their final harvest. Construction wasn’t about to take place just yet anyhow. This was a huge relief, and it felt like a big win for the beach. Even with this guerrilla project being technically illegal, we were finally given actual permission to continue using the space. We didn’t have to wonder whether or not the beach might close unexpectedly.

The beach was open for most days between May 25, 2020, and September 23, 2021. After it closed, people expressed their disappointment. I had known this would be a temporary project and was thrilled the beach lasted as long as it did. I’d had no real expectations for it in the first place, and the results were fantastic, I thought. Things that took place there were entirely unexpected, and the impact it had was beyond anything I would have imagined. To this day, people ask me, ‘Where’s the next beach?’ It’s amazing to still hear this, five years later.

On the site where Bloordale Beach existed is the new Bloor Collegiate Institute, which will open in September 2025. In January of 2024, the superintendent from the construction site contacted me to say he had rescued one of the signs from Bloordale Beach. He had planned on keeping it for himself, but was talking to his son and they thought about asking the principal if the sign could hang in the new school. I was glad to hear a part of the beach could potentially remain on the original site.

Bloordale Beach was a project that developed organically and grew to become something more than I would have ever anticipated. I often feel bored or frustrated with Toronto, maybe since I’ve been living here for 90 per cent of my life. It’s just too familiar. Plus, the City seems uptight in many ways, with too many rules, and it seems to be falling apart. If the City would lighten up a little, like they did with the beach, and let us have some fun, who knows what other kinds of creations could emerge.

The Ballet of the Parking Lot

Brendan Stewart and Daniel Rotsztain

A group of neighbours chat on benches while taking in a spontaneous performance of dancers twirling to a distant beat. Passersby stop to catch what’s going on; some lean on their bikes, while others line up to get street food from one of the many nearby vendors under brightly coloured tents, the savoury aromas of grills wafting through the crowd. Children run and weave as their parents rest their legs on a nearby set of loose chairs under a shady pergola.

It’s the kind of chaotic scene that defines the vendor-lined streets of Mexico City, the bazaars of Istanbul, and the piazzas of Rome, a convivial messiness that underpins robust social networks and is critical to the health of urban communities. But this isn’t Mexico City, or Istanbul, or Rome: it’s a parking lot in Etobicoke North, in the sprawling northwestern suburbs of Toronto.

More precisely, it’s a typical afternoon at ThistlePops, an installation by our plazaPops initiative at the heart of our 2022 project in the Albion Islington Square Business Improvement Area (Bia). And while it feels as though the vivid richness of this scene evolved spontaneously, in the context of Toronto’s regulated urban environment, it was quite the opposite: a painstaking effort involving the coordination of a vast number of partners, local residents, business owners, and City officials.

plazaPops has a simple enough premise. It begins with a fascination and admiration for a particular part of Toronto – the earliest postwar suburbs that ring the older parts of the city, a landscape defined by car-oriented residential neighbourhoods of bungalows and lawns next to modern ‘tower in the park’ high-rise apartments, with wide arterial roads lined by vibrant commercial strip malls that we call ‘strip mall main streets.’ Designed for the car, today many strip malls bustle with pedestrians and transit riders, creating an unofficial type of community hub, attracting people to patronize and hang out at the diverse, mostly locally owned businesses.

The strip malls of Toronto cover over 1,400 hectares of land and are located within a five-minute walk of more than 900,000 people, over 350,000 of whom live within the City-designated Neighbourhood Improvement Areas, which are lower-income and underserved by public and private amenities.

Demographically, these districts map onto what University of Toronto geographer David Hulchanski has identified as the ‘Third City’ of Toronto – areas where income levels are below average and trending downward, and where access to services and infrastructure is lacking. They also tend to be neighbourhoods that urban affairs journalist Doug Saunders describes as ‘Arrival Cities,’ where large concentrations of new Canadian immigrants are settling and building their lives in Canada.

There is great beauty here, in the vibrancy of the community life that strip mall businesses generate, but typically this vibrancy is spatially constrained to building interiors – the restaurants and hookah bars and barber shops – and their immediate edges; the colonnaded walkways, for example, that sometimes serve as a type of community porch where people lean on the columns to smoke or have a chat.

An inventory map of the strip mall plazas of Toronto (black dots) in relation to population density (light grey is low, dark grey is high).

The parking lots that front these businesses could be fairly described as a rather hostile physical environment. Cars and trucks loudly whiz past paved expanses that can be hot, dry, windswept, and lacking in shade and places to sit. Yet the wide swaths of asphalt that surround these sites sometimes host improvised uses, where you might find groups gathering in the shade of a free-standing strip mall sign, sitting in a circle of lawn chairs they have brought and arranged on the asphalt on a long summer evening, simply to hang out.

Strip malls are structured as follows: Starting at the curb, you’ll find a narrow sidewalk zone with bus stops, bollards, poles for electric wires and street lights, and waste receptacles. Next comes the parking lot between the sidewalk and the front doors of the businesses, a space to move through quickly, rather than to linger. Sometimes you’ll find a grassy verge between the sidewalk and the curb, or, when there isn’t a rear alleyway, a collection of dumpsters. But the important consideration is that most of the space between the sidewalk and the strip mall is privately owned either by a single landlord or, less frequently, by multiple owners.

The strip mall ‘plazas’ of peripheral Toronto are quite different in nature from the traditional plazas found in city centres around the world. Their parking lots may be unappealing, yet they anchor the city’s social life. Should strip mall plazas be considered part of the public realm? In the walkable high streets of older streetcar suburbs, the public sidewalk – where Jane Jacobs observed the ‘sidewalk ballet’ – is understood to be enriched by this physical interface and would certainly be considered an important part of the public realm of its neighbourhood.

Strip mall plazas are probably best understood as a type of Privately-Owned Publicly Accessible Space, or Pops. They are the defining spaces of the strip mall main street. Should their ubiquity be captured in how we think about their significance, and enable their enhancement?

We launched plazaPops in 2018 to address this opportunity. We aimed to create public spaces for gathering within these plazas as a form of social infrastructure that responds to the unique conditions, needs, and desires of the strip mall main street, and to develop a sustainable model for delivery. As may be evident at this point, plaza-Pops refers to the locations we are focused on, strip mall plazas, as well as the idea that these plazas are a distinct but important type of Pops. The name also references the idea that the spaces we create, at least at this point, are temporary in nature. They pop up for the summer and fall, and then pop down, relinquishing space back to parked cars. Given the novelty and experimental nature of the idea, we’ve found that it’s much easier for our partner land and business owners to say yes to something temporary.

Funded by a number of research and infrastructure grants, plaza-Pops has created four projects, has developed into a not-for-profit organization with an engaged board of directors and a growing staff, and features a research wing that studies the economic, social, and public health outcomes of the initiative.

Since so much of the public realm of strip mall main streets is privately owned, realizing what might otherwise appear like a relatively simple public realm project – a place with benches, shade, plants, lighting, and public art, where people can gather and hang out outdoors, and that is open to anyone, not just patrons of the mall’s businesses – is immensely challenging.

Because plazaPops is primarily working to enhance public access to privately owned space, a web of trusting and reciprocal relationships needs to be woven, and tools like new types of insurance policies and land-access agreements and other types of contracts need to be created, all to bring land and business owners into the process as partners – absolutely essential partners, as there would be no land to use without them. These relationships require degrees of time, attention, and care that expand well beyond the boundaries of conventional forms of community design practice.

On top of that, because strip mall plazas are not conceptualized as part of the public realm in official policy, the restrictive and car-centric zoning and municipal code bylaws that govern their use create additional barriers, requiring extra time, costs, and support from our City partners to gain permits and approvals. Happily, the City of Toronto recognizes the importance of strip mall main streets. plazaPops has received immense support from numerous City divisions through the course of our projects, including the launch of a temporary-use zoning bylaw pilot within the Wexford Heights Bia that permits outdoor sites of assembly in place of lawfully existing parking spots. The City will be studying our 2024 projects in consideration of expanding these permissions citywide.

From a spatial-justice perspective, these added complexities are an overlooked barrier that needs to be acknowledged and addressed if we are to build more equitable cities. Our experience has taught us that in Toronto we need to expand our conception of the public realm to include privately owned strip mall parking lots and develop pragmatic tools to make enhancing their public benefits easier and cheaper.

In response to the invisible complexities of the context we work in, we’ve developed plazaPops as a process as well as a product. We’ve come to think about plazaPops as something like a quilt, and the collective, community-based act of creation and care as a form of community quilting.

Quilting is an ancient and diverse traditional practice, but one that persists as a counterpoint to our globalized, mass-produced, and disposable material culture. Our appreciation for quilts, and the meaning(s) they carry, are as associated with the processes that brought them into being – the practice of quilting – as they are with the object itself. Quilts often involve more than one person: a ‘community quilt’ is the collaborative effort of a group, with individuals contributing a portion that gets stitched together to make the whole. And a quilt may be mended by its later users and caretakers, after the initial maker is long gone.

Visually, quilts are made of a patchwork of pieces, organized into a coherent pattern and stitched together to create a unified whole. plazaPops installations are composed similarly: created out of a system of modular elements – planters, benches, tables, and shade structures – and layered with custom elements like murals, locally sewn shade fabrics, and interactive signage. These elements are selected for pragmatic purposes – for instance, to be quick and easy to install with minimal disruption to local businesses, to be associated with values such as sourcing materials and labour locally to keep money in the community, and to be organized into patterns dictated largely by considerations of function, safety, and comfort.

Local residents and visitors celebrate at the season closing Harvest Festival and Diwali Celebration at the ThistlePops Hub site in October 2022.

The thread that stitches plazaPops together is the most important component: the network of trust-based relationships that are created through the process. Connected over time through workshops, meals, stories, hanging out, handshake agreements, creative contracts, novel insurance policies, celebrations, and hard work, the thread has to hold up across cultural divides, balance public access with the interests of private landowners, and be repaired quickly and compassionately if and when a portion of it begins to fray.

This act of community quilting involves a lot of people. To borrow a medieval term used to describe trades working in unison, the diverse and nimble group that cooperates, creates, and nurtures plazaPops installations is something like a guild.

The booth style seating at the Ghadir plaza, part of our 2023 installations in Wexford Heights, Scarborough.

The urban scene described in the introduction – the ‘parking lot ballet’ – results from the trust, passion, and care of our guild of community quilters. Working together, the impossible becomes possible and a wonderful messy urbanism is created where you’d least expect it.

These metaphors of quilting and guild are illustrated by the plazaPops installation located at the Ghadir plaza in the summer of 2023, at the northeast corner of Lawrence Avenue East and Pharmacy Road in the eastern part of Toronto known as Scarborough. The plaza is home to a meat market, fish market, grocery, and takeout restaurant that serves Middle Eastern foods like shawarma, falafel, manakeesh, and kafta. An institution within the neighbourhood that also attracts a regional clientele, Ghadir is open seven days a week, serving from 8 a.m. until midnight, extending to 2 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. It buzzes with energy day and night, and, as you might imagine, the parking lot can be chaotic and is nearly always at capacity. We developed an installation of shaded, booth-style seating along the sidewalk facing Pharmacy Road, imagining that it would become a node of vibrant activity, animated largely by diners.

As we’d hoped, the installation was an immediate hit, and we started to receive very positive feedback from the owners of Ghadir. But there were other, less positive forms of evidence of our success. Waste receptacles were filling up more quickly than our site stewards could empty them, and wasps were moving in, making the job even less appealing. The surfaces of our tables were becoming sticky from sauce drippings, and cigarette butts were evident in the grass and along the sidewalk. All signs of success, but clearly a problem that required an upgrade to our operations to ensure that the space remained attractive and safe. This was an undesirable form of messiness.

To show how this problem was identified and addressed, a bit more context is required. A team of five local youth site stewards had been hired and trained to take care of our sites through the summer: watering the plants, managing waste, tidying, cleaning, and being ambassadors of the project. In addition, our team of community-based researchers was conducting fieldwork during the summer, including a public life study, surveys, and an in-depth ethnographic study that included observations and, ultimately, semi-structured interviews with visitors to the sites.

Collectively the researchers and site stewards were a very diverse group in terms of age (ranging from teenagers to retirees), gender, and ethnic and linguistic background, and the majority were local to the neighbourhood. To manage both teams, we set up WhatsApp groups and encouraged a culture of regular reporting, including notifications about when team members were on-site, updates about trends of use and surveys and interviews completed.

Our researchers flagged the garbage, litter, and cleanliness issues at the Ghadir site very quickly (during an evening shift), and we were able to address the issue more or less overnight: purchasing more robust scrubbers and cleaning solutions, implementing more frequent waste removals, and providing further training and supports to our site stewards. The experience inspired longer-term responses as well. In 2024, plazaPops partnered with Scarborough Zero Waste and Good Futures Collective, as well as several local restaurants, to develop a community-based research project to understand practical strategies to reduce takeout food waste in the neighbourhood.

This example illustrates the types of challenges that arise, and the reach and strength of the collaborative guild of people involved in creating and caring for a plazaPops project – a group bonded across disciplines, sectors, and lived experiences and identities. Because plazaPops are publicly accessible, and we have invited ourselves onto private property to do the project, the sustainability of the initiative depends on remaining in the good graces of our landowner and business partners and ensuring that the public perception of the project remains positive. We continuously work to refine and simplify the model, but to date, investing in the development of our ‘guild of quilters’ has created the thread that stitches the whole project together.

Over the years, plazaPops has proven both easy and difficult to talk about. It’s easy when there is time to unpack the various layers of the project, to tell stories of the complicated process, the constant learning, the setbacks, and the moments of unique and messy beauty. Communication becomes difficult when trying to sum up the project quickly. The gestalt of the project is difficult to meaningfully capture when limited to an image or soundbite.

This community-based model is a direct response to the complexities of the physical, political, economic, and legal conditions of the neighbourhoods we are working in, and an ongoing commitment to place-keeping – rather than place-making – practices. The resulting spaces we create and care for, we hope, create places where both the mundane and the sublime of life unfold, and where people encounter each other and grow as individuals and communities.

It takes a village to ‘pop’ a plaza and unleash the ‘parking lot ballet.’ The circuitous, trust-based process is fun most of the time, always enriching, and absolutely worth the painstaking effort. Hopefully we can figure out how to make it just a little bit easier, so this essential messiness will spread throughout the city.

What Is Safety?

Kimahli Powell

During the summer of 2023, I noticed groups of people hovering around a shelter intake centre at Richmond and Peter streets, in what appeared to be an encampment kitty-corner to my office in a former industrial building at the western edge of Toronto’s downtown.

One morning, I decided to stop there and get a sense of what was happening by speaking with a security guard. It quickly became clear that many of those camping out were refugees. They were there because they needed a place to live but could not find one in a city experiencing a housing crisis.

The organization I then led, Rainbow Railroad, is dedicated to helping Lgbtqi+ people facing persecution in other nations reach a safe country. Many land in Toronto. But what happens if the safe haven they reach as refugees is, itself, unable to provide them with the stability and support they need?

Rainbow Railroad is a Toronto-based, globally focused charity, founded in 2006 as a volunteer-run organization that supports individuals one case at a time. The name hearkens back to the Underground Railroad – the nineteenth-century network that helped Black people escape enslavement in the southern United States. As word of Rainbow Railroad’s success in relocating people from dangerous situations spread, it received more and more requests for help. The organization scaled up its operations after receiving charitable status in Canada (2013) and the U.S. (2015). Having started as the organization’s sole full-time employee, I am proud to have led Rainbow Railroad to grow to become an international organization that has provided support to thousands of people.

There are currently more displaced people in the world than ever before – approximately 114 million, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Queer people are uniquely vulnerable due to systemic, state-enabled homophobia and transphobia. Since its founding, Rainbow Railroad has helped over 13,000 individuals facing persecution based on their sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex characteristics through emergency relocation, crisis response, cash support, and other forms of assistance.

An ongoing discussion at the heart of Rainbow Railroad is this: What does safety look like for queer people at risk when they arrive in a resettlement country, particularly since the vast majority end up resettling in urban centres, in search of a safe queer community? As a small organization focused on getting people out of dangerous situations, we could not provide resettlement services and ongoing support. But what if the people we resettle are experiencing further discrimination and trauma in the countries we have helped them move to? What if they are living in poverty or isolated from the community?

I used to say that Rainbow Railroad’s role can be likened to an ambulance – triaging and getting people out of danger and to safety. It’s a line that was integral to the organization’s message but incomplete – because what is the point of the ambulance if people are not receiving care in the hospital?

The refugee housing crisis that was exposed in Toronto in the summer of 2023 laid bare in stark relief that although the city is seen as a beacon of hope for many refugees and an international destination for Lgbtqi+ folks – just look at our annual Pride celebrations – that picture is not complete. Sarah Hegazi’s story really made that clear for me.

I remember Sunday, June 14, 2020, well. I was in my home in Kensington Market, getting ready to go outside and carefully pick up some essential items (we were in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic) when I learned that Sarah Hegazi had taken her life. I saw a post from one of her friends on social media and watched as her life and death became not only an inspiration, but an international rallying cry against the unjust criminal punishment and persecution of Lgbtqi+ people around the world. Sarah was a lesbian activist and writer who spent her life resisting the pervasive homophobia, transphobia, and patriarchy in Egypt that ultimately led her to flee to Canada. She was thirty years old.

Three years prior to her death, Sarah’s life would change after a simple but brave act of activism. On September 22, 2017, Lebanese indie rock band Mashrou’ Leila performed in front of 35,000 fans in Cairo. Sarah – and several others in the audience that evening – courageously and joyously waved rainbow flags in support of the band’s openly gay lead singer. In a country that does not accept Lgbtqi+

people, this celebration of pride and happiness was all too brief. Photos were posted on social media, and within days, Egyptian authorities began a three-week crackdown, arresting over a hundred Lgbtqi+ individuals.

Sarah was jailed for three months, during which time authorities tortured her and placed her in solitary confinement. Upon her release, her life remained in imminent danger. I vividly remember travelling to Cairo to meet Sarah and other activists at risk. Rainbow Railroad helped her and dozens of others flee before they could be recaptured and subjected to further persecution. In March 2018, Sarah arrived in Toronto.

Rainbow Railroad’s intervention in Egypt signalled a shift in its work, from helping individual cases to taking on crisis response. In general, our partner organizations and the public agencies in the safe countries where people resettle take up the baton of caring for the people we help after they land. In Sarah’s case, we connected with her on occasion, and we knew she was struggling to adapt to life in Canada. Other Egyptians we supported during that time also struggled to get access to resources to help with their resettlement.

For Sarah, the lack of mental health support proved fatal. She was not safe. Access to social services is so inequitable – Black and brown people, as well as marginalized folks such as Lgbtqi+ people, cannot access the same kinds of services as others. Sarah wrote about some of her mental health struggles, including isolation and fear, as well as the pervasive trauma from her targeted persecution just because of her sexuality. Sarah’s passing was a wake-up call, a sobering reminder that the trauma resulting from entrenched state-sponsored violence based on sexual orientation or gender identity does not end when someone relocates to somewhere safer. Her death also illuminated that more supports (including basic needs, housing, and mental health assistance) are necessary to help Lgbtqi+ individuals once they arrive in a resettlement country.

The refugee narrative is one of escaping persecution and arriving at safety, but there are many elements of safety for newcomers and refugees. In an urban setting, how does the newly arrived person navigate housing, employment, and health care, let alone find comforting cultural connections and empowering queer community?

Most Lgbtqi+ folks seek community in urban centres, but in many cities, historically gay neighbourhoods have become more gentrified – including in Toronto, where a growing number of gay bars in the downtown Church Street Village have been replaced by condos. Thankfully, there is still Woody’s, an iconic Lgbtqi+ establishment that has operated since 1989 and become a landmark. It’s a place I can reliably go to meet with friends, unwind from work, and catch a drag show.

Not long ago, I went there with friends and noticed a couple of people looking at me (yes, I know it’s a gay bar, but not that kind of looking). Eventually, they approached me and asked if I was Kimahli. They explained that they were Afghans and told me how grateful they were for Rainbow Railroad’s help in escaping their dangerous situation. They also asked if they could take a picture of me, which I obliged but felt humbled to allow, knowing that many people were responsible for their resettlement.

Since the fall of Kabul to the Taliban on August 15, 2021, Lgbtqi+ people in Afghanistan have faced severe persecution, including physical assaults, sexual violence, and unlawful killings. Over 1,700 requests for help were submitted to Rainbow Railroad from Afghanistan between August 2021 and August 2022, and the requests continued through 2023. We learned from those sending requests for our help that the Taliban was actively searching for Lgbtqi+ individuals, identifying them from social media images, encouraging local people to surveil and report on Lgbtqi+ neighbours, doing door-to-door searches, detaining people, and committing physical assaults, including rape and sexual violence. Many reported severe food insecurity, the inability to move about in public, and running out of money.

In an historic agreement with the Government of Canada, we were able to resettle nearly 600 Lgbtqi+ Afghans to Canada as government-assisted refugees. Together with partner organizations, we successfully advocated for the referral of an additional 200 Lgbtqi+ individuals for resettlement in Canada under the agreement between Canada and the U.S. to accept 5,000 Afghan refugees evacuated by the American forces.

Will this large cohort of refugees find safety in their host communities? A unique aspect of the Lgbtqi+ refugee narrative is that individuals arrive with the ongoing trauma of their Lgbtqi+ experiences. The trauma manifests in various ways, including maintaining connections with individuals in the country of origin and facing anti-Lgbtqi+ discrimination within diasporic communities. Will they be exposed to further anti-Lgbtqi+ hate and discrimination in their new country? Many people we resettled have reported experiencing anxiety and trauma when being mixed upon arrival with people from Afghanistan who appear to be homophobic or transphobic.

Also, many have not disclosed their Lgbtqi+ identities to their parents and often fear being outed even though they are ‘safe.’ What does safety look like for them in this complicated and complex geopolitical and socio-economic situation? Will they find the physical and mental health supports they require? What will their living conditions be like? And will they find a sense of family and community? There are few dedicated resources with safe spaces for Lgbtqi+ individuals on arrival to address their specific needs.

The Toronto housing crisis. Sarah’s tragic death. The gentrification encroaching on Lgbtqi+ spaces. The experiences of the hundreds of Afghans who have already arrived. All these stories highlight the fact that Toronto, while a relatively safe space, is nonetheless an imperfect haven, one with its own instabilities and challenges, where Lgbtqi+ and other refugees will face continued struggles. It’s a reminder that urban safety for refugees must be built around equity and equality.

It’s easy to look at the struggles that newcomers face, and their lack of resources, and conclude that Canada is not ready to receive more refugees. Indeed, we are seeing this argument play out not only in countries around the world (yes, I’m talking about Springfield, Ohio, and the Haitian-migrants-eating-pets nonsense), but right here at home as well. But this is a false narrative. This isn’t a contest between the quantity of refugees we resettle and the quality of services we provide. Rather, the heart of the persecution that forces people to flee and the trauma they continue to experience after resettlement is caused by inequity and rivalry, so the solutions must lie in compassion, inclusion, and collaboration.

It’s also important to note that the journey of an Lgbtqi+ refugee is often lonely and singular. While refugees facing armed conflict or other types of persecution are at times able to pursue their journeys with a community of family or friends, most often Lgbtqi+ persons are on the move by themselves, having already become isolated from their communities or escaping families who are targeting them because of their sexual orientation, gender identity, or sex characteristics. They face discrimination while on their journey, whether at a refugee camp or a resettlement centre once they land in Canada. Consequently, there must be adequate resources to support the needs of Lgbtqi+ persons once they finally arrive.

In the wake of the 2023 housing crisis at that corner of Richmond and Peter, I learned that my friend and colleague Christopher Nkambwe, the founder of the African Centre for Refugees and an Lgbtqi+ newcomer from Uganda, was on the front lines providing support to refugees at that very shelter across from our office.

Christopher is a Black transgender woman activist, human rights defender, and community advocate from Uganda. She landed in Toronto in 2019 as a refugee claimant. While Rainbow Railroad has helped many individuals from Uganda, Christopher arrived without the organization’s assistance. Like many newcomers, she is self-reliant and resilient – she found her own way to Canada and navigated her way through services in a brand-new home.

Also, like many Lgbtqi+ human rights defenders, Christopher was trying to change laws and policies that criminalize Lgbtqi+ persons in countries like Uganda, which recently passed one of the world’s most egregious new Lgbtqi+ laws. It includes punishments such as life in prison and even the death penalty. Many Lgbtqi+ human rights defenders only flee when things become too unsafe to stay. They also continue their advocacy once they resettle. The African Centre for Refugees in Ontario-Canada is an organization Christopher founded out of her own pocket and provides support to Lgbtqi+ refugees arriving in Canada.

It was then no surprise to see Christopher on the front lines supporting other newcomers in need during a housing crisis. It’s also what I love about the City of Toronto and this country. Even though much more needs to be done to provide adequate resources to people struggling in cities across Canada, individuals like Christopher, as well as communities and organizations, step up to help. And that makes a world of difference.

Why Can’t We Sell Stuff Anyplace?

John Lorinc

In a world where you can use your smartphone to buy virtually anything, at any time of the day, and from anyplace with a reliable cell signal (which now includes the most remote places on Earth if your provider happens to be Starlink), one could reasonably ask why some cities, especially in the Global North, are so particular about where shopping can happen.

Zoning rules governing commercial activity are so ubiquitous that we barely notice them. Retailers can do business on main streets, or in malls specifically designated for commerce. They’re generally banned from the upper floors of apartment buildings or residential areas, unless those neighbourhoods are old enough that some superannuated grocery store or hair salon existed on a side street before the no-retail rules came into effect – a phenomenon quaintly known as the grandfathering of a ‘legal non-conforming use.’

Some big cities tolerate street vendors, who may or may not require licences, while others prefer their sidewalks and other public spaces – and especially parks – to be unsullied by the exchange of goods for cash, with the possible exception of cafés or stalls offering drinks and snacks.

It’s also true that in denser cities, where most people live in apartments, the presence of retail in neighbourhoods is less restricted, but this is by no means a hard-and-fast rule. There are extended tracts of Manhattan’s more traditional residential neighbourhoods – the Upper East and West Sides, for example – with no retail, or at least no retail on the smaller east-west streets. If you need to go to a bodega or a drugstore, you have to walk a few blocks to the nearest north-south avenue, where shops line the ground floors of apartment buildings.

A few more refinements to these general statements are in order: illicit commerce, of course, happens anywhere and everywhere, and we’re not just talking about drugs or other black-market commodities. In Toronto, residents may run small businesses out of their homes or apartments, but only if they’re not seeing clients or serving customers. Yet I know of public housing complexes in the city that were filled with informal apartment-based businesses – hair and nail salons, private daycares, and so on. The property managers turned a blind eye, and so the residents of those vertical communities did what the inhabitants of human settlements have done since the dawn of time, which is trade with one another.

The suppression of private retail activity in Eastern and Central Europe during the Cold War produced not just an explosion of entrepreneurial desperation after 1989, but a commensurate indifference to location. I spent December 1989 in Budapest, and every pedestrian underpass and subway entrance had turned into a permanent flea market. Nor did municipal authorities fret much, at least early in the post-communist era, about promulgating rules governing what types of retail could go where. In Toronto, you can’t just put a body shop wherever you want. But in Budapest, upstart car dealers and auto repair shops were shoehorned into the ground floors of 1920s-vintage mid-rise apartments. Upstairs in those same buildings, you could find photocopy places or lawyers’ offices. Anything could go anywhere.

That principle is supercharged in Hanoi, Vietnam, where commerce takes place quite literally everywhere. There are tiny restaurants hidden up several flights of stairs that patrons reach by skirting the living quarters of the building’s tenants. Stalls dot the embankments of the colonial-era rail corridors that criss-cross the downtown. And in the conventional retail spaces – at grade, on any street – you find shoemakers and lumber vendors and plumbing supply wholesalers all jammed into impossibly narrow storefronts, their merchandise invariably spilling onto the ribbons of undulating concrete that pass for sidewalk.

It might be tempting to conclude that urban retail – the ur-market – is somehow predisposed to be messy, as in Hanoi. Take away regulation (or enforcement) and replace it with laissez-faire capitalism, and you get commercial activity that naturally metastasizes, spreading into every available nook and cranny.

Yet the history of urban retail districts – which have been heavily constrained in North American cities by postwar zoning policies that strictly segregated commercial, industrial, and residential zones – isn’t just a story about free markets. Urban commerce wasn’t, in fact, always everywhere. Even ancient cities took steps to make it less messy.

As with the origins of money, it’s impossible to locate, physically or temporally, the very earliest markets. Some archaeological evidence, as well as ancient inscriptions from the Bronze and Iron Ages, suggests that markets in the Near East grew up either in the vicinity of ports and harbours, which makes sense, in designated merchant quarters, or on the outskirts of human settlements, in zones where merchants travelling by caravan between different regions would stop to trade their wares, form partnerships, or exchange commercial information. In ancient civilizations separated by large swaths of time and space, municipal markets often occupied a central space within a city – a remarkable point of commonality that speaks to the universality of commerce as a fundamentally human and urban activity. The vast central market in Tlatelolco-Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital now known as Mexico City, ‘was crowded and had a diverse array of goods (mundane, rare, local, exotic) crafted or grown by tens of thousands of farmers and artisans,’ write anthropologists Gary M. Feinman and Linda M. Nicholas, who study pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica archaeology. ‘Most participants in the Aztec market were small-scale producers, sellers, and consumers.’ Tlatelolco-Tenochtitlán’s bustling central market, they add, functioned as the hub of a network of sub-markets.

The agoras of ancient Greece and Rome, and then the souks and bazaars of Middle Eastern cities, were similarly situated at the urban centre, which was not necessarily at the point where water met land. The person credited with laying out the first formal agora, in a small Greek city called Piraeus, was an eccentric figure named Hippodamus, who was born around 480 Bc, a few generations earlier than Plato and Aristotle.

The latter credited Hippodamus with inventing ‘the art of planning cities’ – no small accolade from the greatest of the Greek political philosophers. The specific reference was to the rebuilding of three Greek cities, which Hippodamus laid out on an orthogonal grid, with a central open area to be used for both commerce and social/civic activities. Hippodamus also sought to divide his new city into three social classes, with three types of land use – for sacred activities, for public life, and for private or residential life.

While historians and archaeologists now believe that Hippodamus’s innovation actually replicated or built atop earlier geometrical urban layouts, with streets of varying widths establishing a hierarchy of public spaces defined by the layouts of rectangular buildings, Hippo-damus is seen to have introduced the notion of allocating land uses in master-planned cities. What’s more, the agora he laid out in Piraeus contrasted with the irregularly shaped central plazas/markets of earlier cities, in that it had a geometrical formality as well as purpose-built civic buildings that delineated a public space designed for those quintessentially public urban activities: commerce, civic governance and the exchange of information.

In other words, long before contemporary city planning and the postwar separation of land uses that has carved up so many North American metropolitan regions, early city-builders, borrowing from older organic practices, designated spaces for the buying and selling of goods.

Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar, the Kapalıçarşı, is a market that has long functioned as a city within a city. One of the oldest and certainly largest covered markets in the world, the Kapalıçarşı, according to a 2015 paper in the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, has about 3,600 shops employing about 30,000 people, lining the multiple covered streets of a complex that is substantially larger than the largest American indoor mall. Built by the Ottomans in the 1440s on the site of an earlier marketplace, it has endured the rise and fall of empires, earthquakes, and globalization. The 400,000-square-foot venue also contains guild halls, food courts, and extensive internal streets with vendors that deal only in certain goods, like spices, jewellery, and carpets.

Anyone who’s visited Kapalıçarşı or other large indoor or partially covered municipal markets will recognize, almost immediately, that they share a kind of commercial Dna with modern shopping centres, Asian malls, and even upscale specialty emporiums, like the various Time Out food markets in cities like Lisbon, Portugal. These common features include multiple entrances to the surrounding city, zones that specialize in particular goods/services, anchor stores, and so on.

There’s something deeply embedded in the logic of commerce that encourages merchants selling similar products to converge on one area, either permanently or periodically, as is true for large trade fairs, which now take place in flashy convention centres but originated many centuries ago with the advent of medieval fairgrounds and guild halls. There, artisans and craftspeople would convene to display their wares, trade, pick up industry gossip, steal their rivals’ ideas, and network. As Hippodamus and the Greek political philosophers well understood, there could be no trade in goods and services, much less any form of inclusive civic life, without the robust exchange of information, which could occur only in places where consumers, producers, travelling salespeople, and merchants gathered: the agora.

Despite their universality across geographies, it is nearly impossible to precisely locate the earliest markets in the very oldest human settlements. However, the development of ‘new’ colonial cities revealed the persistence of that ancient instinct to establish central municipal markets. For example, in the Town of York, established in 1793 by British colonizers on Indigenous lands that had been occupied for at least 12,000 years, the first such market, later known as St. Lawrence, was constructed on a site on the shore of Lake Ontario. Toronto’s present-day North Market is located on exactly the same spot and has operated continuously as a food market, except for a recent period of reconstruction, since 1803.

When urban populations grow, they can overwhelm existing municipal markets, and so the zone for commerce needs to expand – a dynamic that was as true for Tlatelolco-Tenochtitlán and Istanbul as for Toronto. In the case of the latter, the municipality constructed other small markets, but also allowed merchants to open stores on commercial high streets.

Yet in early Toronto, which wasn’t all that unusual as colonial cities go, dry goods stores, pubs, butcher shops, barbers, and so on couldn’t just set up shop wherever they wanted. As early as 1834, the newly incorporated City of Toronto passed a bylaw that required ‘[all] Retailers of Ale Beer and Cyder, Butchers, Cartmen, Showmen, and Keepers or Ordinaries or victualling houses’ to obtain a permit signed by the mayor and the chamberlain, after review by ‘a standing Committee to be composed of the Mayor and six Aldermen,’ according to a history of development and land-use regulation in early Toronto. That requirement – promulgated long before late-nineteenth-century urban reformers, like Ebenezer Howard, began writing about the separation of land uses and the need to protect families from noxious industry – enabled the municipality to control where many forms of commercial activity could and could not go.

Those restrictions largely had to do with this young city’s concerns about fire risk, early building codes, and crowding, as well as public health and sanitation, especially in the vicinity of slaughterhouses and butcher shops. By the early years of the twentieth century, however, Toronto council’s decisions revealed a growing awareness of Howard’s ideas about separating residential areas from commercial zones. In 1904, in fact, the provincial legislature passed a law that enabled municipalities to ‘prevent, regulate and control the location, erection and use of buildings for laundries, butcher shops, stores and manufactories’ from specific areas.

‘In response to a request for a building permit or for a licence, or upon notification by any person that a commercial facility was being planned in a certain area,’ explained McGill University planner scholar Raphaël Fischler in a 2007 paper in the Urban History Review, ‘the city’s property commissioner would be mandated to “cause enquiry to be made amongst residents of the neighborhood where such laundry, butcher shop, store or manufactory is proposed to be located, erected or used, with a view of ascertaining if any objections exist to the location, erection and use of the building for any of the purposes aforesaid.” Based on the commissioner’s findings as well as on “his opinion as to the advisability of such a business being established in the said locality,” the Board of Control would decide whether or not to recommend approval.’

That provision – which became law in Ontario fully six decades before the populist push-back against heavy-handed urban revitalization schemes begat modern public consultation protocols – can be read as an early-modern example of how local governments recognized that they had to solicit feedback from residents before allowing merchants to set up shop in their neighbourhoods.

Like many North American cities that were propelled outward during the Baby Boom generation, postwar Toronto worked very hard to separate commercial activity from residential neighbourhoods, the way a picky eater might push the peas to that side of the plate and the mashed potatoes to this side. This approach, the legacy of the utopian planners who influenced so much urban development in the Global North, helped create shopping malls and power centres and neighbourhoods denuded of even the most basic types of retail conveniences.

But that planning orthodoxy is faltering. I think of some of the postwar walk-ups in Montreal where the ground-floor apartments have been converted, either legally or illegally, into shops or hair salons. Much more recently, large shopping centre owners – predominantly pension funds – have been exploring the notion of erecting apartment buildings and condo towers on portions of their extensive surface parking lots, both to monetize all the lazy land that surrounds the mall and to use that proximity as a marketing tool for condo developers. Toronto City Council is considering a bylaw allowing certain types of small-scale retailers back into neighbourhoods from whence they were banned for decades.

Some of these changes reflect the more freewheeling ethic of commercial activity that is commonplace in the megacities of the Global South. But they also respond to the reality of large twenty-first-century cities, which are, or are becoming, denser and therefore more mixed.

Still, that distinctively postwar habit of segregating retail from residential may not be merely a planning response to the proliferation of the private automobile and the outward ambitions of a generation that endured two world wars and a Depression. The ancient logic of markets, as well as the granular messiness of commerce, have both informed the ways in which municipal authorities sought to direct merchants to specific zones within cities – a habit of local governance that persists in many places, despite the placelessness of e-commerce.

Desire Lines in the Sand

Wesley Lincoln Reibeling

For queer communities, desire lines symbolize the many ways that queer people have made places for themselves in cities that have often excluded or erased them. Queer spaces exist outside conventional planning norms, providing sanctuary beyond the constraints of mainstream society. Hanlan’s Point on Toronto Island is one such place, formed and reformed over decades as a community-driven refuge where the Lgbtq+ community created a path for themselves in defiance of ‘Toronto the Good’s’ tendency toward order.

Heteronormative culture, much like traditional city planning, tries to lay out the urban realm rigidly. Queer communities have historically made do in hidden or overlooked spaces, reclaiming places that were not explicitly queer or permanent. As Davy Knittle, a professor at the University of Delaware, writes, ‘Cities, by their very nature, are messy, and queer theory does an excellent job of capturing this messiness.’ Cities should embrace the spontaneous elements that queerness brings to urban landscapes and rethink these inflexible frameworks by questioning for whom public spaces are designed and who benefits.

This perspective is especially relevant to spaces like Hanlan’s Point on Toronto Island, where the city’s queer community has carved out a refuge for many years.

Situated at the southwestern end of Toronto Island, Hanlan’s Point has served as a space of refuge, though its purpose has often sparked contention, with numerous arrests for nudity and queer gatherings over many decades. Yet, through shifting clothing bylaws and evolving social attitudes, Hanlan’s users have persevered. As historian Dale Barbour points out in his book Undressed Toronto, which explores the island and the City’s public swimming history, spaces like the Western Sandbar, as Hanlan’s Point Beach was once known, have long been sites of resistance. Tucked away from the city, Hanlan’s has hosted countless formal and informal gatherings, allowing nude bathers and Lgbtq+ people to be unapologetically themselves. Over time, Hanlan’s became one of the few places where joy, expression, and community converged in ways that defied City plans.

Hanlan’s Point is a testament to the resilience of the Lgbtq+ community. Despite the challenges and the top-down control, it has thrived, thanks to the unwavering determination of its users. Activists like Peter Simm, Ontario appellate counsel and research lawyer, played a crucial role in re-establishing the beach’s clothing-optional status in 1998–99, demonstrating the power of community-driven space.

When speaking about its clothing-optional history, Simm states that this culture ‘[dates] back over a century, [and] went from de jure (1894–1930) to de facto (1930–1999), then back to de jure (1999–present).’ He, alongside some other local community historians, contend it is one of the first clothing-optional spaces in the world. Its informal nature has meant that Hanlan’s Point users repeatedly faced threats from City officials who misunderstood its importance. That indifference reflects a broader concern in planning: decisions are often made without consulting those most impacted.

In early 2022, Hanlan’s and its users faced potential upheaval in the form of a City proposal to build a large event venue near the beach. Later in the year, on a late-autumn evening, after City officials showcased the new Toronto Island Park Master Plan (Timp), I opened my phone and saw rumblings from friends, colleagues, and members of Toronto’s Lgbtq+ community about the proposed change to Hanlan’s Point.

Community members expressed their feelings of apathy and anger that Hanlan’s rich queer history seemed absent from the Timp – a troubling omission that reflects the all-too-common erasure of queer histories in cities and the City’s lack of prioritization of 2SLgbtq+ engagement in the Timp’s process. The posts suggested they didn’t believe their voices were being heard, highlighting the community’s frustration and the need for their concerns to be addressed.

The Timp proposed introducing ‘family-friendly’ programming at the northern tip of Hanlan’s Beach and a large outdoor amphi-theatre metres away from Hanlan’s Point. This worried community members, who felt such a venue could exacerbate homophobic and transphobic violence and tensions with other communities. The beach, moreover, wasn’t explicitly marked as a queer space, which made it hard to advocate for.

Recognizing the community’s frustration, I contacted colleagues at City Hall, sharing that many Lgbtq+ community members felt disheartened and reached out to me, a queer person working for a non-profit that advocates for parks. Initially, City staff appeared steadfast. Without meaningful engagement, I feared, the queer community would mobilize and further strain relationships with the City’s parks department.

In the early twentieth century, Hanlan’s Point was a hub of activity. It was home to an amusement park, which had opened in 1885 and was owned by the Hanlan family, who later owned the island ferry services and a hotel on the island. Besides a baseball diamond and amusement park, this part of the island had primarily informal buildings. As other parts of the Toronto Islands became populated, Hanlan’s Point saw the development of seasonal homes similar to the cottages on Ward’s Island. The Western Sandbar had long served as a recreational beach, marking the beginning of its rich and diverse history.

In 1885, Turner’s Baths opened near Hanlan’s amusement park. In the 1890s, the Western Sandbar became one of the city’s few sanctioned nude swimming areas. This strip of beach near the bathhouse became known as a spot where men, often blue-collar workers, could swim unclothed. Ms. Turner, the owner of the baths, frequently voiced her disapproval of the sight of nude male bodies wading into the lake.

Early evidence of Hanlan’s Point Beach as a queer space can be found in the ArQuives (formerly the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives) in a program book for the 7th International Gay and Lesbian History Conference, Sex and the State, held in 1985. It refers to Hanlan’s as ‘a gay beach for over 50 years,’ which suggests a queer presence going back to the 1930s. In Lynne Fernie’s documentary Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives, Carole Ritchie-Mackintosh recalls attending posh parties in whites and yachting caps and then heading to Hanlan’s with picnic baskets full of wine and smoked oysters.

George Hislop, one of Canada’s most influential gay activists and co-founder of the Community Homophile Association of Toronto, recalled, in a 2002 interview with Xtra!, meeting men and cruising the beach before World War II. He met his future partner there.

Two significant events on the island likely contributed to establishing Hanlan’s as a queer refuge. In 1926, the amusement park closed, transforming Hanlan’s into a ghost town and driving the Turner Baths out of business. Eleven years later, the construction of the Toronto Island Airport in 1937 for civilian and military use led to the removal of cottages on the northern tip of the Western Sandbar. These changes, combined with the area’s earlier reputation as a spot for nude swimming among men at the turn of the century, created the isolation that fostered Hanlan’s emergence as a queer summer colony by the early 1950s.

That same decade, the local tabloid columnist Mother Goose was writing about gay picnics and parties at Hanlan’s Point. In a video interview with the ArQuives, gay liberation activist Philip McLeod, a librarian, recounts speaking with historian David Churchill about meeting fellow queer friends and lovers on the beach at Hanlan’s. He shares memories of befriending a gay English teacher who owned a cottage on the island and reflects on the fear of being seen in a queer space like Hanlan’s that could ‘out him’ in Toronto.

These stories highlight a broader history of gay and lesbian communities seeking refuge in North American beach towns like Fire Island and Provincetown beginning in the 1930s, as well as destinations such as Chicago’s Belmont Rocks, from the 1960s, New York’s Christopher Street pier, in the 1970s and 1980s, and Riis Beach in Rockaway, Brooklyn. For generations, Riis was one of the few transit-accessible public spaces where queer people could gather, relax, and express themselves freely and affordably. However, the 2023 demolition of an abandoned hospital near the beach left visitors feeling exposed and raised fears about surveillance and safety.

On August 1, 1971, Hanlan’s took on even more significance as the site of Canada’s first Pride event, with around three hundred people gathering for the Gay Day Picnic. Organized by the Community Homophile Association of Toronto, Toronto Gay Action, and the University of Toronto Homophile Association, the event followed the signing of the ‘We Demand’ letter, marking the event as both a celebration and an effort to raise awareness and funds for Canada’s first gay-rights march, the We Demand Rally, held at Parliament Hill later that month.

The picnic occurred at the southern end of Hanlan’s Point Beach, a secluded area that offered participants a sense of safety and privacy. Many surviving organizers recall gathering around a firepit on the beach. Tragically, this spot – which some see as a critical historic point for Toronto’s Lgbtq+ community – is now likely submerged due to shifting lake ecology, climate change, and the lack of beach restoration efforts.

Queer and clothing-optional or nude spaces, like that of Hanlan’s Point, hold complexity, balancing expressions of identity with the challenges of visibility, safety, and inclusion. Toronto local writer and human rights lawyer Marcus McCann writes of this in his book Park Cruising: What Happens When We Wander Off the Path. He examines how these spaces challenge societal norms about public parks, urban planning, law, and policing.

Toronto’s queer community has endured a fraught relationship with law enforcement, from the mass arrests during Operation Soap in 1981 to ongoing issues of systemic neglect and overpolicing. The 2SLgbtq+ community continues to push for accountability and the reimagining of safety within queer spaces.

Broader societal tensions surrounding public nudity meant that Hanlan’s Point was no stranger to policing from its earliest days as a designated swimming area. In 1906, for instance, twenty-six men were arrested for nude swimming – an act that reflected broader anxieties around morality and public behaviour.

After the first Gay Day Picnic, the beach became a focal point for targeted policing. In 1975, police arrested sixty-two nude beachgoers, reflecting efforts to suppress gatherings in spaces that offered refuge for queer individuals. This campaign coincided with broader patterns of institutionalized violence and harassment in Canada in the late seventies. By the 1980s, policing tactics shifted but remained aggressive. Officers began enforcing Metropolitan Toronto’s parks bylaws instead of the Criminal Code, with men targeted for minor infractions like sunbathing partially unclothed.

According to the Body Politic, such campaigns aimed to ‘clean up the beach’ by targeting men wearing tops but no bottoms, reinforcing discriminatory enforcement patterns. A 1982 Toronto Star article noted that the beach was frequently advertised in queer publications as ‘Toronto’s nude beach’ and that visitors were often surprised to find it heavily policed. In the early 1990s, harassment by police showed no signs of ceasing. A September 1991 issue of Sightlines Magazine relates how the island police station requested that Metro Parks remove vegetation around Hanlan’s Point Beach to ‘better control the nude sunbathing,’ a request the parks department denied. Despite this refusal, police activity persisted, with twenty to thirty charges laid over a few months. On one occasion, constables Jim Murphy and Jim Swick harassed a gay man and his friend for being ‘improperly attired’ despite their wearing legal swimwear – G-strings, which complied with swimming attire regulations.

The formal establishment of a large section of Hanlan’s as a clothing-optional beach in 1999, a campaign led by Peter Simm, marked a significant victory. The official ribbon-cutting ceremony on Monday, May 24, 1999, was attended by councillor Olivia Chow and her late husband, Jack Layton. Despite this milestone, police harassment persisted. Immediately following the establishment of this clothing-optional space, the Toronto Police Marine Unit arrested nude beach-goers, charging them with violating a 1934 Harbour Commission bylaw. The Toronto Port Authority subsequently amended the bylaw, but resistance to the clothing-optional zone continued.

Hanlan’s Point, as well as beaches such as Belmont Rocks and Riis, in New York, remain poignant examples of how public spaces for marginalized communities are both hard-won and fragile. The policing of queer spaces like Hanlan’s often transcended mere enforcement of laws. However, the Lgbtq+ community’s resilience demonstrated an enduring commitment from community members to keep using this space, have visibility, and fight for inclusivity and the protection of these vital spaces. These sites aren’t just coordinates on a map – they’re acts of resistance, pushing back against systemic violence, policing, City bylaws, and the limits imposed by urban planning.

After the Parks, Forestry & Recreation (Pfr) department team unveiled the event amphitheatre proposal for Hanlan’s in 2022, many Lgbtq+ community members expressed concerns that such a venue could attract unwanted attention, heighten the risk of homophobic and transphobic incidents, and undermine the beach’s long-standing role as a safe and informal gathering space. While City officials attempted to downplay these fears, the controversy fuelled extensive online and in-person discussions, underscoring the need for a more comprehensive engagement process.

In response, ‘community citizen researchers’ – volunteer advocates for a more inclusive future – dedicated over four hundred hours to researching the history of Hanlan’s Point, combing through archives, speaking with long-time activists, and reviewing public documents to identify gaps in the City’s process.

A social media campaign, Hands Off Hanlan’s, quickly gained traction, with thousands of followers encouraged to contact City staff and councillors to demand more thorough consultation. This grass-roots advocacy garnered local and national media attention, drawing critical awareness to the erasure of queer spaces in Canada. In response, the City held a town hall and two additional engagement sessions centred on Hanlan’s queer history, and then formed a working committee to discuss the future of the area.

Councillors Chris Moise and Ausma Malik, alongside local Mpps Chris Glover and Kristyn Wong-Tam, acknowledged the community’s concerns. After a heated virtual town hall and in-person community engagement session at the 519, Toronto’s 2SLgbtq+ community hub, Prf announced it would abandon plans for the event venue, pledging to maintain Hanlan’s Point as an inclusive, protected area for the present time.

The efforts of queer advocates led to other significant gains, including the expansion of the clothing-optional area from the remaining 330 metres that hadn’t been eroded, to 2,000 metres across the beach. Additional changes included inclusive signage, plaques, and large Pride flags. Some small environmental efforts were also prioritized, including a community tree-planting day and the installation of additional bike racks.

On social media, Hands Off Hanlan’s rebranded as Friends of Hanlan’s, shifting from opposition to collaboration with the City in terms of the governance of the space. Ultimately, Friends of Hanlan’s did what many queer advocates of queer space couldn’t achieve, which was to fight back against normative city structures to carve out a more accessible, more inclusive environment while changing public engagement processes – a contrast to the City of Toronto’s historically bureaucratic approach.

For now, the beach still stands. Nude swimmers still bathe, and on a quiet summer weekday, Hanlan’s offers a tranquil reminder of decades past. This place, one of the first queer spaces I visited over sixteen years ago as a young gay teen, holds me hostage to its beauty, wildness, and unregulated nature.

The future of Hanlan’s Point, while hopeful, remains uncertain. Can the City implement the Timp in a way that creates inclusive spaces for everyone while preserving areas specifically for clothing-optional use and the Lgbtq+ community? Will the City be able to balance development with the needs of the queer community? The beach faces threats beyond urban planning – climate change, rising lake levels, and shifting lake ecology have steadily eroded its shoreline since that first Gay Day Picnic in 1971.

Dr. Ahmed Allahwala, a researcher at the Department of Human Geography at the University of Toronto Scarborough, once asked me: ‘Do queer spaces have to “come out of the closet” to continue to exist?’ His question captures a central dilemma: Must queer spaces become institutionalized, commercialized, or hypervisible to survive? And if so, what is lost in terms of the informal and subversive qualities that made these spaces so vital in the first place?

Perhaps Friends of Hanlan’s and the City of Toronto have begun to find an answer. Today, a Pride flag flies at Hanlan’s, alongside the new measures to protect the freshwater dune systems from foot traffic. Signage and plaques now memorialize the beach’s queer history and cultural significance – progress that would not have been possible without the messy, passionate work of grassroots organizing.

Only time will tell if Hanlan’s Point and other queer beaches can endure. These spaces are shaped by the tides of change yet preserved by the steadfastness of those who have fought to protect them.

Conjay’s First Walk Home

Tura Cousins Wilson and Shane Laptiste

The morning is crisp and bright for Conjay’s first day of second grade at Fairbank Public School. It is September 2035, and Conjay wakes up excited because not only does he get to see all the friends he hasn’t seen in months but it’s also going to be the first time he’s allowed to walk home from school alone.

He has lived in Toronto’s Little Jamaica neighbourhood all his seven years and knows every street and laneway. It’s where he rides his bike, plays street hockey and pickup basketball, where he knows the shopkeepers and businesses and which restaurant has the freshest fried plantain.

Conjay’s mother, Monique, was born in Little Jamaica, but her family moved over 50 kilometres away to Whitby, Ontario, once her parents had saved enough money to buy their dream detached suburban home. For Monique, moving back and raising her children in the Toronto core felt natural after a decade and a half of living in the suburbs; she wanted to live in a community close to relatives, where she didn’t have to rely on a car, and where everything they needed was within a short walk. Conjay walking home from school on his own was a big step but also what Monique had dreamed of when she and James, Conjay’s father, decided to start their family in Little Jamaica – just blocks away from where she had lived as a baby.

Little Jamaica, or ‘Eglinton’ as locals call it, is the heart of Toronto’s historic Caribbean community. From its beginnings in the late 1960s after a wave of West Indian migration, the community became the hub of commerce and vibrant Caribbean nightlife in Toronto for decades. However, the pace and vibrancy gradually faded during the mid-2000s to early 2020s – countless businesses falling victim to rising rents and the disruptive decade-long construction of a new light-rail line. With the businesses went many Caribbean families that had made Eglinton their home due to the unique West Indian Canadian mosaic that had blossomed for forty years; they headed away from the city in favour of suburban comforts. Suddenly the neighbourhood was in danger of completely losing the social character that had made it unique.

The neighbourhood began to flourish again in the 2020s – with grassroots initiatives already forming in the late 2010s, community members began taking action to sustain the area’s vitality. The community was able to establish communal reference points, such as new festivals and new Caribbean food markets. The Little Jamaica Community Land Trust founded in 2024, now, in 2035, owns and operates 2,600 below-market and rent-geared-to-income units and is adding four new housing sites currently under construction in the area. Other grassroots initiatives led to the City of Toronto approving mixed-use pedestrian laneways, rent-to-own housing, and a new park designed by and for the community. Through dedicated work, the Community Land Trust was able to establish a cultural centre and an economic development fund for start-up businesses.

With a communal past that was so embedded in the area, the tools were forged to support the community in identifying what needed to be saved and what future was desired in confronting displacement.

These were among the many reasons Monique, a bookseller, and James, a restauranteur, decided to return. Owning businesses on Eglinton Avenue and Reggae Lane made the community feel even more like home, as they were very well-known by other residents.

They live in a new six-storey apartment building with Conjay and his two younger sisters. Their spacious top-floor unit has four bedrooms, a den, and an outdoor terrace overlooking Toronto’s skyline. Conceived by an architecture firm deeply embedded in the neighbourhood, the innovative building is designed to reduce carbon emissions to a net zero standard and is the first point-access-block apartment built in Canada since changes to the building code allowed this in 2030. Point access blocks are single-stairway, multiple-storey buildings that, along with revisions to zoning bylaws, initiated a surge in new multi-unit developments in formerly single-family neighbour-hoods. Little Jamaica was quickly becoming a denser apartment community as small-scale lots previously not economically feasible for development could now become small apartment blocks. Numerous individuals and small developers could now redevelop properties uniquely catered to end-users.

Their building was modelled after a development process from Germany known as baugruppen, or ‘building groups,’ a form of co-housing in which individuals or families collectively finance multi-unit structures designed around each household’s specific needs. Unlike typical speculative, investor-style condo financing models, Monique and James – along with other residents – worked directly with their architect in customizing their home.

The building features a rooftop garden interspersed with solar panels. The residents grow herbs and vegetables in the open air as well as in a small rooftop greenhouse. The communal nature of the building’s creation was carried through to the ways in which common spaces are shared. From the rooftop garden to activity rooms and shared eating areas, the building established itself as a vibrant community hub.

The school bell rings at 3:20 p.m., marking the end of the day. Conjay packs his bags and runs outside with his friends who are headed toward their parents waiting to pick them up, when he remembers that this is the day he walks home by himself.

Conjay is allowed to go out alone to play with friends on the street or pick up milk from Mr. Bailey’s store a block away, but today is different – school is a good ten-minute walk from his home and he has never walked that far alone before. It means walking across multiple intersections and even crossing busy Eglinton Avenue. Conjay and his parents, however, are confident and excited about his journey. Monique has been actively organizing with local residents to improve road design and safety for nearly a decade. After the Little Jamaica Cultural District Master Plan was completed in 2023, the community soon advocated for a traffic safety plan, and many of the city’s newest road-safety initiatives were first piloted in Little Jamaica. In 2028, Toronto banned right turns on red lights and introduced a congestion tax, which greatly reduced the amount of through traffic in the neighbourhood. Just this past spring, City Council approved a motion to reduce speed limits to 30 km/h on major arteries, 20 km/h on side streets, and 10 km/h on laneways. All this to say, Little Jamaica for Conjay is a much different place than when Monique was a child.

Conjay collects his things and meets up with his friend Omar. Omar is walking home by himself too; they walk together since they have to go the same direction for part of the way. They head out, dribbling a basketball along the sidewalk, with Conjay walking backward, pretending to guard Omar as he rushes to an imaginary net. Taking turns, they continue along the still-verdant side streets of late summer, passing homes and new apartments. ‘Hi, Conjay! Hi, Omar!’ a voice calls out from a balcony above. It’s Chantal Bailey, a friend of Conjay’s mother. ‘Do you want a freezie?’ she asks. ‘Yes!’ they shout in unison. She goes inside and quickly reutrns, motioning to Conjay and Omar to catch the freezies as she drops them from her second-floor balcony. Catching them, the two boys both bite them open and wave thanks.

As they continue on their walk, they approach a crosswalk. It’s one of the newer ones the City has been installing that narrows the crossing distance between sidewalks and elevates the crosswalk so it is level with the sidewalk on both sides, creating a speed hump for drivers. Conjay remembers what to do at a crosswalk: press the button, point in the direction you’re travelling, and wait for any traffic to stop. The crossing guard blows her whistle and raises her stop sign, motioning the drivers to wait as Conjay and Omar cross the street. ‘Hello, Conjay and Omar!’ she says as she waves them though. This is where their journey would normally diverge, as Conjay lives in the other direction, but, sucking on their freezies and talking about their summer holidays, they both are lost in the moment and continue in the direction of Omar’s home.

It isn’t until they are nearly at Omar’s house that Conjay realizes he isn’t going the right way, but, since he’s so close to Omar’s, he decides to continue. They walk along side streets as the smell of jerk chicken on a grill wafts through the air. They finally approach Omar’s street, which is buzzing from a few construction projects. Many of the large-lot bungalows are being rebuilt as infill apartment buildings. Omar’s home is one of these – a six-storey walk-up. As they approach his building, they see smoke from the outdoor grill, and Omar knows right away that dinner is almost ready. ‘Mom!’ he yells out, pulling on the lobby door, waiting for her to release the buzzer lock. Hearing him from below, Omar’s mother unlocks the lobby door and up the stairs he runs, waving bye to Conjay.

Conjay continues on his walk down Omar’s street until he gets to Vaughan Road. It is at this point that he realizes he isn’t entirely sure how to get home from Omar’s place. He’s walked this route before but always with his or Omar’s parents. He decides turning left will take him south, back in the direction of school, and turning right will take him home. Conjay continues on his way, passing people on their way home from school and work, but the farther he goes the less and less it feels like his neighbourhood. The Little Jamaica street signs and banners are no longer there. The road is wider. The buildings aren’t recognizable. He can’t smell the jerk barbecue. Conjay is lost.

He didn’t realize that Vaughan Road, unlike most Toronto streets, doesn’t run along the cardinal directions, and, though he thought he was walking north, he was actually walking south-east in the opposite direction of home. Conjay turns around, retracing his steps all the way back to when he first turned onto Vaughan Road. He continues in this direction, knowing that at some point he has to turn, but he just isn’t sure where. Passing a corner laundromat, he sees a woman who works the cash desk at his father’s restaurant. She is folding clothes on a table in the window. She immediately recognizes him, mouths, ‘Conjay!’ and waves. Smiling and waving back, Conjay isn’t sure he should let her know he’s lost. Though he forgets her name, he knows that she knows exactly where he lives because she drops by in the summer to pick up vegetables and herbs his mother grows in their rooftop garden. But how can he tell her he’s lost? He doesn’t want to fail, and feels his parents will never let him walk home alone again if he does, so Conjay decides to keep walking.

From the distance, he can hear a thumping reggae bass, and he thinks that must be coming from Eglinton. If he can get to Eglinton Avenue, he can easily find his way home from there. Following the sound of music, Conjay crosses the street at another crosswalk as he takes a side street intersecting with Vaughan Road. It isn’t fully recognizable, but he knows he is heading in the right direction because the street poles are decaled in Little Jamaica banners and he sees Jamaican and Trinidadian flags hung over balconies. The music is getting louder too, and, turning a corner, he can see Eglinton Avenue in the distance. Eglinton is a bustling street, even more so than in its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s. Conjay’s mom calls this era the Eglinton Renaissance. Though he doesn’t know what she means, she always smiles when she says it.

As Conjay gets to Eglinton, he relaxes in relief, recognizing it all – the sounds, the smells, and the people. He sees the barbershop where he and his father get their hair cut, and the fruit stand with the biggest mangoes, and the other fruit stand across the street that his friend Sonya’s parents own.

Although the street is packed with pedestrians in the late afternoon, Conjay knows the way and feels right at home weaving between the fast-walking adults and sidewalk displays. Eglinton Avenue has become a much more pedestrian-friendly street, with wider sidewalks, space for mature trees to thrive, and narrower vehicle lanes. He realizes the thrumming reggae beat he heard was not from one place but from all the competing sound systems from multiple buildings. Conjay walks west toward home, past barbershops, hair and nail salons, restaurants, clothing stores, food markets, and his new community centre. The sidewalk on Eglinton is wide with huge trees, and there are still a few Caribana banners from this past summer hanging from the street lights.

Stopping to tie up his laces at a bench, Conjay notices a group of boisterous old men gathered around a table playing dominoes who remind him of his grandfather, who moved back to Little Jamaica from Whitby after the neighbourhood revitalized. Conjay crosses Oakwood Avenue and turns down Reggae Lane, a narrow and largely pedestrianized alleyway with three- to five-storey buildings fronted by micro-retail at ground level, including his mother’s bookshop.

He makes it to the last block home, to his building where his father, mother, and little sisters are waiting outside for him, wanting to hear all about his first day of second grade. He tells them about his teacher, Mr. Williams, who lives above Conjay’s father’s restaurant, as well as who he’s sharing his table with (his cousin Samuel, as well as Omar) and what he had for lunch (rice and peas and chickpea roti). And, unable to keep a secret, he tells them about getting lost walking home, but how the sights and sounds and smells of Little Jamaica, his thriving community, helped guide him home.

Flexible Streets

Dylan Reid

‘Angelo, forward! Find a way! Let’s go! Good boy!’

Daniella Levy-Pinto gives the directions in a clear, encouraging, lightly accented voice to her guide dog, Angelo, as they set out from the Berczy Park fountain toward Scott Street. I am following behind, to avoid giving Angelo hints about where he should go. We are going to test if a flexible street can be safe for blind people like Daniella.

Toronto’s Berczy Park is a rather appropriate place to meet with a dog. The park’s signature fountain is a whimsical ode to our canine friends, its multiple layers populated by sculptures of dogs of a variety of breeds and sizes that look up adoringly at a golden bone at its peak. Normally, these dogs would be spouting streams of water, but we’re meeting in September of 2020, and in Covid times the fountain is closed. The dogs are now, symbolically, wearing medical masks.

The park, just east of Toronto’s financial centre, is the base of a triangle formed by converging streets, with a heritage flatiron building at its apex. Just a few years before, this pocket park had been transformed under the guidance of visionary landscape architect Claude Cormier, to update it for use by the increasing number of residents in the condo buildings sprouting up around it. The fountain, much admired and Instagrammed, is one of Cormier’s signature whimsical, animal-themed touches.

Less widely noted, but equally innovative, is what happened to Scott Street, a short block at the base of the park’s triangle that had never been used much except as an outlet for an underground parking garage. The park was expanded to consume Scott Street’s former sidewalk (the clue is the lampposts – they are now at the edge of the lawn, where the curb used to be). At the same time, Scott Street itself became shareable. There is no more curb: the asphalt was replaced by a level expanse of grey paving stones flush with the edge of the grass, and the street can be closed off at any time to become an extension of the park – for example, to host food trucks or provide space for a performance. On the street’s edges, some exclusive pedestrian space, the width of a sidewalk, is demarcated by bollards and a strip of darker, bumpy stone, but pedestrians can easily take over the entire space without ever having to step up or down.

Scott Street has become flexible. This flexibility is spatial – the space is seamless, inviting pedestrians to cross it at will, and it can be used in multiple different ways: for driving, for walking, for performance, for eating, for selling. And the flexibility is also temporal – it can be used in different ways at different times. Sometimes it’s a street, sometimes it’s a park, sometimes it’s a venue. It’s no longer the exclusive domain of drivers.

But that flexibility could be a problem for Daniella. Angelo is trained to pay attention to curbs in order to know where to guide her. He knows to walk parallel to a curb and knows to stop when he meets a curb, because that means they are about to cross a street. If there are no curbs, will he know in what direction to go and where to stop? It would be disastrous if he led Daniella out into the open space of the street, where vehicles she can’t see could be driving. If he can’t guide safely here, it would be a no-go zone for her.

That blurred boundary between park, sidewalk, and street is emblematic of an innovative trend in how cities approach their public spaces. In the twentieth century, and especially as streets became dominated by the automobile, public spaces in North America became strictly separated by function. Parks were separated from sidewalks – often by fences – and sidewalks were separated from streets. Where once pedestrians crossed and even occupied streets willy-nilly, they were relegated to sidewalks and sharply delimited crossing points after cars took over.

But recently, as part of an increasing challenge to the dominance of the motorized vehicle, those boundaries are being blurred. Public spaces are being reimagined as hybrid, flexible, or shared, their boundaries fuzzy and their functions bleeding into each other. Maybe pedestrians and vehicles share a space, or maybe a space is for pedestrians at some times and for vehicles at others. It’s proved to be an alluring concept. But it can also cause complications, because some people need structure in order to access the city safely. The question Daniella and Angelo are testing today is, can we gain the benefits of flexible streets without losing the necessary supports provided by structure?

As we walk up the pedestrian space along the side of Scott Street, it’s easy for me, with sight, to distinguish the safe space, because a series of bollards prevents vehicles from intruding. But they mean nothing to Angelo. There is also a line of dark, bumpy granite paving stones between those bollards that contrasts strongly with the dominant grey pavers. The bumpy texture is a signal to people who walk with a cane, and the strong contrast is a signal to people who have very limited sight, to let them know where the border lies between the safe space and the roadway. But, I have learned, the designers had not considered people who use guide dogs.

As it turns out, Angelo keeps us in the pedestrian safe space, and although he gets distracted by the park grass (‘The pandemic has taken a toll on his work, I have to say,’ notes Daniella), he is able to correct. He does not seem confused by the lack of curb. We stop halfway along the block to talk about the experience so far, while Angelo gets interested in a garbage receptacle. Angelo is a Labrador/golden retriever cross with glossy golden fur and huge, adorable brown eyes. It requires an act of will not to pet him, but as a guide dog he is strictly look, don’t touch – he cannot be distracted from his task.

Always precise in bearing, speech, and thought, Daniella came to Toronto from Mexico City in the first decade of the new century. After completing her PhD in political science at the University of Toronto, she began to work in disability advocacy. For all the issues she’s identified as problems in Toronto, she says the city is far easier and safer for her to navigate than Mexico City, because it is more ordered and predictable. Most of the streets are in a linear grid, as opposed to the random and irregular street layout of Mexico City. And, for the most part, the sidewalks and key accessibility elements, like curb cuts and tactile surfaces, are clear. In Mexico City, by contrast, the sidewalks are erratic and full of obstacles. ‘There’s really no order,’ she says. ‘Some people find that charming, but vending stands everywhere on the sidewalk, sidewalks broken by tree roots, cars parked on sidewalks – there’s no respect.’

Daniella’s blindness is not obvious. Her bright green eyes are wide open and clear. So having Angelo is also useful for letting others know about her disability (although one Halloween, she recounts with a laugh, someone complimented her on her ‘costume’ as she walked by). She did have partial sight until she was thirteen – she can remember colours – and when I describe the contrasting bricks that mark the boundary between pedestrian and shared space, she says they would have been an effective signal for her then.

As it turns out, they are also an effective signal for guide dogs. Daniella explains that guide dogs are trained to look for contrast as a boundary as well as a curb. While she notes winter snow could cause problems by covering the contrast, we’re both pleased to discover that this innovative use of space is generally safe for people without sight.

The accessible design of Scott Street may have benefited from the lessons of a controversy in Europe, where shared streets have been expanding rapidly. The idea of shared streets is often credited to the Netherlands, thanks to two distinct but often conflated Dutch innovations.

One is the woonerf (roughly translated as ‘living yard’ or ‘living street’), a residential street designed to be essentially a front yard for the residents, in which cars might occasionally travel if necessary. It has no curbs, but the driving space is narrow and irregular, interrupted by obstacles such as parking spaces, trees, and street furniture such as benches and garbage bins. Drivers are expected to move at no more than 15 km/hr. Signage gives pedestrians priority in all situations, and it’s expected children will use the space to play.

The second is the ‘naked street,’ conceived by Dutch transportation engineer Hans Monderman in the 1980s. It is aimed at streets with medium volumes of vehicles and pedestrians, like the main street of a small town. Its philosophy is, essentially, that if you strip away all structure and signs from a street, drivers and everyone else will become disoriented and will move through the space a lot more carefully, watching out for and negotiating passage with each other. It was a response to the failure of signs, traffic controls, curbs, and other structures to reduce traffic speed and accidents, and it worked to reduce those accidents in some places where it was implemented.

Both innovations are based in the belief that spaces will be safer and more welcoming to a variety of users if they are fluid rather than strictly defined. And these are not the only models – in other parts of Europe, variations on shared, curbless streets have been widely introduced as well, often in historic town centres where the streets are already narrow and pedestrian traffic is dominant.

But even as these shared-street experiments were becoming popular, blind pedestrians were raising concerns. In the early 2000s, excited by this new trend, cities in England began instituting shared spaces in their downtowns, without considering the needs of pedestrians who couldn’t see or who had other disabilities. In 2006, alarmed by the trend, the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association in Great Britain asked blind and visually impaired pedestrians to test these new spaces. The response was strongly negative. They found these spaces disorienting, unsafe, and exhausting to use. ‘I don’t enjoy going into town anymore … I’m stressed before getting there,’ said a blind person in Lowestoft. A guide-dog user in Coventry summarized the situation as ‘Towns will become no-go areas for us, won’t they?’ A 2012 doctoral thesis by Else Maartje Havik in the Netherlands, spiritual home of the shared street, also revealed a lack of accessibility features, along with negative experiences for the visually disabled.

The Guide Dogs association report didn’t argue against shared-street concepts completely. Rather, it emphasized that any street without curbs needed to have a space that was reserved solely for pedestrians, demarcated as such both in a way that keeps vehicles from intruding and in a way that people with limited or no sight who use canes or guide dogs to navigate can clearly detect: ‘The kerb edge, or other tactile demarcation between footway and carriageway, is fundamental for orientation, both for guide dog users and long cane users.’

The controversy came to a head when a curbless ‘shared street’ plan was announced for Exhibition Road in London, whose four blocks house the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, and other institutions. No one doubted that the existing street, with its narrow sidewalks, was entirely inadequate for such a major destination. But visual-disability activists were concerned that the new scheme would become completely inaccessible to them. In June 2009, led by the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association, they picketed the office of London’s then mayor, Boris Johnson, to get him to reverse the decision to remove curbs.

The scheme went ahead. The eventual result, launched in early 2012, looked spectacular, with black and white bricks used to create an eye-catching diamond pattern along the entire length of the street. There were no bollards or other visible demarcations at all, although parked cars and street furniture broke up the space. Studies showed that it did encourage more and freer use by sighted pedestrians. For unsighted pedestrians who walked with a cane, a textured ‘corduroy’ line of bricks along the side of the street was supposed to provide a guide for an obstacle-free route – but nothing prevented cars from entering that space. As for guide dogs, there was nothing they could use to help navigate the space safely. In news reports, Guide Dogs for the Blind described the new Exhibition Road as ‘“a real problem” for blind and partially sighted people.’

One of the problems with the Exhibition Road scheme, urban planner Mark Van Elsberg tells me, was the high-contrast criss-cross diamond pattern. It was catnip for photographers, making the street something of a sensation when it was first unveiled. But for those with limited sight who relied on contrast to guide them, it was utterly confusing. Following the contrast would lead them straight out into the shared space where vehicles drove. Given what I learned from Daniella and Angelo about Scott Street, it would likely confuse guide dogs too.

When he worked as a planner for the City of Toronto, Mark was instrumental in developing the design for Market Street, the first street in Toronto to be designed as truly flexible. It’s a narrow little street beside Toronto’s oldest covered market, St. Lawrence Market. Once mostly used for parking and loading, in 2014 it was revitalized in conjunction with the restoration of heritage properties across the street from the market. To provide patio space for new restaurants, the sidewalk was flattened. During the summer, by using movable bollards, the sidewalk pushed out to replace parking spots, creating space for patios beside the buildings. During the winter, when patios were no longer viable, the bollards were moved in and the walking space was repositioned toward the building, opening up parking again.

Mark tells me he encountered the same tension between the push for an eye-catching design and the need for practical accessibility in his work on Market Street. He recounts how the architects wanted to incorporate some fancy designs in the brick pavers, but he pushed back because of the accessibility question, much to their frustration. Instead, to ensure accessibility, Market Street implemented the textured, contrasting stone border that then provided the template for Scott Street, a few blocks away. The choice aligned with Toronto’s reputation as a practical city, prizing function over aesthetics when it comes down to the crunch. But as it turned out, the designers needn’t have worried – the street won an Award of Excellence at the 2015 Toronto Urban Design Awards, despite the lack of fancy patterns. A few years later, it became a pedestrian-only street during the summer, and the City is considering making that the case year-round.

You don’t have to rebuild a street to make it flexible or extend the sidewalk, however. In San Francisco in 2005, three founders of a design studio realized that if you paid for a parking spot, no one specified what you could do with it. They dished out the cash for a spot outside their office for the two-hour maximum, rolled out real grass, a tree in a pot, and a bench, and watched as people sat down, ate, and started chatting with each other. After posting the escapade on the internet, they received interest from around the world. The project became a yearly event, Park(ing) Day, in which participants in many cities pay for and transform parking spots on the third Friday in September. It also inspired official seasonal, or permanent, transformations where cities turned parking spots into ‘parklets’ with benches, greenery, and other features to expand the public space of the sidewalk.

As parklets became all the rage in some U.S. cities, Toronto experimented with a couple of one-off special projects. But at first no formal system was developed – every example was a temporary project that had to be negotiated from scratch and approved individually by City Council. After a few local Business Improvement Areas (Bias) began to push to incorporate parklets into their streets, City staff developed a more formal and streamlined process for enabling them toward the end of the 2010s.

Thanks to the parklets, the process of thinking about how to take over parking spots to create quick, inexpensive, often seasonal spaces to sit had been mulled over and accepted in the city’s collective mind – by politicians, staff, businesses, and even residents. When the Covid-19 pandemic struck in 2020, Toronto was ready to enact a much more dramatic takeover of parking spaces across the city to make room for people.

The global lockdowns that followed the arrival of the pandemic in March of 2020 hit every person and business hard, but among the most affected were restaurants, cafés, and bars, which depended on people gathering. When authorities began to realize that gathering outdoors was reasonably safe, it created a potential opening to help keep these businesses alive – and to help everyone recapture the psychological benefits of once again meeting in person. But only a small proportion of restaurants had existing easily accessible outdoor spaces. Cities such as San Francisco and Seattle had already experimented, pre-pandemic, with allowing restaurants to open patios in parklets across the sidewalk from their shopfront, and to many cities that suddenly seemed like a potential solution for helping more eating and drinking establishments survive the crisis.

The City of Toronto was among the cities that noted this potential. In an unusual display of speed and flexibility, City staff began to work out a plan, dubbed CaféTo, to implement curbside patios in Toronto (the City enjoys adding ‘To’ to projects to mark them as local). In the past, a key challenge for taking over curbside space for parklets had been Toronto’s rush-hour lanes. Central Toronto’s streets are fairly narrow – most have no more than two lanes in each direction – and for decades, the curbside lane, normally used for parking, had been opened to moving traffic during rush hour. In effect, the streets were flexible, but just for motor vehicles. However, with the collapse of commuting during the lockdown, those extra lanes were no longer needed and could be turned over to restaurants.

As well as the work to establish rules around parklets, the City’s program benefited from past and more recent initiatives to incorporate a bit of messiness into its stereotypically staid structures. The very first Bia in the world had been founded in Toronto in 1970, creating what is effectively a subsidiary local jurisdiction that can impose a levy on its members and spend it on main-street initiatives and improvements. Toronto now has the most of any city in the world, and the municipality was able to rely on these semi-official organizations to coordinate the CaféTo program with restaurants. The provincial government and the City had also, just a few years before, liberalized Ontario’s strict liquor laws and patio regulations to allow the serving of alcohol across sidewalks to patios beside the street, which would be essential for curbside patios to work. The program also benefited from the City’s previous experimentation with the ‘pilot project’ model for transportation projects, originated by Janette Sadik-Khan, New York City’s transportation commissioner (2007–13), as an official version of the grassroots guerrilla ‘tactical urbanism’ movement. It enabled municipal governments to make changes quickly with temporary measures and inexpensive materials rather than having to wait for the time and expense of approving and implementing a comprehensive plan with a full budget.

Using jersey barriers and plastic pylons, the City, Bias, and individual restaurants were able to set up hundreds of temporary patios in curb lanes throughout the older parts of Toronto in the summer of 2020. Onlookers were surprised both by the City’s uncharacteristic speed and flexibility and by the transformation of its streets into boulevards replete with patios reminiscent of Europe. ‘Toronto … is that you?’ asked urban planner Kosta Derbish on Twitter. The program did indeed prove to be a lifesaver for eating and drinking establishments. A City survey reported that 66 per cent of businesses said CaféTo saved them from having to close. Dave Watson, owner of a brewery-restaurant on the city’s east side that was the site of the program’s launch on July 1, 2020, told me ‘it allowed us to operate with some hope.’

The program was conceived as a kind of large-scale version of Market Street. In the winter, when patios were no longer as appealing and the curb lane was needed for plowing and storing snow, the patios would be removed, to be restored again in the spring. The streets would still be both physically and temporally flexible, but now during the summer the curb lanes would store patios, not parking.

But the challenge with pilot projects is how to evolve them into something permanent. While people enjoyed the concept, some complained that the jersey barriers and pylons looked ugly. The City had absorbed most of the costs of setting up the barriers initially and waived the usual fees for patios using public space, which was not sustainable (or equitable – the program was focused on the more prosperous central parts of the city, with little relevance to the suburbs, where the streets were unsuitable and restaurants could set up patios in private parking lots). Initial accessibility for wheelchair users had been supplied by quick-and-dirty asphalt ramps, but those generally gave access to only a couple of tables.

In 2023, when the City tried to establish the program more permanently, with fees to cover part of the cost and accessibility requirements (parklet-like platforms rather than just tables on the street), establishments responded with outrage at the additional costs, and the take-up dropped off (eventually the requirements were temporarily softened). Meanwhile, as a more formal application process took hold, businesses complained about delays in approvals and new rejections based on more strictly applied regulations. Toronto was not alone in these teething problems – when New York City, whose similar program was widely touted, sought to formalize its processes in 2024, not quite 3,000 of the 13,000 establishments that had once participated applied. Toronto’s drop-off was not as severe, and the processing delays were largely overcome by the time the 2024 season came around.

For all these teething problems, CaféTo fundamentally changed how the City of Toronto regards its streets. Rush-hour curb lanes are no longer sacrosanct (although as I was about to finish this piece, the provincial government intervened to try to restore some of them). On one major east-west artery, Danforth Avenue, the City replaced them with bike lanes and permanent parking. And when summer comes around, some of that parking is removed, the bike lanes are pushed into its space, and CaféTo patios take over the curb lane. What’s more, those patios are no longer the jury-rigged, improvised footholds of the early pandemic. They are now robust, attractive platforms that are flush with the sidewalk, so that these amenities can be fully accessible to all. As with the Scott Street project I explored with Daniella and Angelo, their messiness has been balanced with some constructive order. The street is now permanently flexible, but for restaurant patrons and cyclists (and some parked cars) rather than just vehicles. Straightlaced Toronto has unbuttoned its streets a little.

Ecologies

Leave the Leaves

Lorraine Johnson

‘Leave leaves where they fall, to provide the organic base of the most diverse ecosystem on the planet: temperate woodland soil and leaf litter.’

– Dr. Kefyn Catley, co-author of Life in the Leaf Litter

It was one of the few times I remember my dad being mad at me. I was scared, until I realized that his anger came from his own fear – he thought I was going to be killed. My friends and I had made a fort out of the pile of dead leaves the neighbours had swept onto the street. We had dug deep into that cool, musty, richly scented cache, invisible to parents … and to cars.

When banished from playing in leaf piles on the road, my friends and I would go to the local park, where maintenance crews constructed massive leaf mounds. We made short order of the neatness, doing the work of worms but at a human scale, tossing, tunnelling, jumping. Workers would arrive a few days later to load the now-strewn piles into trucks, taking them away to the local dump.

Those piles of dead leaves were a temporary fort for us, but they were habitat – homes – for the thousands of species that depend on such yard ‘waste’: butterflies and other insects, micro-organisms, chipmunks, birds, and the many creatures that spend time eating, hunting, nesting, sheltering, and hibernating in the layer of dead leaves and other organic matter (twigs, flowers, seeds, nuts, bark, etc.) that falls from trees and carpets the land. Not only are dead leaves habitat for countless species, but they are also crucial to the soil, returning nutrients and organic matter through decomposition. It is this circular process that maintains the health of soil, which in turn ensures healthy plant life.

Leaf litter is the term used to describe this layer. Ecologists mean litter without negative judgment, but for municipalities, these organic materials are treated like trash, as signalled by the term yard waste – a misnomer that should be banished from the municipal lexicon, along with the attitudes and practices it engenders.

Typically, leaf litter is removed from residential landscapes and parks, blown out of sight and out of mind, often by noisy machinery. Aesthetic conventions prioritize neatness over what is perceived as unkempt, disorderly nature doing what nature does – breaking down, decomposing, recycling nutrients and organic matter to the earth. This elemental returning is a crucial natural process we disrupt when leaf litter is removed.

In residential landscapes, people are encouraged to pack dead leaves and other organic detritus into yard bags for municipal collection, sweep leaves onto the curb, or burn them. Municipalities send the message that this is an expected component of residential landscape care in various ways – by removing leaves from public land, for example, or by rigorously promoting yard ‘waste’ collection, or by allowing burning. Even more coercively, many municipalities have property-standards bylaws that mandate removal of leaves, twigs, and branches, lumping them into bylaw definitions of ‘garbage’ or ‘waste’ that must be ‘cleaned up’ or ‘cleared away.’

Far from being waste, leaf litter is an ecosystem – a damp, dark place of decomposition and regeneration. Creatures, from the tiniest microorganisms of fungi and bacteria to larger spiders and snails, and insects such as moths, butterflies, bees, and beetles, live in complex relationships of mutual interaction and dependence in this life-nurturing layer of ecological productivity. Without it, they don’t have the food or habitat they need during pivotal stages in their life cycles.

The landscape ‘cleaning up’ choreography, timed with autumn’s arrival and repeated in spring, is a ritual of harm. It destroys the foundation necessary for the health of the soil, the health of plants, the health of creatures, and on and on throughout the web of biodiversity humans call nature, as if we are separate from it.

Why do municipalities across North America not make room for leaf litter to do its crucial work, particularly in parks – the public spaces where many urban residents have their only access to experiences of nature and natural processes?

Of course, parks serve multiple functions, and leaf litter in recreational areas such as sports fields, or on walkways, would be a potential hazard and interfere with mobility. Likewise, there are huge expanses of lawn in parks whose growth would be negatively impacted by deep layers of leaves. But think of all the park spaces – all the ornamental garden beds, all the treed areas, all the semi-wild places – where leaf litter could be left to do its work rather than being manicured away.

Public perception of park maintenance is certainly a key part of what motivates this destruction of habitat. We’ve been trained by aesthetic conventions to view organic detritus as something that looks ‘messy.’ We expect municipalities to ‘look after’ parks. But for too long, removing leaf litter has been the standard demonstrating what ‘looking after’ looks like, ignoring all the other ways we could express care in partnership with natural processes and in support of biodiversity.

For example, the city in which I live, Toronto, has a Pollinator Strategy that recognizes leaf litter as pollinator habitat and encourages residents to leave the leaves where they fall. Yet every autumn you can wander through park after park and see countless crews with loud machinery blowing away the future – the next generation – for countless creatures. Where is the policy, on the ground, where it matters?

How can we expect those who care for residential yards and gardens to follow ecological practices when municipalities are modelling the reverse? In Toronto, residential yard ‘waste’ collection takes place weekly throughout the autumn and then begins again in early March, before spring has even sprung. During the now common warm-but-still-officially-winter days of freakishly early snow melt, rake-wielding ‘cleaner-uppers’ are outside, the tines of their implements clawing through layers of accumulated detritus, exposing bare soil. No doubt intended as care or duty (or simply a welcome excuse to be outside doing yardwork again), the result is a scarred landscape. And lining the streets are bags filled with life on the way to certain death.

Perhaps if more of us, particularly municipal politicians and policy-makers, drew an explicit connection between the global crisis of biodiversity loss and local landscape practices, all the life in the leaf litter would be nurtured rather than destroyed. Unfortunately, though, our biodiversity concerns are too often focused on charismatic creatures that hold our attention – the cute and cuddly rather than the tiny and critical.

Consider just one example that barely registers in terms of human attention: moths. Now consider just one subset of the 12,000 species of moths in North America: the owlet moths. Most of us probably have no awareness of these nocturnal pollinators who lay their eggs on specific host plants and whose larvae are food for birds. The exhaustive compendium Owlet Caterpillars of Eastern North America by David L. Wagner et al. describes the life cycle for more than eight hundred different species of owlet moths in just this one region. The vast majority require leaf litter. When residential gardeners and parks crews fire up the leaf blowers, they are destroying the caterpillars that are crucial food for birds and other creatures.

Not only do moths depend on leaf litter for habitat, but leaf litter depends, to varying degrees, on them. Some overwintering caterpillars eat fallen leaves during winter and spring, breaking them into smaller pieces that decompose more easily, facilitating the return of their nutrients to the soil. Others are predators, feeding on other larvae and pupae, controlling insect populations and preventing insect outbreaks.

If concern for owlet moths, an insect often dismissed as drab-looking, is a hard sell, consider the brightly coloured cecropia, North America’s largest native moth. Or the large lime-green luna, with spots on its wings that look like eyes. Or the sphinx moth, which can easily be mistaken for a hummingbird due to its size and darting flight. Seeing these spectacular creatures is a mesmerizing encounter, commanding of awe. Like the owlets, these moths depend on leaves left on the ground.

Or consider the butterflies – alluring creatures we love to love. According to the Xerces Society, the vast majority of butterflies over-winter in leaf litter. Some, such as mourning cloaks and commas, overwinter as adults, while others do so as eggs, caterpillars, or chrysalises, some of which attach themselves to leaves. Blow away the fallen leaves that accumulate at the base of trees and the future adult butterflies are likewise blown away, obliterated. Leaf litter provides ‘soft landings,’ a term and practice advocated by pollinator expert and author Heather Holm. The idea of soft landings is a powerful and tangible reconceptualization of ‘mess’ as gentle potential, a place of insect transformation into maturity.

Along with being crucial habitat for moths and butterflies, leaf litter is also the place that incubates native bees, the main pollinators in North American terrestrial ecosystems. Most bee species on this continent are ground-nesting, and some species overwinter in burrows and tunnels in the soil or under the cover of dead leaves. We don’t see them but they’re there, thanks to this protective habitat. As are other ecologically vital species, such as snails, lace wings, beetles, spiders, mites, and millipedes. These in turn are food for the birds, chipmunks, turtles, amphibians, and other wildlife. Removing dead leaves threatens all these relationships with cascading diminishment.

The ecological value of leaf litter extends to the health of the soil, as well – in particular, the communities of microorganisms that transform dirt into biologically rich soil. A layer of leaf litter is crucial to this process: it is, in effect, the ‘nursery’ for the bacteria, fungi, nematodes, and other microorganisms that are the structural foundation for the food webs that cycle energy throughout ecosystems. It all begins with the unimaginably complex (and, for the most part, unknown) interactions among the life forms that exist in the skin of the earth, the pedosphere. The extent of what is unknown is revealed in one striking example: when scientist Dr. Kefyn Catley realized that no one had yet done a systematic study of life in the leaf litter of New York City’s Central Park, he and colleagues from the American Museum of Natural History embarked on a year-long exploration, cataloguing all the life there. They found a new genus and new species not yet known to science.

Along with this teeming, hidden, living mass are other functional benefits of leaf litter to soil health. It prevents erosion during storms, protecting soil that would otherwise be washed away. It helps to retain moisture in the soil, minimizing the desiccating power of wind and sun, protecting plant roots from drying out during droughts. It returns nutrients and organic matter to the soil through decomposition, facilitated by detritivores – creatures that live in leaf litter and consume plant debris.

Nurturing the leaf-litter layer offers key benefits and few challenges. At the same time as it increases resilience in the face of climate change and biodiversity loss, it saves municipalities money and effort. (According to figures from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, yard trimmings comprised the fifth-largest category of municipal solid waste in 2018, at an estimated 35.4 million tons, or 12.1 per cent of all municipal solid waste. Of that total, 22.3 million tons of yard trimmings were composted, and 10.5 million tons were sent to landfill. The costs and greenhouse gas emissions of transporting all those yard trimmings to landfill are enormous, as are the methane emissions from landfill.)

Leaving dead leaves requires relatively small tweaks to ‘business as usual.’ Of all the challenges cities face, figuring out a way to accommodate – indeed celebrate – leaf litter, particularly in parks, might be one of the easiest fixes. Identify the barriers, whether they’re based in entrenched aesthetic ideas, operational issues (keeping pathways and sewer grates clear, for example), or, most intractably perhaps, outdated notions of ‘doing things the way they’ve always been done.’ Mount an educational campaign explaining the benefits in order to bring the public on board. Post signage. Designate park areas for leaf-fort play. Include leaf-litter celebration in harvest festivals.

At the residential level, municipalities can begin by reforming property standards bylaws that mandate the removal of dead leaves, twigs, and spent plant stalks. Municipal codes across North America are littered with definitions of garbage that explicitly include dead leaves, and as long as they do, people will continue to be required to destroy habitat if a neighbour lodges a complaint. As well, municipal garbage collection policies and practices are complicit in habitat destruction. Instead of having schedules that facilitate and encourage wholesale leaf raking and removal, municipalities could treat leaf collection as a special-case feature, limiting the number of bags allowed, outlawing leaf burning, encouraging leaf composting at residences through tax breaks, or by distributing leaf-mould-making bins to anyone who wants one. At the very least, yard ‘waste’ collection could be moved from late winter/early spring to the end of spring/early summer, when the majority of pollinator species (though not all) have emerged from their leaf-litter homes.

While such changes – the majority of them small tweaks – are imperative for supporting biodiversity, shifting cultural norms is a much stickier, even intransigent, problem. Changing municipal practices to align with the many existing policies in support of climate action and biodiversity protection is an important route, but the harder, more urgent work is to change attitudes. Rebranding ‘mess’ is one place to start. Asking questions such as Is a forest ‘messy’? Is a meadow ‘messy’? can reveal assumptions behind our ideas of nature and cities, and how we make room (or don’t) for nature and natural processes in human communities.

Perhaps the surest route to change, though, will only come through acknowledgement. The convention of removing leaf litter is a symptom of a deep disconnect from nature and natural processes that has led us to a place of existential threat. Reconciling with nature, as Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report on the residential school system for Indigenous children urges, offers a foundational path forward. Many cities now have land acknowledgements identifying the First Peoples, treaty holders, and Nations on whose territories the city exists. Such acknowledgements ring hollow if, as human communities, we abdicate our responsibility to the land itself.

Nurturing the leaf-litter layer is land acknowledgement as practice, in action, beyond words. Leaving the leaves, honouring them and the places they land, is one of the most publicly visible means to celebrate this journey of reconciling with nature, reconciling with ourselves as a part of (not apart from) nature. What better place to model an actual, embodied land acknowledgement than on the land itself, our true and only home.

Non-humans (Heard and Unheard)

Kite and Robbie Wing

As artist-facilitators, we’re often invited to lead workshops in places where we, or the participants, might not have a complete understanding of the context, where we are uninvited guests on Indigenous lands. This scenario presents a challenge: to provide an experience that is both informative and engaging without projecting our interpretations onto the participants.

Please choose a conductor in your group to read and keep time. Walk without speaking.

1. As you walk, for the next five minutes, clear your thoughts and pay attention to the sounds as they enter your ears, first the left ear, then the right ear, back to both ears. Pay attention to the sounds around you as they change while you move through time and space.

2. For the next five minutes, tune to the space by recognizing that by being there, you are affecting the space and that you are in collaboration with non-humans around you, seen and unseen, heard and unheard. Do you hear your breath, your footsteps, clothing, heartbeat?

3. For the next five minutes, do you have permission to listen? Can you remember how to hear the unheard sounds of non-humans? Do you know how far you can you listen? Listen to the end of street, edge of the city, base of the mountains, to the horizon, base of the mountains, edge of the city, end of the street. Repeat.

4. For the next five minutes, pick a single sound and listen for its decay. Listen to what is heard, then what is unheard; follow its wave for as far as you can.

5. For the next five minutes, listen to the people you are walking with, their footsteps, their clothing, their breathing, then your footsteps, your clothing, your breathing, then back to theirs. Listen to the sound of the group as a whole, listen to the distance between each other, the air that fills the space between the community you have formed with one another.

6. Approach where you started, remembering what decays and acknowledging what sustains. Finish your group’s walk and re-enter the gallery.

Groups are made of five to six people, where one person volunteers as the conductor, guiding the pace and direction of the piece. Another person acts as a timekeeper to cue shifts in listening. At each interval, the groups reconvene for the conductor to read the next prompt. Participants follow the conductor but are free to move impro-visationally to places they wish. Groups walk out and away from the original location, returning to the workshop space, where they come to rest.

This piece acts as at once a practice, a workshop, a community dialogue, and a score, and was the culmination of our ongoing conversations. We considered the sound of the urban or built environment alongside the potential for an Indigenous listening practice that would not refuse the physical world but would draw the non-physical world closer to our ears, to listen beyond. Sonic environments include both external vibrations and internal dialogues, where no sound can be separated from its context.

Context creates ethics. Immediately after a performance we held in Newburgh, New York, we began discussing the idea of soundscapes of uncomfortability. During the Ann Street Gallery event, our co-performers-turned-listeners were mainly white, some not citizens of downtown Newburgh or Newburgh at all, which is a predominantly Latinx community. Furthermore, in 2023 asylum seekers in New York City were bused to Newburgh and housed in hotels, creating an influx of new immigrant community members. Ann Street Gallery was formed under the umbrella of Safe Harbors of the Hudson, a house, arts, and community project based in Newburgh. Since 2004, according to its website, ‘Safe Harbors transformed the Hotel Newburgh into the Cornerstone Residence – safe, supportive and well-designed permanent housing for 128 of our neighbors, including those living with mental health diagnoses and physical disabilities, veterans, the formerly homeless, artists in need of affordable live-work space and low and very low income working adults.’ Listeners must engage with the historical and contemporary context of a place. In Newburgh, the reality of migrant displacement and the history of Latinx and Black community is essential to understand as one listens in place.

The after-walk discussion is an opportunity for participants to describe what they heard during their twenty-five-minute sound walk, with its prompts about listening to non-humans. In this iteration, participants began listing mostly the sounds that made them uncomfortable, like the number of cars and how loud the music in the cars was. Rather than just noticing what was happening, and recognizing that that was the sound of that particular place at that particular time, the discussion became more around a kind of desire for an idealized sound, such as ‘If we could only get rid of these sounds, we could have better listening’ or ‘If there were fewer cars and music, I would have experienced this soundscape and not that soundscape.’ Participants expressed that they would personally have benefited more if this environment was different in the ways they hoped it to be, or imagined it to be.

For authors of such a work, or potentially for anyone who does place-based exercises, even by invitation, there is a limit to what is knowable before engaging with a site. However, there is a clear distinction between arriving and listening as a visitor to such spaces and automatically assuming ownership of such places.

This desire for hearing is a form of what xwélmexw (Stó:lō/Skwah) artist and scholar Dylan Robinson identifies as ‘Hungry Listening.’ Perhaps our failure, as the creators of the workshop, was a miscalculation of what Indigenous forms of listening might mean to different audiences. The perspective of a listener shouldn’t be from that of ownership of a place or desire for future ownership. While we experience an expansive acceptance of sound, history, and context, we cannot expect the same of all audiences. By framing this project as listening to non-human beings, we amplified a desire to experience physical non-human beings in the world. While we think of this as an artwork that is more speculative than a soundwalk, the relationship to soundwalks immediately separates the listened from the listener, nature (Western definition) from man-made, birds/wind/trees/ water/insects/animals from the human inner world. Individuation from the community only amplified this desire for a purely positive spiritual experience.

While, as Native artists, we might experience the diversities of Indigenous philosophy as ongoing practice, as ceremony, as day-today living, and the most heightened practices of Indigenous philosophy as intense, uncomfortable, sometimes even painful, we cannot expect that of everyone else, at least not yet. To us, the experience of hearing loud music playing in many cars driving by signals a community practice, where ancestors’ voices still come through today, regardless of displacement and diaspora.

After our score performance and discussion ended, the curator led a walk around the gallery, which stopped in front of a photograph we had installed for a related work: Kite, Nuŋhˇwáuŋzazapi (We Only Hear Snatches of What Is Said), Photograph, 3’ × 4’, 2022. The photograph, taken on Pine Ridge Reservation, depicts a landscape of reeds and water around Kyle Dam; in the frame is the microphone we used to record the audio for our multi-channel sound installation: Kite & Robbie Wing, Owákhithˇaŋiŋ, 8-channel audio installation, 2022. The sonic reality of the piece is of sounds in a small reservation town. The recording is full of birds in a dawn chorus, but it’s also full of Kite’s cousins, nieces, and nephews screaming, family dogs barking, and cars going to and from town, heading to work and further into Pine Ridge’s more rural areas. The American Indian lived reality is not some pristine natural world experience, it’s real life, where we self-organize our towns and self-organize our homes to be as comfortable as possible within walking distance of our relatives. Maintaining this structure of not only the relation between family members, but also the physical relation between homes and land, allows families to have dinner together, foster inter-family drama, babysit each other’s kids, shelter from tornados.

Making sound in a place forms our communities, invoking ancestors and expressing our cultural and social history. In a 2016 keynote address at the Indigenous Methodologies and Art History conference, Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish First Nation) foregrounds an American Indian big-drum group protesting inside the Mall of America in a suburb of Minneapolis, Minnesota. To those outside American Indian communities, the sonic act is protest: perceived as loudness and disruption. When American Indians hear a big drum, we hear very intricate relational histories and genealogies: songs, peoples, and place. While states of beinghood are specific to different communities, sonic intimacy with these forms of loudness in public spaces allows humans to hear these non-human beings: ephemeral, ancestral, and loud. Vastly different from an ideal white American public social space, perceptions of American Indian sounds as social disruption in a city such as Minneapolis cannot be separated from histories of bans on American Indian gatherings.

When we create prompts or scores, we’re essentially offering a starting point that can heavily influence participants’ perceptions. The initial information or frame we provide can shape their experience significantly. The question then becomes how to design activities, like soundwalks or immersive workshops, in a way that encourages participants to explore freely without being overly directed by our initial suggestions, and more deeply calls participants to acknowledge communities harmed by the creation of a place.

We begin by reframing the listener as a guest in the place they are occupying, and away from the idea that their listening is for their own self-reflection rather than an attunement and openness to relationality within a place and a recognition of the listener’s presence within that place. Simply, while you are listening to non-humans and humans, non-humans and humans are also listening to you.

1. Acknowledge you are a visitor to this place, and attune to the sounds/vibrations as they enter your ears and move through/against your body.

2. For the next five minutes, recognize that you alter a place by being there and are in presence of non-humans, seen and unseen, heard and unheard. What sound knows you, and for how long?

3. For the next five minutes, ask yourself, ‘Do I have permission to listen?’

4. For the next five minutes, pick a single sound and listen for its decay. Listen to what is heard, then what is unheard. Follow that wave as far as you can. Listen for the moment when it is no longer audible, listen for what is still there. Have the birds gone quiet?

5. Acknowledge you are a visitor to this place; return to where you started.

My Teacher

Carolynne Crawley

One of my recent teachers has shared with me over the past three years the importance of slowing down. To take time and be fully in the present moment, to be aware of my surroundings, to be patient, as important things cannot be rushed. But there is also a time when speed is necessary, even while maintaining full awareness.

My teacher came to me during the height of the pandemic, on June 8, 2021. I remember that day vividly, as though it were yesterday. I’ve heard many times that teachers come into our lives at exactly the right moment. Perhaps this was the moment I was open to receiving her teachings.

It was early Tuesday morning, the temperature was rising toward what would become a hot day. I met up with an acquaintance, someone from the neighbourhood, to take a stroll through High Park so we could catch up. We chatted as we walked along a path in an open field, when suddenly we noticed her, a distinctive profile low in the grass. She was walking with great intent. I say this because she looked as though she was on a mission. But then she began to walk in circles that became smaller and smaller. I was puzzled. What is she doing? Is she okay? I wondered. I noticed a few people walking about, some with their dog companions, but they were not fully aware of her presence. I felt concerned as she seemed so vulnerable and exposed. Yet she seemed confident enough to continue doing what she was doing.

I approached her cautiously, not wanting to disturb her but wanting to be mindful, to respect her space. She was beautiful. I noticed her dark eyes as she looked up in my direction and how it felt like they pierced through me. The wrinkled folds of her skin made her look so wise. She was quite large, yet she moved gracefully, taking her time with each movement. At times she would pause, noticing motions nearby, but then she continued as though she carried caution.

What is she doing? Why is she here? Questions I asked myself. As more people began to notice her, I felt I couldn’t walk away. My acquaintance continued on her walk as I decided to stay and ensure my newly discovered future teacher was okay. Once she began digging, I became utterly confused, so I began to make a few phone calls for guidance on how to approach the situation. One call led to another, and that would precipitate the journey I continue to walk today. But it was one specific call, to someone named Jenny Davis, who joined me that day to sit with Mama Snapping Turtle to ensure the many dogs off leash were leashed again and people kept a respectful distance as she dug her nest and laid her eggs, that made all the difference.

I learned so much that day, and I continue to learn from my teacher and her kin, as they are all my teachers. I learned she and her kin are on the Species at Risk list in Ontario and Canada. I learned she could live to be more than one hundred years old. But some of the greatest threats to her living her full life are road mortality and habitat loss. I learned that if she were to pass away, it would take approximately sixty years to replace her. I learned that one of her roles is to keep the waters clean, for the waters will quickly become sick without her and her kin.

I grew up knowing that all life is sacred and all life has purpose. I hear these teachings today from many Indigenous Elders in my life. That day, those teachings guided me as Jenny and I took on a responsibility to Mama Snapping Turtle: to advocate and mobilize when necessary to protect her and her kin. For she endures so many challenges living in an urban centre as large as Toronto. And her young hatchlings, as they are known, also face many risks living in the city. So we became Turtle Protectors, Mishiikenh Gizhaasowin, and found a group of volunteers to join us to advocate for, protect, and support our Turtle relatives in High Park and other city parks.

I’m fortunate that I live close to High Park, one of the largest in the City of Toronto. It is a busy park, especially since the pandemic. I regularly see families, classes, cyclists, dog walkers, dogs off leash, photographers, joggers, and people taking a stroll. I am so thankful I have access to this place that so many beings call home. It’s beautiful to see how many people gravitate to parks as a way to connect with nature. But there is a shadow side to all of this human activity in the park. The lands have become a place that prioritizes human activity and often forgets the impacts of this activity on all of our animal and plant relatives. I have witnessed careless and irresponsible behaviours countless times on those lands. My heart aches, knowing there is little care, regard, or thought by so many park-goers. Perhaps it’s ignorance or a disconnect. We need to create more awareness.

Every spring, the time of the cherry blossoms, I wait with bated breath for Midland Painted Turtle hatchlings to emerge from their nests. Some of these nests are scattered along the hill of the cherry blossom trees. I always marvel as I witness the strength and determination of hatchlings as they dig from their nest, a quiet and dark place inches deep in the ground, to enter a ‘new world’ filled with many obstacles and risks. They are tiny, the size of a quarter. My heart races as tens of thousands of human feet cluster close together as they shuffle down the path and along the hillside while their eyes gawk above at the beautiful blossoms, without knowing to look downward to notice the hatchlings. Hatchlings try their best to weave in and out, but some are crushed into the grasses, unable to move further, their time already at an end before they can be embraced by the waters, their home. Tears flow from my eyes, knowing this great loss, that it all could have been prevented. I ask myself, Why do we add more perils to their journey? Why have many forgotten about them? They have always been here, long before the Japanese cherry trees.

Cherry blossom season attracts tens of thousands of people in Toronto to High Park. Through the work of Turtle Protectors, it was learned that the hill that holds the cherry trees is a popular nesting site for many turtles. Midland Painted Turtle nests typically over winter, and the hatchlings emerge once the temperatures rise, which coincides with the blossoming of the Japanese cherry trees planted in the park. As for the young of my first teacher, Snapping Turtle nesting season begins in late May to mid-July, and the hatchlings emerge in late summer through to early autumn.

Turtles come to me in my dreams. I hear their ‘voices.’ I remember those voices as I stand on the path below the hill of the cherry trees. I scream out, ‘Watch out beneath your feet! Baby turtles are in the grass!’ Some feet stop, frozen in place; some eyes look downward, engulfed by concern and confusion, but others are too busy taking that perfect Instagram photo. I ask myself, How did we get here? Too concerned about others’ perceptions, the click-click-click of a camera, some pucker lips and tilt heads, grabbing clusters of blossoms, while others look, sit, and gather upon the grasses, not knowing they may be upon a nest.

‘Oh Turtle, my great Teacher, I’m so sorry we have forgotten about you, so small yet so mighty! I wait with trepidation for your time to come again, when you must navigate through thousands of shuffling feet as you try to move through the grasses, downhill, attempt to climb a curb, cross a crowded path, climb up a curb if you can, trying with all your might, only to tumble down, to try again, trying your best to reach water. But your precarious journey continues as you swim with great might, not knowing the threats that linger in the waters, for you are also food for many beings trying to survive. I wish you a safe journey, my dear loved one, and a good long life, may we meet again. Miigwetch/thank you for being my Teacher.’

Beyond the Lawn: Meadow or Mess?

Nina-Marie E. Lister

It’s a late spring morning, the air thick with the promise of heat. I’m in our front-yard garden at sunrise, on the site of a former ravine on a southwest-facing slope looking out over our Toronto neighbour-hood. I can see Lake Ontario shimmering in the distance. The wild strawberry, violets, and dandelion leaves are still moist from the morning dew, forming a soft, cool carpet under my bare feet. The goldenrod is already nodding, knee-high. Clumps of milkweed (the ones the rabbits left intact) hang heavy with pink blossoms bursting with their sultry honey scent, attracting bumblebees, honeybees, and monarch, morning cloak, and eastern tiger swallowtail butterflies, along with other pollinating insects most of us can’t name. If I’m lucky, a ruby-throated hummingbird may stop by to drink the nectar from the hare-bells and columbine, zipping around the bees, back and forth to the lavender border. The last of the crabapple, apricot, and pear blossoms have given way to the promise of later summer fruits. I close my eyes and soak in the dawn chorus dominated by the neighbourhood robins, goldfinches, house finches, cardinals (‘what cheer what cheer what cheer’) and the downy woodpecker knock-knocking, drumming as he works his way along a dying maple branch. This symphony of birdsong (almost) rivals the neighbours’ lawn mower, thanks to the song sparrows in the shrub layer and, more rarely, an indigo bunting holding court in the hedge (‘fire fire, see it see it, where where’). By midsummer we’ll have a night chorus of crickets from dusk to dawn in the thicker tall asters and goldenrod. The understorey hums with life from early spring to late fall, and long after the leaves have fallen, the stalks remain through winter, holding the snow and sheltering sleeping insect larvae, standing silent sentinel to spring’s return.

Habitat Beyond the Lawn

Our front yard is a habitat garden, designed to support pollinating and other insects, resident and migrating birds, small native mammals like rabbits, groundhogs, and squirrels, and, if we are lucky, perhaps even a few amphibians. Specifically, it’s a semi-naturalized meadow of perennial flowering plants (mostly forbs, and some native grasses) intersected by trees and shrubs. Each year there are more native plants, though still mixed in with a variety of ornamental species: some planted and others left from the previous owner. The meadow is an understorey of changing colour and texture, blooming from April to October, punctuated by small trees like Canada redbud, nannyberry, chokecherries, and sumac. Open patches bathe in full sunlight while the perimeter is in dappled shade, offered by an overstorey of red and silver maples, interspersed by burr oaks and a single stately red oak.

There is no lawn here. No neatly trimmed square or clean-shaven crop of turf. No chemical controls are used, no leaf-blowing or regular watering is needed. Leaves are left to hold soil moisture, to blanket and insulate overwintering creatures, to slowly decompose on their own and to add vital nutrients back to the soil. This ‘rambunctious garden,’ in environmental writer Emma Marris’s description, is an intentional urban rewilding project, chaotic and cheerful, less symphony and more improvisational jazz – a recovered shrub rose excavated from the foundation, coneflowers from a friend’s yard, asters rescued from the roadside. It is a jumble sale of various finds from our local seed swap and sale bin, donations from friends, hopeful introductions, and, sometimes, spontaneous appearances from seeds blown in by the wind or dropped by a passing bird. This is a healthy yard, a habitat for more-than-humans, a cosmopolitan ecology of an ecosystem evolving from what was here and what’s arrived – rather like us, and the city itself.

So why then was our tended wild garden deemed a mess and ordered cut?

On August 26, 2020, a City of Toronto bylaw enforcement officer knocked on our front door. She handed my son her card and told him we had to ‘mow the lawn’ and, specifically, ‘cut down the long grass and weeds.’ My son, knowing very well my approach to the garden, politely explained that there was no lawn here. Gesturing to the meadow, he asked the officer which ‘weeds’ were to be cut and why. What, specifically, were the offending plants? The officer had no answer and could not identify any of the plants in the garden nor specify their apparent crimes. She simply repeated the order, saying we were in violation of Chapter 489 of Toronto’s Municipal Code, otherwise known as the ‘Long Grass and Weeds’ bylaw, and we had one week to comply and to cut it all.

The bylaw in question regulates yards and gardens on private property. In 2020, Toronto’s bylaw was like many across Canada, variously called, for example, Property Standards or Yard and Lot Maintenance. In 2020, the bylaw stated that ‘grass, weeds and vegetation’ cannot be taller than twenty centimetres, but left ‘weeds’ and ‘grass’ undefined. Failure to comply could result in forced mowing of the property, with the cost billed to the property owner, and an added fine of up to $5,000. Many similar bylaws use subjective terms like ‘overgrowth,’ ‘excessive,’ ‘untidy,’ and ‘messy’ to describe the appearance of gardens that are not compliant. These terms remain common in most bylaws across North America and are the norm in Ontario, despite two Ontario Superior Court rulings that limit their use.

In 1995, in the case of the Town of Caledon v. Mik, the court ruled that the municipalities’ powers under the Municipal Act do not extend to the regulation of appearance or aesthetics. In 1996, in what is now known as the Sandy Bell case (Bell v. Toronto), the Ontario Superior Court recognized that freedom of expression, which is constitutionally protected under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, extends to protect expressions of environmental values and beliefs reflected in naturalized gardens. Importantly, in other cases such as Counter v. Toronto and Ruck v. City of Mississauga, the court has also recognized limits to individuals’ rights to freedom of expression, where matters of public health and safety take priority. These legal precedents offer clear guidance: municipal bylaws ought to be focused on matters of health and safety and steer clear of references to aesthetics or terms that suggest appearance, and should establish fair, evidence-based rules for enforcement.

Still, in most municipalities, such bylaws stubbornly persist. What’s more, their enforcement is complaint-driven, anonymous and arbitrary. Anyone can call in a suspected violation and do so in confidence. Little to no defensible evidence is needed before an enforcement officer is sent to investigate, and, unlike other areas of law, the burden of proof is placed on the property owner to defend their garden. Most bylaw enforcement officers deal with many aspects of municipal regulation, from animal control to traffic and noise. Enforcement is at the discretion and judgment of the officer, yet almost none are trained by the municipality to identify plants. In such cases, even clearly defined bylaws focused on health and safety are subject to the vagaries of enforcement procedures, which often don’t align with updated bylaws – officers still investigate complaints of ‘messy,’ ‘untidy,’ and ‘weedy’ gardens, with little or no reference to a bylaw that has weeded out subjective and aesthetic implications.

By implication, these ‘Long Grass and Weeds’ bylaws normalize the mown and homogenous lawn as the standard for yards and gardens on private property. Maintenance requires mowing undefined ‘grasses’ and removal of ‘weeds.’ Yet there are more than 12,000 known species of graminoids (the family to which turf grasses belong), and ‘weeds’ is not a scientific or even a specific term. A weed is simply an undesired plant, a flower growing in the wrong place, or, as Harvard botanist Peter Del Tredici’s guidebook title suggests, a ‘wild urban plant.’ My goldenrod is beloved and nurtured, and my dandelions provide vital nectar for early-wakening bees, yet my anonymous neighbours wanted them all destroyed. But regulation requires definition, and enforcement requires clarity and specificity. In 2020, Toronto’s bylaw provided neither. Vague in its meaning and arbitrary in enforcement, this bylaw had somehow persisted despite two provincial court precedents that ruled municipalities can’t enforce garden aesthetics, and that individuals have constitutional rights to freedom of expression in their gardens.

In effect, most municipal bylaws outlaw biodiversity – it is hard to imagine most of earth’s millions of plant species and their ‘messy’ habitats being measured against twenty centimetres of lawn, or what is essentially three species of turfgrass and its various genetically engineered cultivars. I wondered, how was this possible in 2020, only one year after an international panel of expert ecologists declared a biodiversity crisis, one that is exacerbated by and inseparable from the climate crisis? How did the City still have an outdated bylaw on its books? The irony of spending municipal taxes to enforce such a bylaw was rich during a global pandemic when the only safe place for people to be was outdoors, at home in the garden (for those lucky enough to have one).

As a professor of urban planning, I am privileged to have the freedom to be critical and vocal. I’m well-trained in municipal legislation – the tools we use to shape the city – from visionary planning policies to the binding power of zoning bylaws. As an expert advisor to Toronto’s Ravine Strategy and its recent Biodiversity Strategy, I am regularly engaged in the City’s efforts to re-naturalize public lands, from ravines to selected public parks, using contemporary approaches to landscape design that include native species and their habitats. Moreover, I’d spent the previous several years advising various municipalities on the benefits of supporting and investing in biodiversity as a ‘nature-based solution’ with multiple co-benefits, including improved stormwater attenuation, urban cooling for climate resilience, and, as became evident during the coronavirus pandemic, human health and wellness. I thought this battle had been fought and won decades ago in Ontario by pioneers like Sandy Bell and Douglas Counter, and more recently in Middle America too. But nothing prepared me for the weird inertia of property standards bylaws – rules that are fixated on appearance, aesthetics, control, and order – and certainly not for the deep-rooted bias for the lawn. I knew I had to use this opportunity to challenge ‘lawn order,’ as aptly described by Globe and Mail columnist Alex Bozikovic when writing about my case.

Unsettling the Lawn

The lawn is all about order and control. Much has been written about this, along with its colonial roots. As a symbol of leisure and wealth introduced from Britain, the virtues of the clean-shaven lawn were extolled and emulated by American elites from Jefferson to Olmstead, and later, postwar, became integral to the identity of the suburban landscape. Facing the street, the front lawn signals conformity to neighbourhood norms, order through homogeneity – a monoculture cut to prevent seed, its fertility controlled. It’s a stark contrast to the backyard, where the laundry hangs out along with the messiness of everyday life, from the vegetable patch to the compost pile. As the largest irrigated (and invasive) crop in North America, the lawn produces neither food nor flower. A greedy consumer of water, pesticides, fertilizers, and money, it is guarded by a powerful lobby, with the lawn-care industry worth billions. Why, amid the precarity of entangled biodiversity and climate crises, would we wish to stifle the diversity and resilience of life itself with a monoculture that is never allowed to flower or spread its seed?

The answer would appear to lie in an unrelenting love of the lawn. Perhaps it is a trope for order – we cling to the illusion of control as we careen toward an extinction abyss on a changing planet with a climate far from normal. Perhaps it is nostalgia too, for postwar suburbia and the promise of stability and prosperity, a safe place to police one’s neighbours and insist on the cleanliness of conformity to a shared ideal. The juxtaposition of conformity and order in the lawn with the rise of a neoliberal economy isn’t a coincidence. Property-standards bylaws are just the bottom of a pyramid scheme. They offer an illusion of stability at a time when we need more than ever to embrace diversity in all its messy, and sometimes chaotic, less-than-predictable complexity.

Certainly, property owners who are issued a notice of violation or charged with a bylaw infraction are ‘outed’ and judged in the same language used to attack their gardens. In my case, I was called ‘lazy,’ and my garden was a ‘mess.’ As wild gardeners, we have been called ‘preachy’ and ‘radical,’ ‘eco-evangelists’ who would impose our disordered, naive ideals on everyone. In times of crisis, different approaches to living are urgently needed, but the threat to normal, to order, is destabilizing. The irony is that naturalized gardens are often well-aligned with progressive municipal policies to support pollinators, grow native plants, or manage rain where it falls. They are often havens for native plants, creating biodiverse habitats that provide neighbourhood benefits beyond the yard – and some have won awards for their efforts.

Gardeners deemed to be in violation of local bylaws often report a sense of deep betrayal, violation, or, at the least, feeling stigmatized and shamed by their anonymous complainant neighbours. Many will simply cut their gardens and return to the lawn or a traditional landscape rather than appeal or fight the infraction. In my case, I chose to fight. My position and privilege meant I had an obligation to lend my voice to what was already a chorus of experts and advocates calling for change.

Embracing Diversity, Cultivating Care – Bylaw Reform Takes Root

In late 2020, after much media attention and an outpouring of support (and trolling by haters), my lawyer David Donnelly and I, along with author and native plant expert Lorraine Johnson, invited then-mayor John Tory to tea in the garden. He accepted, and we challenged the City of Toronto to update the bylaw. With the help of graduate student Carly Murphy in my research lab, we drafted a model bylaw to be shared with the City. Along with thirteen other ‘subject matter experts,’ we were invited to advise the City in a slow process of bylaw reform, aligning the City of Toronto’s property standards with the Bell v. Toronto court ruling and with the City’s otherwise progressive policies that support biodiversity and climate resilience on public lands.

The updated bylaw removed references to aesthetics, defined turf-grass, restricted height limits to apply only to turfgrass, and notably included a short list of ten local plants that were prohibited, all of which were known to pose risks to ecological or human health. The prohibited plants were selected from the provincial noxious weed list in the Ontario Weed Control Act, ensuring legal conformity. The reformed bylaw passed at Council in July 2021 and took effect in January 2022, but our efforts to update and align enforcement proced-ures with the new bylaw were less successful. We had recommended that the burden of responsibility should be placed on complainants to specifically identify the problem of concern and the plants that were its source. We suggested a screening process for telephone operators and an online complaint form complete with drop-down pre-filled menus from which specific problems and prohibited plants would be selected before a complaint could be investigated. We also recommended education and training for enforcement officers in the identification of health and safety risks and the prohibited listed plants. To date, we are not aware of any of these recommendations having been adopted. Unfortunately, gardeners in Toronto, and elsewhere, are still targeted with enforcement violations using old language that attempts to regulate aesthetics or requires blanket removal of undefined ‘weeds’ or ‘grass.’

The road to reform is bumpy and uneven. Sometimes it feels like we are engaged in a perennial game of whack-a-mole, as each growing season the problem re-emerges and more gardeners are served notices for their messy wildness or their unkempt appearance. But Toronto, as the country’s largest municipality, has set a precedent through reform: the updated bylaw has been copied, adapted, and circulated to many smaller municipalities in Ontario and beyond, and many have enacted similar rules. From Smiths Falls to Thunder Bay, Prince Edward County to Kingston, and London, Ontario, to Lunenberg, Nova Scotia, cities and towns are slowly embracing diversity and cultivating care for their communities through bylaws for, rather than despite, biodiversity. In a climate-resilient world, surely, we need to grow habitat beyond hostas.

As the meadow marked its tenth anniversary last year, I am grateful for its role in advancing support for biodiversity, in normalizing habitat gardens, and in challenging the dominance of the lawn. It’s been a long journey since Sandy Bell successfully challenged the City of Toronto in 1996 for the right to her ‘environmental garden.’ In the years since, my students and I have amplified and accelerated the call for ‘Bylaws for Biodiversity,’ which is now a research and action focus in my Ecological Design Lab and the content for a national partnership with the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects, the David Suzuki Foundation, the Canadian Wildlife Federation, my colleague and author Lorraine Johnson, and many others. Together with a growing number of gardeners, we are on a much bigger campaign to recover, support, and embrace the diversity of life itself.

Coda

Heading up the slope toward the house, I pause, blinking into the sunrise over the meadow. I stop to admire the fullness of its bloom, soon to be shaded by the rounded canopy of the trees we planted, and the buxom beauty it has become. I lean down to pull a bull thistle that’s taken root. I love its spiky purple blooms, and so do the tiger swallowtails that frequent it for nectar in late summer, but its thorns aren’t welcome near the path, and the City has declared it a ‘prohibited plant’ – so it goes to the compost. I tie up the goldenrod and tall asters hanging over the sidewalk, angling for more sunlight but obstructing pedestrians and strollers. We follow the rules to ensure a long life for this emerging habitat. As with any garden, it is designed and cultivated with intention, direction, and care; it is not an accident or left alone to its own devices. We steward, select, plant, prune, encourage – and we wait, hopeful each year for the return of the birds, the rebirth of spring’s bloom, when life bursts forth anew. While the outcome is not always known, and the direction changes and evolves, order emerges from apparent chaos, magic in the mess. We work together, feeling our way from soil to sky. We are dance partners, the meadow and I.

Further Reading

F. Herbert Bormann, Gordon T. Geballe, Diana Balmori, and Lisa Vernegaard. Redesigning the American Lawn: A Search for Environmental Harmony (Second Edition). Yale University Press, 2001.

Emma Marris. Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World. Bloomsbury, 2013.

Michael Pollan. Sacred Garden: A Gardener’s Education. Grove Press, 2003.

Douglas W. Tallamy. Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard. Timber Press, 2020.

Built Forms

Designing Out Disorder

Cara Chellew

It was a chilly Friday evening in November 2023 when City of Toronto staff moved in with heavy machinery to clear an encampment in the Kensington Market neighbourhood. The two-year-old cluster of tents, located on a small plot of land adjacent to Saint Stephen-in-the-Fields Anglican Church, emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic as unhoused folks sought alternatives to Toronto’s overcrowded congregate shelter system. The land, technically municipal property, had been used as a churchyard for 150 years and more recently as a space of refuge for unhoused community members. City crews moved to dismantle the encampment under the cover of darkness, on the pretext of community ‘safety.’ They erected a fence to keep people from returning.

The next day, City crews returned to place large concrete blocks on the contested plot of land. Designed with an uneven surface area, the blocks were installed not only to keep the encampment from returning, but also to send a message to the residents and their supporters: the City of Toronto would not tolerate visible signs of disorder on municipal land.

About a month prior to the eviction, the church and local outreach workers learned that a neighbourhood group called Friends of Bellevue Parkette had been granted a special permit to create a pollinator garden on that same spot. In response, the church sought an emergency injunction to prevent the encampment eviction. When it was revealed that much of the community, including the church, opposed the creation of a garden to displace unhoused residents, the City released a media statement claiming the permit had been issued ‘in error.’

While the concrete blocks differ from a pollinator garden in many ways, they are both forms of defensive urbanism. Also known as hostile, unpleasant, or exclusive design, it’s an urban design and governance strategy that uses the built environment to guide or restrict behaviour in public space. Linked to notions of crime prevention and protection of property, defensive urbanism is used to protect capital investment in urban space and prevent people from using these spaces in unintended ways. Control is exerted through what designers Selena Savić and Gordan Savičić call ‘silent agents,’ i.e., design elements that are meant to manage the behaviour of people without the need for authorities to intervene. Examples include seating modified with a centre armrest to keep people from lying down, planter boxes installed in doorways and alcoves to deter ‘loitering,’ and the absence of public amenities that support human well-being, like public washrooms, benches, and places of shelter and shade.

Public spaces form the material foundations for social and political life in cities. As sites for everyday life, they are versatile and can accommodate many different types of activities. Yet, inclusive, diverse, and accessible public spaces are not without friction or conflict. Struggles over different ways of living and being in the city are central for urban politics. Moreover, the purpose and meaning of public space is contested. For some, public space is a site for politics, social struggle, and everyday life that should be actively constructed and shaped by the citizenry. This can be at times messy and disorderly. For others, public space is a landscape of leisure, recreation, and retreat to be passively enjoyed and consumed. Order and control are paramount, as visible signs of disorder are associated with fear and crime.

People targeted by defensive or hostile design strategies are often those who use and rely on public space the most, such as youth and unhoused individuals. Design elements (or the lack thereof) are used to discourage ‘undesired’ behaviours, like sleeping in public and gathering in groups. While the most conspicuous examples of defensive urbanism draw the public’s attention, many forms go undetected by everyday users. This is because the coercive functions of defensive design are often hidden within more socially acceptable ones. For example, the creation of a pollinator garden or the installation of planter boxes can be considered an attractive way to beautify a neighbourhood and increase biodiversity. Nevertheless, these interventions can be weaponized against the city’s most vulnerable community members when they are used to displace.

In their research, Savić and Savičić, editors of the book Unpleasant Design, look for ‘qualifiers’ that can help us determine whether something is designed to be defensive. This includes shape modifications, surface treatments, and sensory interventions. I would add two more qualifiers to look out for: the restriction of access to urban space and the removal or absence of public amenities. The most common forms of defensive urbanism include modified seating, unusable surfaces, spatial barriers, uncomfortable light and sound, and the absence of public amenities.

Defensive urbanism is found in both public and private spaces, produced by a wide range of actors, including the private and public sectors, urban designers, landscape architects, street furniture manufacturers, and private property owners. This is done in a number of ways.

First, existing infrastructure can be modified or specially designed so that pre-existing uses are no longer possible. Examples include seating designed for only one person or sloped in a way so that leaning is the only option. Second, defensive design features can be added to a space to deter possible uses. The addition of light or sound changes how the space is experienced. Finally, objects or public amenities can be removed from a space so that pre-existing functions are no longer available. This is what I call ghost amenities – benches, washrooms, and water fountains that are often included in public spaces to make them more comfortable for human use but are absent due to disrepair, reduced operation, or intentional removal.

Although the terms defensive or hostile design are relatively new, the reconfiguration of the built environment for spatial control is not. Defensive urbanism is a component of the design philosophy Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (Cpted). Influenced by architect Oscar Newman’s 1970s work on defensible space, Cpted uses design strategies like access control, surveillance, image maintenance, and territorial reinforcement to reduce real and perceived crime. Cpted is widely encouraged by police departments and Cpted consult-ants, often former police and security professionals, who approach the design of public space through a lens of enforcement and security. However, these practices are based upon unquestioned and often unproven assumptions about crime and public safety.

Defensive urban design and architecture is employed to not only restrict existing ‘undesirable’ uses of urban space, but also forestalls the possibility of such uses. This manifests in urban spaces designed to be defensive before any conflict even occurs. Moreover, removing potential uses of public space makes the space less flexible and has implications for its social and political character.

Everyday public spaces are ordinary and messy. They are an essential part of many people’s daily lives and routines. From neighbourhood parks to local streets and laneways, these are spaces for recreation, leisure, and socializing. As important sites for public life, they are spaces where people can come together, engage with others, and encounter difference. Public spaces are also vital sites for protest and activism, in part due to their accessibility, openness, and symbolic significance. For people who are unhoused and have no private space of their own, public space is a space of survival.

Public space also plays an increasingly important role in urban development and renewal strategies in cities across Canada and around the world. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, many cities in North America, Europe, and Australia experienced deindustrialization, suburban flight, and the dismantling of the postwar welfare state. This resulted in economic decline, widespread unemployment, and the physical deterioration of urban spaces, especially in older core areas.

The ‘rediscovery’ of the city and its urban core was sparked by artists, immigrants, and entrepreneurs who moved into disinvested neighbourhoods to take advantage of cheap rent. Neglected factory and office buildings were repurposed for art studios, lofts, galleries, and nightlife venues, creating an atmosphere of urban vibrancy and diversity. This in turn helped to revalorize local property markets, raising property values and sparking (re)development processes.

As cities attempted to boost their economies and encourage local development, they gradually took on entrepreneurial roles associated with the private sector, such as taking risks on real estate, embracing innovation, and engaging in place branding and promotion.

Characterized by interurban competition, public-private partnerships, and the political economy of place, the ‘entrepreneurial city’ has created new spatial conditions that have implications for the production and governance of public space. By improving the attractiveness of local sites, cities compete for capital investment and skilled labour through the creation of large-scale development projects, improvements to the public realm, and the development of consumer attractions. ‘Above all,’ notes the critical geographer David Harvey, ‘the city has to appear as an innovative, exciting, creative, and safe place to live or to visit, to play and consume in.’

As public space plays a central role in city branding and image-building, public and private money is invested to create new public spaces and redevelop old ones. To protect investments in the built environment, these spaces are increasingly ‘disciplined’ through policing, surveillance, and defensive urban design to disperse unwanted people and present the built environment as safe and controlled. Public space is used not only to attract capital and labour, but also trust in the city. ‘Public spaces have been used to resurrect urban living,’ urban scholar Vikas Mehta writes. ‘But this trust in the city is often built on the mistrust of the “other.”‘ This mistrust manifests in the desire to securitize and control public space and to exclude perceived ‘others’ from access.

As we saw during the Covid-19 pandemic, public space is multi-functional and accommodates many different uses and users. Yet the desire to control urban space leads to fewer flexible public spaces and threatens its social and political dimensions. For example, when public amenities like washrooms, benches, and places of shelter and shade are not included in the creation of new public spaces for fear of ‘loiterers,’ they are less comfortable for everyone. They become spaces to pass through rather than spaces to stop and linger. For people with disabilities and older adults, the lack of appropriate public amenities is also a barrier to accessibility and restricts how people can move through the city and access the benefits of urban life.

Additionally, encounters with difference are one of the defining features of urban life. Urban historian Lewis Mumford writes that the primary purpose of the city is ‘to permit – indeed, to encourage – the greatest possible number of meetings, encounters, challenges, between varied persons and groups, providing as it were a stage upon which the drama of social life may be enacted.’ While not always comfortable, exposure to people of different ages, races, classes, religions, politics, and cultures can create conditions for mutual respect, political solidarity, tolerance, and civil discourse. Who we see in public space helps to inform our conception of the ‘public.’ When we use design to displace, it means hiding, rather than acknowledging, the social and political realities faced by marginalized communities and individuals.

Thus, public space is always contested space. It plays many roles in urban life, and sometimes these roles conflict. These conflicts over the purpose and meaning of public space play out regularly, as demonstrated by the removal of the Kensington Market encampment and many more like it in cities across North America. For the unhoused community, taking refuge next to Saint Stephen-in-the-Fields Anglican Church, a small plot of City-owned land, was an act of appropriation to create a space of survival. This act conflicted with the City’s desire for the space to be ordered, controlled, and passively enjoyed (by those who are housed). While orderly and controlled public spaces help to create an image of the city as a safe space that is ready for investment, they are less flexible, and that rigidity limits the social and political functions of these places.

As sociologist Richard Sennett and architect Pablo Sendra tell us in Designing Disorder: Experiments and Disruptions in the City (Verso, 2020), ‘A vital and open city does not occur naturally. There are places where improvised activities and social interaction do not happen because the rigidity of the urban environment does not allow this improvisation to take place, and planning for disorder is necessary.’

The Collective Effervescence of Messy Parks

Jake Tobin Garrett

It was the first pandemic summer and the park was packed. Indoor dining and patios were closed, so hundreds of people had spread out blankets with takeout food in Toronto’s Riverdale Park East, where a large sloping hillside provides a dramatic view of downtown. Wine and beer bottles leaned precariously on tilted grass, dogs and kids ran around in the thin empty patches between blankets, and people danced where someone had set up turntables and a speaker. It was chaotic, broke about half a dozen bylaws, and was absolutely perfect.

We’ve all likely experienced these magical moments – ones where we’re overcome with a bubbling joy from sharing space with strangers doing their own thing, but doing so together. Sociologist Émile Durkheim named these moments ‘collective effervescence,’ which was described in a 2021 New York Times article by Adam Grant as ‘the sense of energy and harmony people feel when they come together in a group around a shared purpose.’

As awful as the Covid-19 pandemic was, and still is, it helped break open some of the constraints on how conservatively Canadians view public spaces like parks. Suddenly, we turned our cities inside out. The Victorian-style pleasure grounds that form so many of our parks were hacked to become our living rooms, hair salons, bars, restaurant booths, dance clubs, fitness studios, co-working spaces, and, for some, even housing.

Our shared purpose was often just to be in the company of others – friends, co-workers, family, and strangers. It was not without conflict, but that’s part of the beauty of parks – they bring you into contact with other people, and contact sometimes leads to friction. However, it’s working through these frictions, rather than avoiding them, that strengthens communities.

Back in 2018, while working at the national city-park charity Park People, I co-led a research process with Doblin – a human-centred design research lab housed within Deloitte – to explore what elements helped foster a sense of belonging in public space. Commissioned by Sidewalk Labs and Waterfront Toronto, the research included in-depth interviews with Torontonians as well as guided walking workshops that took place in parks and plazas.

One thing that jumped out immediately during those walking workshops was how drawn people were to evidence of other people, even if no one was in the park at the time. A play area strewn with toys, a community-operated bake oven, colourful murals, knitted cozies wrapped around trees – these became signals to people that a place was well-loved.

A key finding from that research boiled down to what we called creating a living room, not a sitting room. Sitting rooms have fancy, often uncomfortable furniture and a controlling energy that puts you on your best behaviour but never allows you to relax. A living room, on the other hand, is a place for life, however messy that becomes. It’s in living rooms that you’ll find comfy couches, blankets, pillows, toys – all designed for use, not just decoration.

It’s the same with parks: they should be designed to be used. We relax into places that feel lived in and cared for – places where people have left their mark. These places not only signal to us that we’re allowed to use them, but they seem to invite participation.

Well-used and well-loved parks are not necessarily the ones with the fanciest designs or the shiniest amenities. Instead, they’re often the ones where people have, over time, created a culture of use together by negotiating the sharing of space and bringing their own elements, whether in programming or design, to make the space unique.

In fact, the liveliest park cultures have sometimes grown in the absence of official amenities and in the face of park rules. Often this means finding ways for various uses, valued by different cultures, to coexist: big family barbecues, reading quietly under a tree, drum circles, community gardening, kids’ birthday parties, playing music, multiple sports – the list is endless.

As a former theatre kid, I often think about parks as a stage for performance. You have the set, which is the amenities, design features, and landscaping of the park (think benches, playgrounds, grassy areas, and fountains). And you have the script, which is the unwritten and written rules that govern the park’s use (think official signs banning certain activities, like loud music, as well as encouraging various and differing social norms, like not spreading out your blanket too close to someone else).

On one end of the scale are parks with intricately designed sets and clear scripts, while on the other are those that are blank stages ripe for improvisation. While neither is necessarily better than the other, they each elicit a different feeling.

When I lived in Vancouver in my early twenties, I often found myself on hot summer days descending what felt like a million steps built into the side of a steep rainforest slope at the edge of the University of British Columbia. I would emerge at the bottom, blinking, into the bright sunlight of Wreck Beach, a beautiful crescent of sand and logs that is also the city’s only clothing-optional public space.

Slipping off my sneakers, I would walk barefoot across the baking sand – passing all types of bodies represented by students, professors, young families, and groups of friends, both queer and straight – to find a log where I could lay down my blanket.

Aside from public washrooms built near the steps and the strategically placed logs along the sand, there isn’t much that feels formally ‘designed.’ Instead, like the sand itself, Wreck Beach’s design continually shifts, built by the various people that use it. Each day umbrellas are opened, small tents pitched, chairs unfolded, and a patchwork quilt of blankets unfurled as the day goes on. Music drifts out of speakers or is strummed on a guitar. An informal economy thrives as both licit and non-licit wares are shopped around by nude entrepreneurs lugging coolers and backpacks. Food is offered from kitchens cobbled together with driftwood. Alcoholic drinks are cracked open and enjoyed. And farther down, cruisers disappear into the forest, hoping someone will follow.

Wreck Beach is not a place without its conflicts – though I’ve never witnessed anything beyond a simple argument myself. But it is an example of a space where a culture of use practised over years has allowed the beach to evolve into a somewhat self-regulated equilibrium, despite its various activities, both legal and non. Perhaps its semi-secluded status and its existence as a clothing-optional and avowedly queer-friendly space has helped it transcend – though not without a lot of community work – some of the constricting elements and behaviour-policing found in other parks.

So, how can we foster parks with this kind of dynamic energy, while ensuring they remain well maintained and equitable spaces?

A ‘messy’ park is not one that is a free-for-all. Parks should be designed to be high-quality spaces, with excellent materials, relevant community amenities, and well-cared-for landscapes. They also require a set of rules to help govern their use. But, as with everything, there is a balance. Overdesigned and overregulated spaces filled with shiny amenities and byzantine rules can provoke that formal sitting-room feeling: look but don’t touch; whisper, don’t shout; and for god’s sake, sit up straight!

It doesn’t have to be complicated. Providing canvases in the park that invite artistic and community-based participation, such as community message boards and blank walls for murals, can help a park reflect the culture of the community around it over time. But it can be as simple as not immediately removing informal elements and artistic embellishments when they inevitably pop up. A charming example can be found in Toronto’s Kew Gardens, near the eastern waterfront, where someone has for years maintained a tiny mouse door at the base of a tree, sometimes redecorating it for certain holidays.

Another idea is posting positive park ‘rules,’ rather than solely negative ones. While it may seem overly didactic or symbolic, if done in a playful way, positive park signs could help promote an inclusive and varied culture of use. My favourite example of this comes from Toronto Island, an extensive park across from the city’s waterfront, where an old sign stating ‘Please Walk on the Grass’ greets visitors as they disembark from the ferry. I love this because it upsets the norm of park signs, which are often long lists of activities we’re not supposed to do, and instead invites a sense of exploration and childlike play. I can imagine other signs encouraging friendly social interaction or respect for others’ use of the space in a similar playful way.

The same goes for policies that govern park events and organized activities: while it’s important to have ways to manage park use, over-regulation can end up smoothing out local variations. Parks should reflect the multiple communities within which they’re situated. While part of that is design, a larger part of developing that unique culture is to stay open to a mix of activities, events, and general community use.

Complex and costly permit policies can hinder community park use, particularly for equity-deserving communities that don’t have the capital, time, or political ties to navigate them. Similarly, blanket city-wide policies prohibiting or restricting certain activities (say, commercial activity or selling food in parks) can have unintended negative consequences by closing off creative avenues of community expression, such as local artisan markets or community-run cafés.

Positioning projects as ‘pilots’ is one way for risk-averse cities to try out different designs or community-based activities, helping to stimulate the natural evolutionary process of a place. We shouldn’t be afraid to experiment in parks – not everything is going to work, but that’s okay. Things can be tried, evaluated, tweaked, and then either discarded or made permanent. Vancouver’s process for creating new plazas from underused street space by piloting them with low-cost designs that often feature simple chairs, tables, and paint before making any permanent changes is a great example of public space evolution through trial.

Indeed, including movable furniture and adaptable elements in parks – stages that fold out, infrastructure to display art, or seating that can be arranged for groups or solo use – can help foster a kind of controlled messiness. These elements don’t prescribe use and allow people to adapt the park to their own needs.

To see how a park evolves through community effort and use, we can look to R. V. Burgess Park in Toronto’s Thorncliffe Park neighbour-hood – a high-rise tower community with a lively immigrant culture. Led by Sabina Ali, the executive director of the local non-profit Thorn-cliffe Park Women’s Committee (Tpwc), local women have transformed this small park, which sits at the centre of the neighbourhood and adjacent to a community centre, into a lively community hub.

An outdoor market with folding tables and chairs provides an opportunity to sell jewellery, clothing, and other items during the warmer months, while a volunteer-operated tandoor oven installed in the park in 2013 provides freshly baked naan. In 2017, the Tpwc added their largest amenity yet – a shipping-container café staffed by locals that sells affordable snacks to park-goers.

New amenities like the tandoor oven and park café are important, but the magic of R. V. Burgess comes from the care, ingenuity, and persistence of the people who inhabit it. Through pop-up markets, art events, cooking, youth leadership programs, community gardening, and other activities, Ali and community volunteers have evolved the park into a unique space that reflects the cultural communities in the neighbourhood. It also provides a way for people, many of them newcomers, to feel connected to a sense of place and get a foothold within the local economy through the markets.

None of it was easy. Ali and the Tpwc had to apply for various grants and navigate rules around commercial activity in parks, special event permits, food safety, and more to get to where they are today. Through patience and dedication, however, they made it work, and it’s now held up by the city as a beloved park success story – so much so that City staff even included it as a stop on a tour when the U.S.-based City Parks Alliance came to Toronto in 2016.

Parks are many things – spaces of relaxation, physical activity, and natural respite – but at their heart, they are social spaces. This means they are, when working best, inherently messy because they’re holding space for a symphony of activities, feelings, and expressions, both competing and complementary. Just as we tend a garden, we need to embrace the complexity of life and give our parks the right mix of resources, care, and freedom to evolve and grow into their own.

Mexico City’s Eclectic Apartment Architecture

Daniel Gordon

On a 2024 trip to Mexico City, where I was born, I arrived at my accommodation, dropped off my luggage, and immediately got a bicycle through the city’s bike-share program. I set off to bike around the edge of Bosque de Chapultepec, Mexico City’s vast central green space (which is twice the size of Central Park), past leafy Parque España in the Condesa neighbourhood, and through the picturesque plazas in Roma Norte.

As a recent urban-planning graduate, I felt I was looking at the city through a new lens. On that first ride and throughout the rest of my trip, I found myself observing new and old buildings in Mexico City and thinking that these buildings would not be permitted in my hometown of Toronto. I saw street after street in highly desirable neighbourhoods such as Polanco, Condesa, and Roma Norte, with rows of simple and in some cases very skinny mid-rise apartment buildings with no stepbacks or setbacks. (The former refer to a building’s upper floors that are recessed from the floors below them and the latter to the distance between property line and building.)

There are twelve-storey buildings pressed up against old two-storey single-family homes, some of which have been converted into small shops, cafés, and other commercial spaces. Buildings that use the same material for the entire facade and buildings that cast shadows on sidewalks for hours at a time. Upscale apartment buildings with windows facing directly into the windows of other apartment buildings without much space between them. Chunky tall buildings without podiums. These structures sound simple and maybe even insignificant, but they all have one thing in common: planning policies and urban design guidelines in most cities across Canada would consider them undesirable, inappropriate, problematic, or all three.

Mexico City is also far ahead of Toronto when it comes to the type of gentle density and neighbourhood retail that is slowly being legalized in our city. In many of Mexico City’s suburban neighbourhoods, you don’t have to walk very far to find duplexes, triplexes, and small-scale apartment buildings. Just as important is the variety and mix of retail and commercial space in Mexico City’s neighbourhoods, from small-scale stores along many main streets, to the aforementioned commercial spaces housed in old single-family homes, to picturesque semi-enclosed shopping arcades, to tiny kiosks selling flowers, coffee, or magazines on one of the city’s tree-lined boulevard medians.

Mexico City is a place of contrasts. It is one of the largest metropolitan regions in the Americas and is beset by profound economic inequality. Just as the Annex and Rosedale are not representative of Toronto, and the West Village and Upper East Side are not representative of New York City, Polanco and Condesa are not representative of Mexico City as a whole.

Corruption is a widespread problem in Mexico, and real estate development and other urban systems are not immune to it. Mexico City also faces a plethora of other challenges, including high levels of crime, chronic water shortages, and high rates of poverty. With these important caveats out of the way, there is much that urban planners living and working in Toronto and other big cities across Canada and the United States can learn from the ways in which some of the most livable neighbourhoods in Mexico City have evolved and developed. These are lively and dynamic places with interesting architecture and abundant housing.

The success of neighbourhoods like Mexico City’s Condesa, Polanco, and Roma Norte are not due to design guidelines, community consultations, or overly prescriptive planning policies. Rather, they are the result of experimentation, organic change, risk-taking, and creativity on the part of local architects, residents, developers, and business owners, among others.

The overly planned cities in Canada and the U.S. make it very challenging for builders to experiment with development and to learn from successes and failures. New buildings are highly regulated. First, planning policies severely limit where specific types of buildings can be built. For example, in most residential areas in Toronto, the densest types of homes that are permitted are fourplexes, laneway suites, and garden suites.

In addition to building types, heights are tightly controlled. Within lands designated as neighbourhoods in Toronto’s Official Plan (the main municipal policy document that guides development in the city), the maximum building height is four storeys, although zoning bylaws for most neighbourhoods result in an actual maximum of three storeys. There are main streets in Toronto with access to frequent transit with astoundingly low building height maximums, such as the seven to eight storeys permitted on Danforth Avenue and the five storeys permitted on parts of College Street – lower heights than many residential buildings on quiet side streets in Mexico City. Toronto’s zoning bylaws provide myriad further restrictions related to how far a building must be set back from the street, how much land a building can occupy, and even how much indoor and outdoor amenity space an apartment building must provide.

Urban design guidelines are even more prescriptive. Toronto, along with many other cities in Canada and the United States, publishes a variety of urban design guidelines that are intended to provide more detailed design recommendations than what is included in the City’s Official Plan and zoning bylaws. While Official Plan and zoning provisions have the force of law, urban design guidelines are not legally binding (at least in theory). However, they are most often treated by the city’s planning department as rigid requirements. Toronto’s Tall Building Guidelines, for example, include detailed provisions for how the base, the middle, and the top of a tower should look; the maximum footprint that a tall building can occupy; how building entrances should look; and what percentage of external walls on the ground floor should have windows.

Many of the planning restrictions that define development in Toronto have been instituted for one of three broad reasons: to prevent specific outcomes that the city has determined are undesirable, to protect the (assumed) needs and desires of existing residents who live near a development, or to advance arbitrary aesthetic preferences. The Tall Building Guidelines, for example, point to potential negative outcomes of buildings that do not comply with the guidelines, such as excessive shadows and overlook on neighbouring properties, loss of sky view, an oppressive sense of pedestrian scale, or overwhelming street proportions.

To protect existing residents, new buildings are required to transition in scale if they are adjacent to low-rise residential neighbour-hoods, and the guidelines try to ensure that new buildings fit within the existing or planned context. Finally, the guidelines outline arbitrary aesthetic preferences for textures, staggered heights in multi-building projects, and a desire for as much transparent glazing at grade as possible.

These examples all come from the same document, the Tall Building Guidelines, but the City of Toronto’s planning department has many others, including retail design guidelines, townhouse guidelines, pet-friendly design guidelines, and child-care design guidelines. The city has also developed almost a hundred location-specific design guidelines for individual neighbourhoods or even specific sites: there are even two sets of guidelines for different sections of the Danforth Avenue, and two for different sections of St. Clair Avenue West.

Design guidelines are not bad in and of themselves – the role of urban planning departments is to successfully guide growth in our cities, and Toronto is one of the fastest-growing cities in North America. But these guidelines are far too often predicated on questionable values, such as wanting new buildings to be as inoffensive as possible to existing residents. Meanwhile, they fail to consider the experiences of the people who will actually be living or working in new buildings. Planning policies and guidelines are also infused with subjective and debatable aesthetic preferences. Micromanaging every aspect of a proposed building has led to worse outcomes for new developments and has made it difficult to achieve thriving, successful communities with abundant housing.

The standard approach to urban planning in Canada and the U.S. assumes that the absolute optimal way to design buildings can be discovered and distilled into commandments, which leave little wiggle room for new information or revealed preferences to seep into development. For example, the requirement that at least 60 per cent of first-floor retail and commercial units must have transparent glazing has led to dozens of new buildings in Toronto with large expanses of floor-to-ceiling glass facades on the ground floor. This type of ubiquitous ground-floor treatment is now seen as problematic for a variety of reasons. These ground floors often look monotonous and uninviting. The glazing can clash with the cladding treatment used for the upper floors of a building. Ground-floor windows are often covered in decals or opaque film, particularly when retail tenants use part of the street-facing portions of their units for back-of-house functions.

The reasoning behind this provision may have had some logic at the time the original design guidelines were implemented – for example, the guideline is meant to create a visual connection between passersby and the activity happening inside a building. But in practice, the results are generally poor. One can imagine an alternate universe without this guideline, where a few buildings may have been built with entirely glazed first-floor facades, with architects, designers, and developers quickly realizing that this facade treatment doesn’t work, and then promptly abandoning it.

In Mexico City, I saw new buildings with a wide variety of ground-floor treatments, with varying amounts of glass used, and a wide variety of materials. On one mid-rise apartment building on a quiet side street, simple matte-black garage doors made up approximately half of the ground-floor facade, broken up by a small retail unit that was fully glazed. But our guidelines still require transparent ground floors, so that is what gets built and what will continue to get built until the guidelines are changed or eliminated by the city.

Prescriptive planning policies also reduce urban planning, architecture, and design to a formulaic, paint-by-numbers exercise that results in blandness and sameness and discourages variety or interest. Some of my favourite buildings in Mexico City are ones that completely break the rules of Toronto’s planning and urban design policies. A striking twenty-four-storey terracotta-hued residential building designed by famed Mexican architect Alberto Kalach on Calle Reforma (Mexico City’s version of Paris’s Champs Élysées) is a prime example. It has a significantly larger floor plate than the 750-square-metre maximum outlined in Toronto’s Tall Building Guidelines, does not sit on a podium, uses the same high-quality material across the entire facade, features no building stepbacks, and breaks a number of other provisions.

Yet this building is more beautiful than most new high-rises built in Toronto over the past twenty years. So why are our outcomes in Toronto often so poor (though there are many notable exceptions)? Developers and architects absolutely deserve some blame, as does the city’s overall lack of strong design culture. Ultimately, however, architects and developers will generally not try to break the mould if the policies and guidelines developed by urban planners and approved by the city’s leaders explicitly discourage them from doing so.

Most crucially, our overly prescriptive planning regulations maintain entire neighbourhoods frozen in time, contributing to the critical housing shortage facing small and large cities today. Many of Toronto’s most in-demand central neighbourhoods continue to be dominated by two- and three-storey residential buildings. Walk in any direction from many of the stations along Toronto’s Line 2 Bloor– Danforth subway, and you will find yourself in a sea of single- and semi-detached homes with a smattering of multiplexes and a sprinkling of apartment buildings. In fact, many of the neighbourhoods along this subway line have actually shrunk in population in recent decades. The thicket of planning regulations and the amount of time it takes to get developments approved severely limits the amount of new housing that can get built. It deters new entrants or small players in real estate development and makes the city reliant on a small group of experienced and well-financed developers to build new housing.

Affordable housing providers are not immune from the challenges posed by our overly prescriptive planning system – the City’s own real estate agency has struggled to get affordable housing projects built as it historically proposed buildings that largely obeyed the City’s planning policies, only to find out that these buildings were not financially viable to build.

Planners have an important role to play in shaping the future of our cities, setting the conditions for both recent and long-time residents to thrive. Planners also create places and spaces that are beautiful, equitable, and spark joy. But I worry that our planning policies and guidelines have largely missed the forest for the trees. If we want to create cities where experimentation and innovation take root, where there are all sorts of housing types for all stages of life, and where our neighbourhoods and streetscapes are beautiful and diverse, we could do a lot worse than learning from Mexico City’s messy urbanism.

We have to let go of many of the priorities and fixations that have held a tight grip on our planning policies. In Canada’s largest and most dynamic city, our main concern should not be to micromanage the design of new apartment buildings to protect low-rise houses from shadows or overlooks. If we get rid of the planning policies that bog down development and consume hundreds of hours of time for both developers and planners who must haggle over seemingly small details, we might give our planners back more time to focus on planning community amenities, new parks, new neighbourhoods, or new bike lanes. If we eliminate many of our urban design guidelines and enable creativity and new ways of thinking, we may even be able to bring a spark of Mexico City to the streets and neighbourhoods of Toronto.

A future of thriving neighbourhoods with lots of housing, interesting and varied buildings, and diverse retail is possible – but only if we take the opportunity to fundamentally rethink the role of planning policies and guidelines in our city.

Tower Communities Are What We Make Them

Ajeev Bhatia

As I step off the 54 Lawrence bus at the intersection of Orton Park Road and Lawrence Avenue East, my Saturday unfolds with a stop at the gas station at the corner. I pay $1.50 for a Jamaican patty and an Rc Cola. This is the gas station where you can get all the essentials: butter, milk, eggs, honey buns, international calling cards, drain cleaner, and a new pair of pliers. The bus transfer in my pocket is dated June 2006, and the halved bus ticket – split like a piece of two-ply tissue – has been surgically separated so that one ticket can be used twice, unbeknownst to the bus driver. Working the system to make life more affordable is a kind of ingenuity born of necessity – a hallmark of the ‘messy urbanism’ that characterizes the way many people in my neighbourhood have learned to get by. The gas station backs onto my fourteen-storey rental apartment building, one of two identical towers facing each other at the intersection.

Orton Park is in the Kingston–Galloway–Orton Park neighbour-hood of the inner-suburban community of Scarborough, around twenty kilometres northeast of the downtown core of the City of Toronto. Toronto’s inner suburbs are sprinkled with many apartment-tower areas like mine. Each has its own vibe, culture, and little communities. The people in these tower communities find all sorts of ways to repurpose them for so much more than housing.

Across the street from the gas station is a patchwork of high-rise and low-rise public housing buildings and a mid-rise private apartment building known as ‘Paki Palace,’ a stigmatizing, racialized slur meant to acknowledge the predominant South Asian newcomer population in the community, and a name that sort of stuck. The other dominant newcomer population is African and Caribbean folks, making Orton Park a Black and Brown neighbourhood. The block is partly surrounded by the ravine and steep cliffs framing the creek below. All the buildings are framed by surface parking lots and a five-lane road with cars whizzing by at speeds of up to seventy-five kilometres an hour.

Like Toronto’s other inner suburbs, Scarborough’s geography is tricky: the distances are expansive and transit is infrequent. The grocery store closest to our apartment is a thirty-minute walk, a five-minute drive, or a ten-minute bus ride (if you’re lucky enough to catch the bus on time), making it hard for a family to live there without a car. Consequently, the block itself becomes a world where the gas station, a basketball court, a swimming pool, and the ravine serve as places where people gather. Yet, these outdoor spaces only really work when the weather is warm. In colder months, spaces like staircases and parking garages offer the only spots to gather.

The apartment building where I lived was more than just a collection of living spaces; it was a dynamic ecosystem that continuously adapted to the influx of new immigrants and refugees from across the globe. Many of the apartment units housed considerably more people than the names reported in the rental agreement, sometimes as many as twelve per unit; because a lot of people lived in one apartment, every square inch of space was put to use, inside and outside. People’s homes were transformed into makeshift childcare centres, breakfast clubs, and after-school programs.

The Muslim community, for instance, rented a unit on the first floor of the building to use as a mosque, a creative solution for the lack of a nearby place of worship. The front door was often left open for passersby to enter; the red carpet from the prayer space spilling colour into the hallway symbolized more than just an adaptation – it was a bold declaration of presence and belonging. Families from all around the block would come to our apartment building for this place of worship.

The staircase had a unique smell, a blend of bleach, oil-based paint, remnants of tobacco from the Backwoods cigars being repurposed as blunt wraps, and the occasional waft of urine. Usually free of any police harassment, unlike the areas near the gas station, these stairwells became places to gather. Similarly, residents transformed the hallway corridors and underground garages into makeshift workshops for repairing bikes and cars. These spaces became classrooms where residents learned both mechanical skills and problem-solving.

Before the independence that came with a driver’s licence, bicycles were our freedom. We became adept at building our own bikes from parts salvaged from those abandoned around the block. A chain from one bike, gears and brake lines from another, lots of WD-40, and an adjustable wrench could solve most problems. Our Frankenstein bikes, built in the hallways, allowed us to explore the ravine system or generate some extra cash if we sold them. Sometimes, if we found ourselves in a nice neighbourhood and some kid thought leaving his bike on the front lawn was a good idea, they served as sacrificial burner bikes.

As we got our licences, we began helping one another fix the cars we bought off Kijiji for a few hundred dollars. The underground garage transformed into our communal mechanic shop on evenings and weekends. Here, a dozen young men from our building gathered to work on each other’s fixer-uppers, sharing tools, knowledge, and labour.

These late-night repair sessions built skills; we became self-reliant while also knowing that some jobs require teamwork, and getting our own cars helped our families access grocery stores and health appointments, shaving down long commute times with a drop-off at the Scarborough Rt train or Kennedy subway.

Scarborough’s vast distances, the concentration of low-income and newcomer communities in dense apartment communities, and reliance on cars inadvertently fostered pockets of vibrant community life within these apartment towers. These places challenged more efficient and orderly uses of space with the community’s needs and its cultural expression. Apartments like the one I grew up in take on many functions beyond residences – they are used in ways as diverse as the people who live there.

Global Cities

Rasta Cape Town

Kofi Hope

In 2010, I moved to Cape Town, South Africa, to work on my PhD research. That journey became a seminal experience in my life, as my wife, Lisa, and I immersed ourselves in the people, culture, and neighbourhoods of one of the world’s most breathtaking cities. Cape Town is a place unlike any other, its leafy southern suburbs and city centre nestled right up alongside the majestic Table Mountain range. Hiking, waterfalls, forests filled with chimpanzees, turquoise beaches with penguins, dramatic cliffs that jut out of the Pacific Ocean. Other than Vancouver, few cities I’ve visited offer such a feast for the eyes.

Yet Cape Town also reflects the harshest realities of many global metropolises. There’s a striking contrast of rich and poor, an encapsulation of the reality of urban inequality. This is a place where you land at the airport and head onto the highway, driving by seemingly endless expanses of shack communities and informal settlements where residents share communal toilets and struggle with horrifying levels of violence. Then, twenty minutes later, you are eating incredible sushi on a shaded patio as tourists and freshly dressed middle-class residents saunter by, and then go off to enjoy a film at an Imax theatre. The highs and lows of humanity’s modern urban experience are all on stark display in one afternoon.

My main guide in Cape Town was my brother-from-another-mother, Kurt Orderson. As a documentary filmmaker, he was chronicling the struggle of the Ithemba Farmers, a group of township dwellers who had taken over a patch of land to create small subsistence farms. They were locked in a land-claim battle with Cape Town’s municipal government over the future of their farms. At the time, I was interning with a local Ngo, the Surplus People’s Project, that worked in solidarity with the farmers. The group assigned me to support the farmers in their work. My first day going out to the farm, I hitched a ride with Kurt and his partner, and from that moment our friendship began.

Kurt was part of the so-called ‘Cape Coloured community’ – so-called in that he and his brethren rejected that apartheid label and described themselves first as Black Africans. You see, Kurt belonged to the Rastafarian faith, which in Cape Town manifested as a thriving, poor people’s social movement in the townships. I only realized the role Rastafarians played in Cape Town on my first visit to the central business district. As Kurt and I walked along the streets of the downtown, multiple people in working-class jobs – car-park guards, taxi drivers, delivery workers, and store clerks, all folks who lived in the townships and took the train or mini-taxis into the city centre for work – came up to him unprompted. They offered props (or fist bumps, as some people say), nodded their heads, and said, ‘Yes Rasta.’ These unsolicited gestures of respect made more sense as I spent increasing amounts of time with Kurt in the township of Mitchells Plain.

The Rastafarians I met in Cape Town were the definition of messy urbanists: a collection of community builders, peacemakers, entrepreneurs, mutual-support purveyors, and, most importantly, identity-builders. Yet they didn’t fit the bill for urban change-makers. What’s more, the language, beliefs, and lifestyles of the Rastafarian community stood at odds with middle-class sensibilities. Many in the movement could be quite militant and rigid in their faith. For most, veganism was a must, Western systems of knowledge and religion were rejected or belittled, and gender roles tended to be very traditional. Their lifestyle choices could be quite extreme: some new converts refused to bathe in showers, choosing only to immerse themselves in the water that flowed from Cape Town’s waterfalls. They saw exercise as a religious duty and often fasted from technology and food one day a week. All intoxicants were banned except for weed, which could only be consumed directly, without papers or butane lighters. This was a puritan movement, born of a place where gang violence, substance abuse, and the chronic health conditions linked to poor diets were prevalent. Rastafarianism provided a rigid and dramatic lifestyle change in response.

However, this movement also called adherents to high levels of moral conduct and ethics, as well as an intense focus on living out social justice. Without government grants or support from official political structures, Rastafarian communities organized soup kitchens, built daycares (or ‘creches,’ as they are called in South Africa), served as peacemakers to defuse community violence, held lectures about entrepreneurship, mentored young people away from lifestyles of violence and addiction, and supported learning about Indigenous culture.

The reason people would hail up Kurt in Cape Town’s streets, just at the sight of his dreadlocks, was that he was part of a movement synonymous with positive change and integrity. What I learned from these underappreciated change-makers were the foundational lessons in the messiness, contradictions, and vibrancy that come from poor people’s movements. Theirs was a new interpretation of a modern faith born roughly a hundred years ago on the tiny island of Jamaica, then transported to the tip of the African continent, where it mixed the ancient Indigenous traditions of the Khoi and San (the so-called Bushmen) with the sounds and aesthetics of both reggae and newer flavours of hip-hop culture.

For the seven months we were in South Africa, we spent most of our time in the community. I worked with my mother back in Canada to organize a toy drive at her school, the proceeds of which we donated to the Red Gold and Green child-care centre in the Marcus Garvey informal settlement. The classroom had expanded to a second room, in a shipping container, thereby providing a safe refuge for preschoolers who, if they weren’t there, were sometimes pressed into the work-force doing jobs like delivering messages and running small errands for the questionable characters who hung out around taxi stops.

I also took part in cultural festivals and educational sessions, observing member-run youth programs that fed and provided a safe haven for local children whose parents were lost to crystal meth. We journeyed with the brethren to multi-tiered waterfalls deep in the mountains, taking in lessons about local ecology and indigenous spiritual traditions tied to the land. In a country with some of the highest levels of crime and violence on earth, I soon found that my best bet whenever I got lost in a new city was to find someone visibly Rasta, give them a pound, and say, ‘Wha gawan, King?’ Then I’d ask for directions and guidance.

As someone with Caribbean roots, I have cousins who embraced Rastafari, so the culture was not unknown to me. However, the South African townships version was very new and totally unexpected. Yet there was a deep familiarity in the way the movement brought people together, changed the lives of its adherents, countered gang culture and nihilism, and helped individuals reframe and reclaim their identities.

It’s the same work I and many others have carried out in Black-focused youth organizations in Toronto. It was also similar in spirit to work I had observed in the context of Indigenous community organizations like Toronto’s first Indigenous-focused high school, an Indigenous cultural camp I attended in Standing Buffalo First Nation in Saskatchewan, and the hip-hop youth club for Inuit youth I joined for an afternoon in Iqaluit, Nunavut. In all of these contexts, I met urban heroes, city-builders, and culture-makers who worked with populations of young people who had experienced the historical effects of colonialism and found themselves in positions of social exclusion.

The human mind has evolved an inbuilt tendency to think in hierarchies, with extreme sensitivities to social status and position. In urban areas all over the world, social hierarchies are created and then ingrained, grouping communities and peoples in pyramid structures. In most of the world, the descendants of the colonized – whether those whose ancestors were enslaved to cut sugar cane in the Caribbean, faced cultural genocide, and forced onto reserves in North America, or condemned to the all-encompassing legal discrimination of apartheid – sit at the bottom.

It is among those communities where economic exclusion and poverty engenders a profound sense of alienation and feeling of otherness, within one’s own city, one’s own land, or one’s own geography. Time and again, whether in northwest Toronto, South London, the north end of Winnipeg, or the Cape Flats, I witnessed how those communities provided the foot soldiers and pawns for the international drug trade. The subcultures of gangs or other ideologies of death and power provide an identity for young people, one that gives them purpose and rationalizes their feelings of being at war with society and their own communities.

In these conditions, the culture-builders, those who speak the language of identity to the descendants of the colonized, are far more effective at mobilizing for change than social workers, teachers, parole officers, welfare administrators, and well-meaning non-profit do-gooders – the conventional first response for well-meaning urbanism. These contradictory and sometimes controversial movements, which tend to be countercultures themselves, have an unrivalled ability to speak to those who already feel outside the mainstream.

While we were in Cape Town, I watched as Kurt and his comrades used these same techniques I have seen serving Black and Indigenous communities in Canada. One example is our good friend Bradlox, who lived the lifestyle of youth worker and hip-hop artist. Walking the townships in bare feet, with massive dreadlocks, Rasta cap, and carved walking stick, he struck quite the sight. Like Kurt and the majority of residents in Mitchells Plain, Brad was a member of the ‘coloured’ community – people primarily from the Western Cape whose heritage traces to the local Indigenous Khoi people and the other groups enslaved by the Dutch to work in the new Cape Colony. This included Malaysians, Indonesians, East Africans, Indians, and other local Black communities. Apartheid worked diligently through its separation laws and unequal privileges to separate ‘coloured’ people from Black communities, telling the population that being deemed ‘coloured’ meant being superior to Black Africans.

For Brad and others I met, embracing Rastafari was a radical act, an embrace of their Africanness and Blackness and their Khoi ancestry. They proudly claimed they were as indigenous to this place as Bantu-speaking groups like the Xhosa or Zulu. To deepen his faith, Brad had travelled to Nambia, learned the local languages and culture of the Nama people who still live there, and then ran workshops for youth in the townships, teaching them Indigenous languages, crafts, traditions, and, of course, a heavy dose of hip-hop music and culture. He saved lives by helping young people embrace a new identity, then taught them how to transform their communities.

When we talk about city-building, there is the physical infrastructure (roads, hospitals, parks) and the social infrastructure (community centres, libraries, arts organizations). But there’s also cultural infrastructure, which exists within the minds of the human beings who exist within communities. These are the psychological feelings of trust, belonging, and connection that we all need to thrive. My time in South Africa showed me that identity-builders and culture-makers are the missing links when people think about community transformation. Identity and culture by nature are intensely personal and contextual, so I wouldn’t claim in Toronto that Rastafari is the solution for some of the issues of urban inequity and exclusion we face.

And that’s the thing about urbanism from the bottom up. It accepts that not all solutions will be for everyone. In diverse and cosmopolitan societies, it makes sense that governments seek to treat everyone the same. Democracies should look for equality in outcomes, but the way we get there must leave room for a high degree of diversity.

Rastafari represent a spiritual response to urban issues, one that goes against the overwhelmingly secular approach to social change that informs contemporary urbanism. An urban change movement that originates from a belief in the divinity of a twentieth-century Ethiopian emperor and then mixes this spiritual worldview with Black nationalism is not exactly the type of ideology that fits into our traditional urbanist narratives. It can seem threatening and even retrograde to many of the contemporary progressive visions of how neighbours should come together to build and support one another.

But perhaps one of the best gifts of a messy urbanism perspective is that it can expand our apertures a little to open our minds to the many unexpected and unusual ways humans can navigate the city and create communities based around common purpose and positive change. Since the settlement of Göbekli Tepe, the first urban area we know about in human history, we have used spiritual community as an avenue to gather people, create collective identities, and foster the building of cities. In many ways, it shouldn’t have been a surprise to encounter an unexpected modern take on a very familiar form of urbanism in Africa’s most urbanized nation. If urbanists looked a little more broadly in their search for city-builders, who knows how many more non-traditional models and leaders, like Kurt or Bradlox, they would find.

Chaotic Unregulated Tokyo: The Quintessentially Messy City?

Andre Sorensen

Tokyo is often celebrated by foreign visitors as the quintessentially messy city. Its crowded and chaotic central areas, colourful neon signage covering entire districts, ten-storey stacks of tiny restaurants in pencil buildings, wildly eccentric architecture, thickets of tangled overhead wires, narrow alleyways choked with aggressive legions of potted plants, and thousands of bicycles overflowing the sidewalks outside subway entrances all offer a challenge and thrill to the intrepid urban explorer. Recent books celebrate Tokyo’s ‘spontaneous’ urbanism, and neoliberal economists frequently point to Tokyo’s affordable housing prices as proof that deregulation and the elimination of zoning regulations is the answer to housing crises elsewhere. Yet cities are complex phenomena, often following structuring logics that are invisible to the casual observer. What seems ‘messy’ to a visitor can represent a carefully regulated and logical order to a resident, hinting at the perils of thin comparison and fast policy borrowing.

Tokyo’s mixed jumble of land uses is surprising to many observers. Anywhere near a train station or subway entrance enjoys a dense mix of convenience stores, bars, tiny restaurants, tofu shops, fast-food outlets, and bakery-cafés. Even more dramatic are the tall, skinny commercial buildings with restaurants and games parlours on all ten floors. Visitors from North America and other places regulated by land-use zoning codes that separate commercial areas and factories from housing areas – but that mostly deliver a dull uniformity and consistency of built form within large single-use zones – are amazed and impressed by the cheek-by-jowl mixture of supposedly incompatible uses. In Tokyo and other Japanese cities, land uses are relentlessly mixed in a way that fools most observers into thinking that Japanese cities don’t do zoning at all.

Tokyo’s messy and vital urbanism: Shimokitazawa Minamiguchi Shotengai is a popular shopping and club district at the intersection of the Keio Inokashira and the Odakyu Odawara commuter railway lines in Tokyo’s western suburbs.

Yet the exact opposite is true: Japan operates one of the strictest zoning systems in the world. It is virtually impossible to change the zoning of urban property, and codes are strictly policed and enforced. The routine ‘spot rezoning’ and ‘official plan amendments’ that in Toronto allow sixty-storey condominium towers to be built on parcels whose former zoning allowed three storeys maximum are simply illegal in Tokyo. But the logic and goals of zoning in Japan are different, and have been since the first City Planning Law (Toshi Keikaku Hô) included zoning as one of its primary tools in 1919. This was partly because Japan already had some of the largest cities in the world before the opening to the West and modernization started in the second half of the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Edo (now Tokyo) was already over one million in population. When modern ideas like ‘urban planning’ were introduced, there was a great reluctance to impose overly strict regulations on existing urban areas. Most urban areas were zoned either residential, commercial, or industrial, but each of those zones allowed almost all land uses, with housing allowed in industrial areas, and commercial and industrial uses permitted in residential areas. It was only later, after 1968, with the introduction of the ‘exclusive residential zone’ and ‘exclusive industrial zone,’ that land-use controls started to significantly limit land use in some areas, and those were mostly in the outer suburbs, in places where few visitors go.

The legal structure and evolution of Japanese zoning is also completely different than in Canada and the United States. In Japan, the national government designs and passes planning laws, including zoning, and local governments have no discretion in creating new zoning categories that are more restrictive than those established in national law. This approach eliminated the possibility of local not-in-my-backyard–motivated exclusionary zoning of affluent residential neighbourhoods. Conservative Japanese national governments have consistently prioritized economic growth and property interests over local preferences and declined to allow significant local autonomy in land-use planning. Throughout the post–World War II period, governments prioritized rapid economic growth and investment in infrastructure over careful environmental management, and land development and construction played a starring role in economic-stimulus programs.

Just as important, from the start, Japanese zoning was more about regulating built form than land use. While most zones allowed most land uses, they included strict regulations on the scale and height of development, and the relationship between building heights and the width of the road the development fronted on. Japan also maintains strictly enforced building codes and slant-plane restrictions to preserve access to sunlight for nearby buildings. Those regulations were partly the product of successful ‘sunshine rights’ movements opposing high-rise developments when condominiums first began popping up in the 1970s. Slant-plane regulations, which draw a sloping line from the opposite side of the street of a proposed development that limits the height of buildings, combined with high land prices, small parcels fronting on narrow streets, and pressure on space are the main reasons there are so many oddly shaped pyramidal buildings in Japan: architects and engineers quickly devised software packages that revealed the maximum built envelope of any target development parcel, however odd the resulting shape, and developers routinely build to 100 per cent of that envelope.

Building codes also work in a range of other ways to structure built form in Japan. For example, many Japanese condominium buildings are ten storeys, not because of height limits in the zoning codes, but because above ten storeys the costs of compliance with strict earthquake engineering and fire codes are dramatically higher.

There are three other major sources for the often chaotic appearance of many Japanese cities: unregulated signage, lightly regulated land subdivision, and the constant churn of urban buildings with exceptionally short building lifespans. Japan largely avoided regulating signage or otherwise imposing the aesthetic restrictions on architectural style and form that are common in many European cities. In commercial sub-centres like Shibuya, Shinjuku, and Akihabara ‘Electric Town,’ this enabled the extraordinary proliferation of colourful neon signs that makes Tokyo’s centres so dramatic and photogenic.

Of more profound importance has been the almost complete lack of subdivision controls. Until the mid-1990s, local governments had no legal authority to regulate the division of land parcels into smaller parcels, which required only a simple administrative procedure. Plot subdivision is still simple and requires no special permissions, but now local governments have the legal authority to stipulate minimum lot sizes, even though most don’t. Simple subdivision rules and high land prices meant that fragmentation of urban land parcels was extreme, with small houses routinely demolished and replaced with two to five even smaller lots with skinny buildings on them. That pressure of subdivision and fragmentation meant that urban land was always a development opportunity, and contributed greatly to housing unaffordability before the collapse of the Japanese economy and the end of growth in the early 1990s. Worse, in extensive suburban areas, farmers could always slice off a little bit of a rice paddy or woodland and sell a tiny plot without contributing anything to infrastructure, such as sewers or even widened road access. Many of those haphazard developments, which reached out past 80 kilometres from central Tokyo in the 1980s as young families sought affordable building sites, are now abandoned and vacant after the Japanese population started its secular decline after 2008, land values started dropping, and younger generations were able to find more convenient housing in more central and accessible locations.

Short building lifespans are a different but related story. Traditional Japanese dwellings were extremely lightly built and considered ephemeral, expected to last only a single generation before being demolished and replaced. Even though buildings are now much more substantial, frequently incorporating concrete, steel, and glass instead of the traditional wood, tile, paper, and straw, older social norms about secondhand houses continue to be powerful. The only enduring value in housing is seen in the land under it, and the physical structures are considered to depreciate in a straight line from the moment they are built, reaching an assessed value of zero in thirty years. Houses older than thirty years are routinely demolished before resale of property to enhance the value of the land they are sitting on. This practice means that, even with a declining population, there is still a significant amount of housing construction and building churn, supporting the continuous flux of built form in Japanese cities.

In this context, it is worth challenging the assertion that weak development controls are the reason for relative housing affordability in Tokyo. It is certainly true that the lack of laws establishing minimum housing standards has allowed the construction of a lot of tiny rental apartments. But likely much more important are Japan’s economic stagnation since the 1990s, following the collapse of the ‘Bubble Economy’ period, and the subsequent three decades of steady land and property value decline, exacerbated by the increasingly rapid decline of total Japanese population. Today, over 13.8 per cent of all Japanese housing units are vacant, including huge numbers of units in the Tokyo area. This excess housing supply is growing rapidly and is probably the main factor suppressing housing costs, not weak development regulation. Millions of housing units are vacant throughout the country, and this undoubtedly suppresses both rents and resale prices. Even in Tokyo, which remains Japan’s only city-region not experiencing rapid population decline, the inner suburbs are seeing rapidly rising vacancies.

I would argue that the truly ‘messy’ aspects of Japanese urbanism are not the famously chaotic and dynamic city centres, but the extensive areas of fragmented and dangerous wooden housing just outside central Tokyo that were built after World War II. These areas have such narrow roads and such tiny parcels that they are almost impossible to redevelop with newer fire- and earthquake-proof buildings and are now seeing widespread vacancy, abandonment, and neglect. Similarly, in Tokyo’s outer suburbs, poorly regulated developments in agricultural areas are seeing high vacancy rates and even complete abandonment and failure to pay property taxes because they are undesirable and have zero resale value. In the outer suburbs, ‘messy urbanism’ is a question of abandoned buildings populated by rats and raccoons. Far from suburban railway stations, with few local shops or amenities, these areas are a growing social and environmental challenge.

So Japan’s ‘spontaneous’ urbanism is neither the product of a lack of planning regulations nor of informal urbanism, but more the result of a different culture and different priorities in zoning and planning regulations. Tokyo’s ‘messy’ urbanism exists more in the eye of visiting urbanists than anything. For most Japanese, Tokyo has a clear order and set of structuring principles. Different urban cultures and regulatory systems work to different sets of values and to different conceptions of order and disorder.

The Readable City

Shawn Micallef

A messy city is a readable city. A clean city is hard to decipher, hard to get to know. To wander through messy urbanism is to walk through a city that can be negotiated and understood along the way, where details big and small, underground or popular, can be gleaned from the streets themselves.

Clean cities give you the official line. Walking through them lends a vetted and permitted version of the city. There are the official monuments, buildings, and plaques that tell the official story of a place. You’ll quickly know about its great men – and sometimes even the horses they rode around on. Occasionally you’ll learn about a great woman. You’ll know about sports victories and dates of independence. There are grand avenues lined with impressive light standards and trees, all of which will be well-kept and without any unauthorized embellishment. Often clean cities are actually clean, as in there’s little rubbish around, but a clean city, in this sense, does not mean the absence of litter, but rather being bereft of the other, varied signs of human existence, intentional marks of lives being lived and even political stands and arguments playing out on the streets. In a clean city you get one story. In a messy city you can get millions.

A most extreme example of this is Karl-Marx-Allee, the monumental showcase boulevard of East Germany, created in what was East Berlin as the divided city was rebuilt after World War II. It’s an extremely wide street, with broad sidewalks and large apartment blocks, some designed in a more classical style than typical of the postwar era they were built in, though there are exceptional modernist examples too, like the Kino International cinema that often appears on Berlin postcards. Regardless of the style, the street was built to be clean, and all of it was meant to show off the Ddr as a socialist utopia, or at least suggest there was one to be found. The 2006 German film The Lives of Others captures this very clean era before the fall of the wall effectively. In the final scene, the film’s protagonist, a former Stasi officer, walks along the Karl-Marx-Allee sidewalk and into a bookshop. At the time of the film’s release, the faithfulness of period production design was remarked on because it cleaned up Berlin. The buildings didn’t need to be altered much beyond changing the signage, but East Berlin had been a much different city than it is now.

Today a reunited Berlin is a wonderfully messy city. On one trip there, I was walking along Karl-Marx-Allee and saw a poster, pasted onto a wall, advertising an upcoming event for a Dj from my home-town, Windsor, Ontario. Like a few artists from the Detroit area’s electronic music scene, he had moved to Berlin, and though it was nice to see the image of somebody familiar so far away from home (local boy makes good and all that), it wasn’t entirely surprising. Berlin is a city absolutely covered in posters, stickers, and flyers that proclaim all manner of cultural and arts life, and even some politics. The variety is deeply impressive. The most prominent are large and colourful posters pasted onto walls, buildings, fences, and poles. Any flat surface seems able to accommodate this layer. When I walk through Berlin, I immediately feel a lot is going on. There’s an ever-changing patina of culture covering surfaces all over the city.

There are so many posters, one on top of another, that they create a kind of second skin in popular, highly visible spots. Sometimes they get so heavy that the layers slough off like a snake might shed a skin, peeling from top to bottom, sometimes paused in mid-curl like decorative icing on an elaborate, colourful cake. Below these spots are often piles of posters that, if they’ve been there awhile, have turned into a pulpy mound. Culture is often performative and ephemeral – you’re either there to experience it or you miss it – but in a messy city like Berlin, the culture becomes solid, or at least mushy and visible.

Some cities resist being messy, while others leave space for it, intentionally or not. In 2002 I was part of a small group at the Canadian Film Centre’s media lab who created the [murmur] project. We recorded short oral histories with connections to specific places and then affixed an ear-shaped green metal sign to a pole in those locations, with a phone number people could call to hear the story. Working on [murmur] in dozens of cities gave us a particularly detailed understanding of which cities allowed for a messy layer and which resisted it.

Toronto had a very messy layer we could work within, and our first project in the city was in Kensington Market, where decades of layers are on view and have never been fully scrubbed away. Kensington is a dense neighbourhood of narrow streets and narrower laneways lined with Victorian buildings, established when it was subdivided into homes in the nineteenth century. On that base, wave upon wave of Toronto immigration has left a mark, building new things or converting old buildings for new uses. Once known as the city’s Jewish Market, Kensington has subsequently been home to Toronto’s Portuguese, Caribbean, Southeast Asian, and other communities while also hosting a few generations of underground and alternative culture. The old wooden utility poles in the market have so many staples in them, each put there to briefly hold a poster of some kind, they could surely be considered mostly metal now. It was a good, messy place to start putting up signs we didn’t have permission to put up.

After a few subsequent [murmur] projects in other parts of the city, we were funded by the municipality itself for a large project along Spadina Avenue, one of Toronto’s great thoroughfares, running next to Kensington for a few blocks and home to, among other things, the city’s most prominent Chinatown. We figured that since we were having meetings at city hall and were funded by the same place, this time we could get explicit permission to do the project and put up signs, to be part of the official city. After some internal investigation, we were told, in a hushed tone, to ‘just put the signs up.’ The bureaucratic divisions in charge of various poles (there were around four distinct ones) meant that coordinating an officialness to our layer of signs and stories was difficult, even impossible, as it would have likely sucked up our small budget. So, we just did it, and twenty years or so later, many of those signs are still on poles around the city, even though the project has been retired. That lack of bureaucratic coordination has let Toronto develop its own messiness where, like Berlin, you know something’s going on when you simply walk around the city.

Other cities were not as easy. In Vancouver a city official approved our project and thought our signs looked great, but he told me they were one inch too wide for the city’s standard size. I nodded and went back to the hotel, where our stack of already-made signs were waiting and we ‘just put them up’ – the project ran successfully for years. They were written about in the media and appeared in many photos, and some of them, until quite recently, were still up. A messy city can flourish when there’s a gap between the official rules and how they’re actually enforced. A bit of messiness in the city gives things that aren’t quite official room to exist.

Montreal, San Jose (California), and Orange (New Jersey) operate with, I learned, a similar layer of messiness that allowed for our [murmur] signs to be put up without much hassle. When we worked on [murmur] in Edinburgh, Dublin, and Galway, we found that while these cities do allow a level of messiness (some posters and stickers), it was not enough for us to just put up our signs and go, as we did elsewhere. In those cities we had to get official permission, and in some cases even a municipal team of installers so the sign-and-pole people knew of them, lest they be dismantled soon after. A truly messy city requires a certain amount of bureaucratic inattention, perhaps even some benign neglect.

While seeing a poster with a familiar Dj in Berlin might be a particularly niche occurrence sparked by the connections between that city and Detroit, there’s an ease, when wandering cities like it, in accessing what the former poet laureate of Toronto, Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, called the ‘buzz’ of the place. The messy layers give the impression that one can find a home there, that there’s space to be yourself or even to explore new, deviant, or radical ideas. Room, then, for expression in between whatever officialdom has put on the streets, rather than conforming to the city’s established civic identity. Aesthetically, there are certainly many who see layers like this as actually a mess, ones they’d like to have scrubbed away because there’s no formality to it, no governing rules, order, or hierarchy. The disorder of it – like, say, the unjuried nature of graffiti and street art – makes some people nervous. For others it makes a place seem exciting and infinite, a layer that can turn a city from a giant museum piece to a dynamic one where the landscape can change as quickly as culture does.

However, not all messiness is the same. Compared to Montreal or Berlin, Hong Kong doesn’t have a lot of ephemeral street posters or graffiti tagging, though there is some of that, of course. There are certainly few political posters and the like (at least, not that I saw during the fall of 2023, visiting for a week after a decade of increasing oppression of political dissent). Instead, it’s a place of wonderfully ordered messiness, with signage nearly everywhere the eye falls and a visual layering that is almost exhausting to consume. Exhausting, that is, because Hong Kong is a city that is hard to be passive in. It demands attention to its many layers, demands to be read and explored like a book, or like one might click around on the internet, ending up in unexpected places. A tiny sign by a doorway, surrounded by a dozen other tiny signs, might indicate that, yes, this is the location of the twelfth-floor bar you’ve been circling the block for ten minutes trying to find. Many lament the disappearance of the neon signs Hong Kong was once known for, but as a first-time visitor I was still dazzled by the sheer number of signs, both electric and otherwise. Though the politics are very different, walking Tokyo on another leg of the same trip was a similar experience to wading through glorious, bright, and messy signage.

Consume is the key word in Hong Kong, where the signage was nearly all for commercial enterprises. As a former British holding, Hong Kong has leftover elements of a clean, colonial city with some grand monuments, street names, and buildings that date to that era, some still with overt traces of the British empire. Like the lush mountains and hills Hong Kong’s urbanity wraps around, however, they are just a part of the bigger city now. Layer upon layer is there to be explored, revealed by looking closely or when trying hard – and sometimes failing – to find your destination.

Hong Kong is confounding because the messiness exists in a place with extreme bureaucratic organization. An example of Hong Kong’s underlying order is the ‘Slope Registration’ signs attached to human-made retaining walls and natural areas, which reveal a constant monitoring of this precarious city built on mountainsides, one that also gets torrential rains at times. Seeing these signs on busy sidewalks and quiet, leafy nature paths alike affords a glimpse into how regulated the place is and gives an inkling that what we see and experience in Hong Kong is what the authorities want us to see and experience.

Visual messiness, then, doesn’t mean there’s a shared openness across commercial, cultural, and political expressions. At first glance, it all seems just as exciting, but it isn’t the whole story. In terms of messiness, Hong Kong today might exist somewhere between the East German Karl-Marx-Allee and the current Berlin version of the street, a deceptive place to be. Messiness is visual but also philosophical, connected to rules and laws. A messy city requires a gap where things can happen, perhaps even some benign neglect, to let the visual layer through, but it also requires deeper fundamental freedoms so that layer can sometimes contradict the official line.

Cities for Women and Girls

ElsaMarie D’silva

When I was thirteen years old, my mum, siblings, and I were returning by train in Mumbai from my grandfather’s month’s mind Mass honouring his passing. The compartment we boarded was a women’s-only one; however, unbeknownst to us, at a certain time of day, it became a general compartment. Just before we could disembark at our stop, a sea of men rushed into the tiny space, crushing us. As we positioned ourselves near the door to get off quickly at our destination, I could feel my skirt being lifted and someone inserting his hands into my private parts. I could not do a thing, as my arms were pinned to my side, I could not breathe, and all I could think of was getting off that train. The incident impacted me severely, and decades later, I hate travelling by train in Mumbai, and I intensely dislike crowded spaces. Men have groped and touched me many times, ruining my day, my outing, and my peace of mind.

This is not my experience alone. While across the world, public spaces can be messy and chaotic for many reasons, for most women and girls, sexual harassment and violence is a key reason.

According to Un Habitat, by 2050, 70 per cent of the world’s population will live in cities. Cities are places where people live, work, and play. Yet for half the population, cities are spaces that are not safe and inclusive. And while we emphasize the ‘live’ and ‘work’ part, cities are definitely not seen as places for women to have play or fun in or to enjoy themselves. Instead, we have gendered urbanism.

I am always on high alert when I step out of my home in Mumbai and when I travel. For twenty years, I travelled the world for my job in aviation, and over the last decade, I’ve continued to travel extensively to advocate for women’s safety. I have been to seventy countries and often travel solo. Safety is constantly on my mind as I plan for trips and undertake them. I do extensive research ahead of time, trying to build my situational awareness, seeking out people’s personal experiences of their relationship to the space, and reading comments on travel pages or hotel websites.

Within and across India, public spaces and transport are frequently very crowded, with bodies packed into small spaces. In these instances, personal space is often violated under the guise of anonymity. So it is no wonder that women, including me, are always on high alert, trying to protect our chests and bottoms with our oversized clothing and big bags. But often that is not enough to shield us from the constant male gaze or the whistles and comments that make us uneasy.

Further, the infrastructure in our cities is rarely neat and tidy, instead imbuing chaos. Buses and abandoned cars line the side of the road, often blocking the street lights and making it a great place for robbers, drug addicts, and miscreants to lurk in the shadows, waiting for their next victim. Most footpaths and pavements are taken up by street vendors, forcing pedestrians to walk on the road, sharing space with bikers, cars, cyclists, stray animals, parked cars, and more. These are fertile grounds for men to grab and grope girls and women from their bikes, pull them into a moving car, knock them down, yank their jewellery, or snatch their handbag. Women and girls are these men’s targets, as they are seen to be vulnerable, less likely to react, and subdued.

Sexual harassment and violence – and the threat of it – leads to gendered urbanism, where women’s needs and lived realities are not taken into account. It results in women not feeling safe and leads to a culture of impunity, where the crowded spaces do not allow for identification of the perpetrator and permit a quick getaway. Over a period of time, girls and women may ‘deselect’ themselves from various social and economic opportunities, putting themselves less at risk, retreating from public spaces, and withdrawing from these unpleasant experiences.

If you visit a park in Mumbai, you will notice these are male-only spaces. Rarely will you see a woman or young girl just sitting by herself reading, taking in the sun, or quietly reflecting. But you will see many men lazing around, playing cards, sleeping, and making the most of the space. If as a woman you tried to do the same, immediately a security guard would ask you to move or would question your presence there. It is as though you do not belong in that space, and by just being there, you are asking for trouble.

So it is no wonder we have a movement called Why Loiter?, based on the book by Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan, and Shilpa Ranade that encourages women to reclaim their right to public spaces. It is further complemented by Jasmeen Patheja’s campaign, Meet to Sleep, which invites women of all ages to bring a mat and sleep in a park. Most find it uncomfortable and risky but liberating to challenge the harmful and exclusionary socio-cultural norm.

As my train experience illustrates, public transport is another area of concern. A city with good public transport offers a wide array of opportunities for people to access a livelihood, education, and cultural experiences. Yet, according to Girija Borker’s 2021 publication, “Safety First,’ women spend about Cad $300 annually for a safer means of transport in Delhi and often compromise on the choice of an educational institution, choosing one because it is closer to home rather than for its reputation or academic offerings. This limits the resources women can access and has long-term implications as they then tend to be less qualified than their male counterparts, do not take risks in their personal and professional lives, and are less likely to move further from home for social or economic opportunities. It further influences urban and transport planning, or lack of it. For example, most women use public transport and undertake multiple trips to complete various chores. However, the frequency of public buses and trains may be less during the times when women are using them, making such transit inconvenient, with longer wait times connecting between trips to the ultimate destination.

On the extreme end, the violence women experience in the city can result in their death.

One of the most horrific incidents in India occurred in December 2012, when the gang rape of Jyoti Singh took place on a bus in Delhi. She and a male friend had gone to watch a movie, The Life of Pi, and decided to take a private bus home. It was on that journey that they were attacked, and Jyoti was repeatedly raped and left to die on the streets. Afterward, thousands of people marched in the street to demand change. I was among them. Ten days after the incident, along with some friends, I launched Safecity, a crowd-sourced map for anonymous reporting of sexual and gender-based violence.

Sexual and gender-based violence is not a problem only in India. It is a global pandemic affecting one in three women. Yet it is normalized and accepted as part of our daily routine. The acceptance and dismissal of it forces women and girls to stay silent. Meanwhile, the lack of support or acknowledgement of the problem affects girls’ and women’s mental and physical health, and limits their opportunities and ability to get around.

Over 90 per cent of our 55,000 Safecity volunteers have shared that they have not made a police complaint, nor will they make an official complaint, as they are afraid to engage with the formal system. They are afraid to bring shame and dishonour to their families. Some may want to file a complaint, but it is often the families who refuse to let them, especially if the girl is unmarried. This is tragic because it makes the violence invisible, with no official data to inform policies, decision making, or implementation of resources.

To illustrate the kind of impact this violence has on girls, here is a story from one of the girls my team met through our project. Anjali is a fourteen-year-old in Satara district. She loves math and science and is curious about the world around her. She enjoys learning and exchanging ideas with her teachers and friends. However, she hates the bus ride to her school, which is a fair distance from her village. Every morning her father drops her off at the bus stop, where a mini-van picks her up, along with a few other girls. They are crammed into the tiny interior and are often groped and touched by fellow passengers. They feel totally uncomfortable and, for the next hour, stare at the floor because they cannot bear to face the constant male gaze. This has caused Anjali great anxiety and has affected her ability to concentrate in school. Six months ago, she just could not wake up to go to school, despite not having fever. So she decided to drop out of school, as she did not feel motivated to undertake the anxiety-filled journey.

When our Safecity project started in her neighbourhood, Anjali volunteered to be a Safety Champion for her community. She joined our workshops, where she learned about the various forms of sexual violence – non-verbal forms like staring, ogling, and leering; verbal forms like commenting, catcalling, and sexual invitations; physical forms like stalking, touching, groping, sexual assault, and rape; and digital forms like morphing, revenge porn, and cyberbullying. She also learned that under Indian law, all of these are crimes that can result in strict punishments.

Anjali observed that many other girls and women had experiences similar to hers – being touched and groped or commented upon – and she realized that she was not alone. She was curious about how to take action, and when she understood that she and others could document their experiences on the Safecity app, she could then use the data to make a representation to her family members and other parents for safe transportation to school. One month later, she was back in school after successfully convincing the elders in her community about the issue of sexual harassment and putting forward the case of many young girls. The elders were compelled to arrange for the girls a dedicated transport to school and back. Anjali is now planning to complete her Grade 10 and continue on to college.

What I have observed through my more than ten years of advocacy work to make public places less chaotic and safer for women and girls is how important a role a program like Safecity can play in making the invisible visible. The project brings together the community to understand the issue and decide on solutions that make sense for them. It teaches communities that sexual and gender-based violence is not a woman’s fault but a societal issue. It is the socio-cultural constructs that often value a woman’s honour and impose impossible standards for her to live her life.

As a community, we need to step up our understanding of sexual and gender-based violence, and Safecity can be a great tool. It documents the largest collection of personal experiences that help us understand the context in which the violence takes place. We can look at the map and understand what is happening in our own neighbour-hood – what kind of violence is occurring, at which street corner, and the time of day and day of week – and this will help us understand what might be allowing the space to be the perpetrator’s comfort zone.

The next step would be to decide what must be done to make a safe space for women and girls – and, in fact, everyone. Does the space need better lighting or sidewalks? Do we need better allies? Who could those allies be? We have engaged local businesses like restaurants and pubs in Brazil during the Carnival to intervene when someone harasses another. We have engaged religious leaders to talk to their community in Kenya and call out inappropriate behaviour. In the Philippines we are working with local mayors and city government officials who are responding to the needs of the community in real time based on the Safecity data. They organize workshops and trainings for community members, sharing resources to counter the violence, and this has resulted in many availing themselves of helplines and other resources to protect, prevent, and respond to the violence.

We all have a part to play in helping women and girls break the silence around sexual and gender-based violence, in being good allies, and in making cities and public spaces safer. Even if we do not experience the violence ourselves, we may witness it or have a loved one who has experienced it.

Bystanders can undertake strategies to intervene without putting themselves at risk. For example, if you see a perpetrator harassing a woman, you can pretend to be her friend, interrupt the exchange, and let her know she is not alone. Or you could call the police helpline and/or raise an alarm asking other people nearby to intervene. After one workshop where we discussed several of these strategies, a friend recounted an incident on a commuter train where a man was harassing a young woman. My friend noticed it and moved into the empty seat opposite the young woman and struck up a conversation, as though they were good friends, exchanging college notes. The man quickly got up and left, as he realized he had an audience and his victim was no longer vulnerable to his advances. This woman had successfully intervened and prevented further harassment.

If we want to have safer cities and neighbourhoods, the first step is to encourage more reporting and analysis of incidents. The Safecity data indicates that the peak when women experience violence during the day is noon to 2 p.m. Yet urban planners and city governments focus a lot on street lighting. They are often surprised to hear that many women experience these incidents in broad daylight. Incorporating more evidence-based data and input from diverse stakeholders, like women, is essential to effective planning of cities and infrastructure. Another example is the high volume of surveillance equipment and cameras, like Cctv, in our cities. Most of the control-room personnel have a poor understanding of the kinds of incidents they need to monitor, the locations and time of day, and more. But with information like the hotspots on the Safecity map, it is easy for them to identify the violence and use resources such as the public announcement facility to warn the perpetrator to desist.

When large rural populations migrate to cities there are bound to be messy transitions. For women and underprivileged groups they can be easy targets for violence. But there are solutions, ranging from disaggregated data of people’s lived experiences and community engagement, to effective use of human, financial, educational, and technical resources and stronger implementation of legislation.

A Food Map of Toronto

Karon Liu

‘Hey, what do you want for lunch?’

’Buddhist Vegetarian Kitchen – it’s one of my favourite restaurants. My family has been going there for at least thirty years, and they make the best wheat gluten. Don’t worry about Google Maps, I’ll tell you where to drive.’

‘Okay … ‘

‘All right, go straight. Turn left at the plaza up ahead. That’s the original Johnny’s Hamburgers location – the other fast-food chain started by a former Toronto Maple Leafs player – and the really good mom-and-pop-owned Greek place that has amazing moussaka, but you have to call ahead to reserve it ‘cause they always sell out.’

‘Uh-huh …

‘ ‘Drive for a bit and turn right at the plaza with a really old-school McDonald’s with the mansard roof. Keep going, past the mall with the Metro, the eighties office building that has the hard-to-miss Dindigul Thalappakattu Biriyani on the ground level, the Fishman Lobster Clubhouse Restaurant that does those wok-fried lobster and crab towers that downtown chefs are obsessed with whenever they make a Scarborough day trip.’

‘What street are we on?’

‘Don’t worry about it. You see that green terracotta roof? That’s Very Fair Seafood Cuisine, a good option if you want fancier dim sum. Keep going, we’re almost there … All right, on your left you’re gonna see a big plaza with a Tim Hortons on one end and then a bunch of smaller Chinese restaurants, including a pretty good dessert place called Double Ming, but they don’t open till 3 p.m. and their boiled milk and egg dessert is always sold out by dinnertime.’

‘That … doesn’t answer my question.’

‘Then go past Full House, a more old-school dim sum place that’s affordable and reliable. Turn into the plaza with Marathon Tea – you gotta order a Ying Yang, a fifty-fifty mix of milk tea and coffee. All right, just park anywhere where there’s a space. I’ll run in and get a table first. Thanks!’

What? Were you expecting me to give you names of roads? Nah, this is how I see the city. Malls and supermarkets are my major intersections. Plazas and stand-alone restaurants that evaded demolition are my side streets. As a food reporter, my mental map of Toronto is dotted with memorable meals, grocers with the best prices, and little gems too small to write about in a national newspaper. After all, it’s the people who make up the best of Toronto, and they’re the ones who deserve to be put on the map.

The best way to do this is to hop on the bus or streetcar. Taking the ‘scenic route,’ it’s not the most efficient way to get from Point A to Point B, but having the bus weave in and out of commercial streets – and when there’s construction, taking detours to places I never knew existed or passed through – fills my mental map of the city.

I don’t get to experience that when whizzing by in a car along the highway, where the most exciting thing I’ll probably see is an out-of-province licence plate or, if I’m lucky, a dog with its head out the window. I’ll have memories of your start and your destination. Everything in between is a big question mark.

On the bus, it’s the driver who keeps their eyes on the road while I scan, zoom, and rubberneck my surroundings. Houses move on to strip malls. Long sidewalks lead to major shopping malls that tower over plazas that once were the shopping destination. A lone takeout spot has a line out the door even on a Wednesday afternoon. Each time, there’s at least one place that lures me to get off the bus a few stops earlier than planned. At some stops, the bulk of the passengers disembark, indicating there’s a community centre or supermarket that’s worth exploring next time (or sometimes it’s just a school, but that’s also a good indicator that there might be popular takeout spots nearby with student lunch specials). That old travel tip of taking public transit rather than a taxi or rideshare to truly explore a city applies to Toronto, even if you’re someone like me who lived their entire life here.

On foot, I can detect traces of cumin in the air from a nearby Indian restaurant, the smoke from a jerk drum, or the warm breeze from an industrial-sized bakery that most certainly would have a little, cash-only retail window for half-priced breads. If you’re at 14th Avenue and Birchmount Road in Markham, it’s where the Michidean patty factory is, a little closet of retail space where you can get a dozen patties for less than you’d pay at a subway station. I can easily take a detour and hop across the street to check out a small grocer or convenience store for imported snacks that big chain supermarkets would never stock.

Heck, that’s how I found my go-to spot for produce. It’s literally on the other side of town from me, but it’s hard to beat an independent grocer where I can get three and a half pounds of blackberries or a big box of spinach for just two dollars – and in 2025, mind you. (Sorry, I cannot divulge my secret spot and risk drawing the ire of the neighbourhood.)

‘Are you really going to spend an hour and a half one way to save two dollars on spinach?’ my partner would ask whenever I said that’s how I’m spending a Saturday. He enjoys a good deal as much as I do, but like most reasonable people, he points out it’s a long way to travel for groceries.

He’s right. I shouldn’t have to travel to the other side of town to save money on groceries when a well-designed city should provide easy access to affordable food no matter where you live.

But I will make the best of the situation and try to get the most out of my trip, taking advantage of the two hours of unlimited rides a single TTC fare will get me by jamming my trip with side excursions.

On a muggy July Sunday, my laptop, a cracked clamshell that was once my sister’s work computer, finally gave out after seven years. My weekend plans were interrupted by an impromptu trip on the 904 Sheppard-Kennedy Express bus to the Best Buy across from the Scarborough Civic Centre.

It’s a route I often take. The bus travels east along Sheppard Avenue East, starting with Fairview Mall, then past the Scarborough border and into Agincourt. Among my usual route markers: the Dairy Queen with the nineties fixtures on the north side of Victoria Park and the stand-alone Johnny’s Hamburgers hut to the south; the Red Lobster at Bridlewood Boulevard, where I unknowingly had a rum fruit punch as a child; and the Agincourt Mall, where I saw a Woolco turn into a Walmart.

Just as the bus was about to turn south on Midland Avenue, something caught my eye: a place called Tianjin Dumplings Restaurant, specializing in northern Chinese food: steamed and pan-fried dumplings, cold noodles slathered with peanut sauce, spicy beef noodle soups. There’s nothing remarkable about it from the outside: sun-faded red sign with black lettering, blinds drawn down and an Led ‘Open’ sign signalling that it’s not shuttered. The online reviews were good, and the prices were in the ten- to fifteen-dollar range.

My lunch plans were derailed, and with an unexpected emergency expense, this place fit the bill for my ideal plaza meal. It looked lived-in from the outside, so it’s time-tested, and the low-profile location means the prices will be on the lower end to attract return visits.

The interior was bare-bones: a drop ceiling, maybe five tables, faded Lunar New Year decorations that hung year-round, with a drink fridge tucked to the side to store extra ingredients. The server was also the one making the food and handling takeout orders. I ordered a dozen plump boiled lamb dumplings and a bowl of chewy, bouncy cold noodles with a big plop of nutty sesame sauce and shredded beef and radish on top. At that moment, I was prouder of this purchase than the purchase of the laptop resting on the chair across from me.

But just as taking scenic routes and detours leads me to delicious discoveries, travelling by foot and public transit gives me a look into which parts of the city are severely underserved, with limited access to reliable transit, cracked and uneven sidewalks (if there are any, or if people have to walk on the side of the road), and a lack of green space and public places that don’t require buying a latte to sit at a table.

Even in my neighbourhood, when I’m waiting for the 85 Sheppard East bus, I’m trudging through a foot of snow or penguin-walking to the bus because the sidewalks weren’t cleared, while just a few steps away, cars are zooming by on a perfectly dry road. When it’s raining, I instinctively walk a safe distance from the curb or else I’m in the splash zone. Even on a sunny day, I regret not bringing an umbrella, because waiting at an unsheltered bus stop surrounded by heat-absorbing pavement and no trees to hide under is a health hazard.

Back in February 2020, in an effort to get to a Portuguese chicken place, I once climbed over a guardrail and trundled through the years-delayed light rail transit construction site on Eglinton East because there weren’t any sidewalks or alternative routes for pedestrians. It didn’t surprise me that, when I later spoke with the restaurant owner during the first round of lockdowns, I was told they’d had only two customers since the day started (also not surprising: the restaurant shuttered shortly after, with the one-two punch of roadwork and the pandemic).

I always (sort of) joke that there should be a bylaw that requires all city councillors and policy-makers to bike or take public transit if they want to hold office. It’s the easiest way to truly see the city on the literal ground (or underground) level and determine what needs to be done.

After all, loving a city isn’t just about seeing its good parts. It’s about recognizing its quirks: who amongst downtowners hasn’t called the perpetually packed 29 Dufferin bus the Sufferin’ Dufferin or the late-night bus the Vomit Comet? But it’s also about caring enough about the city to see its potential to do better, like being able to build a crosstown Lrt within our lifetimes.

But for every long bus wait, food swamp, and harrowing crosswalk, there are the side streets, the takeout spots at the back of the plazas, and the corner grocers you would have missed if you just whizzed by in a car. These places, which require time and a curious mind, make neighbourhoods memorable and worth revisiting.

I like the idea of everyone having their own versions of city maps, however distorted they might be. Some stretches might seem shorter because they’re packed full of places you love or seem longer when there’s nothing that speaks to you. But that’s how you make the city yours – by adding the little touches and notes of delectable mile markers and intersections that you can’t wait to tell your friends about. But maybe also have the boring old map on hand, just in case they haven’t warmed up to your own Toronto mental map quite yet.

Sports and Spaces

Perry King

‘Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.’

– Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Navi Mumbai is one of the largest satellite cities on earth. This planned suburb, which broke ground in 1971 across the bay from India’s largest city, was intended to spur a new era of urban planning in India by attracting new residents and easing the overcrowding in increasingly dense Mumbai.

That vision didn’t come to pass. ‘Navi Mumbai has become a sprawling bedroom community for its larger twin,’ Bloomberg reported in 2015. ‘Real estate speculation now outpaces much-needed infrastructure improvements.’

In fact, when you hover above, looking at the skyline and landscape, Navi Mumbai is a jumble of deadly air pollution and difficult commutes, with massive highway flyovers that seem to leave huge empty spaces underneath.

But look again. Beneath those highways, something impossible to ignore has emerged. Multi-purpose sports courts are now live under colourful highway underbellies. Cricketers have places to bowl, badminton players swat and strike. And safety nets keep balls from flying into the housing complexes nearby.

The development of these facilities was an initiative of the Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation, which courted public and private money to bring life to what were generally lifeless and empty spaces.

This is what Sanjay Desai, one of their city engineers, said of the project in 2021: ‘The space under most of the flyovers in Navi Mumbai is lying unused, and taking advantage of the situation, some people have encroached on them for parking vehicles, running small shops, among others. Some homeless people are also staying under a few flyovers, and neither we nor the police department have any idea about their background. So to beautify the place, we have decided to develop sports infrastructure and open gyms under the flyovers.’ And when Navi Mumbai built them, the players came.

More people now live in cities than in rural areas – the United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs’ World Social Report for 2020 was definitive in that assessment. A welcome mat for immigrants, refugees, new citizens, expats, and the like, cities have become puzzles of identity, an interplay of ideas performed in close quarters.

Some of that cultural urban interplay occurs through active play. Basketball, for instance, has exploded in the cities of the Global South, from rural China to Singapore, Manila, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, played by locals and immigrants alike. The sports we see in cities don’t just reflect incumbent cultures – they have also piqued the interest of people the world over.

Those games take place in increasingly crowded cities with growing inequality. As the UN’s 2020 World Social Report shows, ‘the opportunities that cities bring are unevenly distributed in space, preventing entire neighbourhoods and groups of population from accessing proper health care, good schools, sanitation, piped water, employment opportunities and adequate housing among others.’

The twenty-first-century city includes growing slums, sprawl, white flight, rising rates of crime and poverty, and a dangerous lack of deeply affordable housing. What we have are dull, unenergized public spaces and a dearth of resources for communities.

But even as these metropolises contend with decay and a lack of resources, answers emerge from the crowds. It is a tale as old as time – populations coming together, connecting deeply, and establishing their own sporting traditions, even when the circumstances are dire.

There’s perhaps no better example than a phenomenon that began in the streets of San Francisco during the Great Depression.

The Depression was a period of enormous economic turmoil, but what emerged from the working-class communities of San Francisco’s Chinatown – a landscape of empty warehouses and derelict parking lots – was a brand-new sport.

So-called 9-man is a game filled with blurted-out swear words and trash talk, bloody knees, bruised forearms, and the loud smack of a spiked volleyball.

This game became the pastime of choice for Chinese-American labourers in the 1930s. It grew as a streetball game – with the same kind of ferocious energy you see, for example, in street basketball scenes in New York City’s Rucker Park.

Ursula Liang, a New York journalist with a Chinese father and a German mother, made a documentary about 9-man in 2014. ‘If you’re a volleyball player like I was,’ she said in an interview, ‘you look at it and you think, this is crazy. All these people swarming around, on concrete, sweeping up broken bottles all over the place, it’s insane.

‘Pro volleyball players are often baffled by how fast the game is,’ she continued, ‘how long the rallies are. It’s sort of the jazz version of volleyball, so quick and innovative.’

The spike-filled sport was an open secret within Chinese immigrant communities and thus mostly unnoticed by outsiders for decades. The 9-man scene was so vibrant that it led to the founding of the North American Chinese Invitational Volleyball Tournament in 1945, which is now held on Labour Day weekends, rotating among Chinatowns across North America.

Originally held in Boston’s Chinatown, the tournament brought thousands of people together to play and watch. The Nacivt introduced a women’s six-per-side volleyball tournament in the 1970s.

That culture, that innovation, animates these neighbourhoods, creating a means to celebrate their unique heritage and take advantage of the long weekend.

The Nacivt has also captured Canadian audiences. Toronto teams began competing in 1981 – and squads like Toronto Connex, Toronto Ngun Lam, and the Toronto Flying Tigers have all been gold-medal finishers.

Long before a successful collegiate and professional volleyball career, Jeff Chung, considered one of the best Canadian male players and coaches, was a kid playing 9-man with friends in Toronto’s West Chinatown and Kensington Market. He and his teammates played in the nearby parking lots and the playgrounds of Ogden Junior Public School and Lord Lansdowne Junior Public School.

‘[My dad] encouraged sport at a very young age,’ Chung told me. ‘He was very athletic himself. Long story short, he actually wanted me to be a basketball player. But somehow, I fell in love with volleyball.’

Chung really bought into the sport after seeing his cousin play 9-man for the Toronto Flying Tigers. For a kid growing up in Chinatown, it was a hearty introduction.

‘Our connection to everyone was just in that neighbourhood, that whole pocket,’ says Chung, who teaches in Toronto. ‘I just pursued the sport accidentally, [but] it took me to the next level. At the same time, I would continue with 9-man in the summer. So as I grew on the sort of “normal side” of volleyball, 9-man was always there every summer for me.’

The intermingling of cultures shaped these neighbourhoods and gave many people safe spaces to connect with their neighbours and friends. By situating itself in Chinatowns, 9-man offers itself up as a piece of a larger picture – but one gateway into the larger community hub, Chinatown, a symbol of ongoing connectivity with the global Chinese immigrant community.

Min Zhou, director of the University of California, Los Angeles’s Asia Pacific Center and professor of sociology and Asian American studies, described how these neighbourhoods were born out of ‘racial exclusion’ and ‘self-protection.’ As the Library of Congress notes, ‘Chinatown served as a safe haven and second home for Chinese immigrants, a place to shop for familiar food, to worship in a traditional temple, or to catch up on the news from the old country.’

Over many generations, 9-man added another wrinkle about the inner lives of these immigrant communities with a long history of racist abuse. The game invited generations of Chinese immigrants to uphold both the sport and the surrounding Chinatown as part of a beautiful tapestry that improves livability and adds to the messy cultural mosaic of global cities.

In its founding year, 1982, Samahang Makasining – a Filipino arts organization that arose during the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos – introduced the term Laro ng Lahi, a phrase that advocates for the games in the Filipino imagination.

‘The word “Laro ng Lahi” was conceptualized by the group and it was the first act to research and preserve the Filipino indigenous games,’ the arts organization declared.

Their goal was to find a way to connect Indigenous culture and history to the games that children play every day, often in public spaces. ‘The answer to some of the problems of the disappearance of Filipino culture is to remember and act on them,’ the organization explains. ‘The native game can be considered a sign of a race, so it should be revisited, preserved through the act of playing, painting, and writing … The game of each tribe is the identity of a personality and nationality. It also shapes an artistic thought and artistic feeling. Behavioural shaping and preparation for later professional experiences are also brought about by youth play.’

In 2001, Samahang Makasining made a proposal to the National Commission for Culture and the Arts entitled ‘Laro ng Lahi,’ to support and subsidize the three-day actual playing of selected Filipino games in the country each year. This proposal has since been adopted by the national commission.

A great deal of sporting culture plays out every day on the streets of cities around the world. Yet in countries like the Philippines, which has experienced colonial rule and dire poverty, such games take on a large role.

Before the arrival of sports like basketball or volleyball, Filipino kids had very few of the resources they needed to play organized sports and games. Instead, they invented their own games. Some of these traditional Filipino games predate colonization by the Spanish and continue to be played to this day, despite the fervent culture around imports like basketball.

These games, with their varied histories and origins, are deeply engrained in everyday life because they derive from Indigenous cultures. What’s more, they take up space on the streets of Manila, in the backyards, yards, and beaches across the islands. Usually played between neighbours and friends, many require only other people to play. Often, there are no formal rules or any strict regulations – which results in variations on the games, depending on city, island, and region.

Outdoors, the two most common games – patintero and tumbang preso – are variations on tag. Patintero, also known as harangangtaga and translated as ‘escape from hell,’ is played by two teams of five or six (taggers and runners), on a rectangular grid of about five to six metres by four metres. The goal is to cross the rectangular playing surface back and forth without getting tagged. Tumbang preso, a variation on patintero, is played on sidewalks and narrow streets, and fills these spaces with an astounding level of joy. There are also stick games, guessing and board games, throwing games.

Efforts to protect and promote such games have continued – with Samahang Makasining, the national commission, and local governments working to integrate them into school curricula, as well as the arts, through engagement activities for high schoolers, college students, and adults.

The Philippines might not be the same without these activities. As the country continues to evolve its democracy, such games serve as a binding agent between the families, neighbours, and citizens of its vast archipelago. They have also made Philippine cities that much more unique in the global context.

Grassroots sports and games emerge organically from the dense and messy cities of the twenty-first century, which, despite their size and inequities, continue to give rise to these most human of pastimes.

If not for these games, the urban chaos of sterile high-rises, noisy underpasses, and thickets of shabby housing might simply accelerate. The messiness of urban sports and street games makes our cities more livable, sustainable, and socially connected, and contributes to improving their future.

Everything Is Everything … But the Details Matter

Alexandra Lambropoulos and Sami Ferwati

Cities are ideas expressed as built form. They are what geographers call a ‘palimpsest,’ where development is rarely a blank canvas. Each building, park, or sidewalk builds on the decisions, policies, and plans that came before and is informed by narratives about who, what, and how people should live, work, and play in urban environments.

A prime example of this principle in action involved a quintessential late-summer teenage activity: going to the mall. The setting was Lubumbashi, the second-largest city in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in August 2018. The development of the Hypnose Mall was met with much excitement, as it was one of the tallest buildings in the city, featuring a fully glass exterior. At that time, Lubumbashi’s landscape was primarily characterized by low-rise to mid-rise buildings, and the colour schemes – reflecting both the lingering traces of the era of Belgian colonialism and the use of local materials (after all, this is the Copperbelt) – were vibrant and earth-toned.

The first impressions upon approaching the mall were twofold. Firstly, its blue-tinted, reflective surface stood out like a glittering sore thumb beside the terracotta-hued Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, an important landmark. Secondly, for a mall, Hypnose was totally dead. Having grown accustomed to malls functioning as quasi-third places (i.e., spaces between home and work that allow for social interactions), visiting one brought expectations of going to the movies or (window) shopping, but also sitting in the food court and people-watching.

While Hypnose had a cinema and a café, and there were a few people here and there, it was nothing like the sensory overload of the lively markets we had previously known, places that burst with colour, sound, smells, and people. In contrast, Hypnose’s sensory-deprived environment felt sanitized, unwelcoming, and cold, not just due to the (much-welcomed) air conditioning but also the general lack of people both consuming and selling products – i.e., those who make a mall … a mall. A relative shared that the low traffic was because the commercial rent was too high for most local businesses, resulting in largely empty storefronts, quiet hallways, and sparse foot traffic. As well, many of the stores that could afford to be there were owned by multinational companies catering to foreign clientele, which was clearly reflected in both the price and type of merchandise available.

Fortunately, according to accounts from relatives who have visited Hypnose more recently, the mall is now busier. Nevertheless, the story serves as a reminder that in urban development, both the big picture and the minute details are important in decision-making and design. If we don’t take into account the local context, then the necessary narratives, networks, and identities get left out of decision-making, thereby creating mismatches between built form and local needs.

Urbanism and the Art of Persuasive Storytelling

As cities change, each new iteration contributes to the textured web of collective memory and identity that shapes our understanding of the spaces and places we encounter. As a result, a critical aspect of urbanism is storytelling. In fact, in recent years, urban planning has become increasingly known as a process of ‘persuasive storytelling,’ fundamental to dictating our land uses, framing urban policies, and shaping our perception of different neighbourhoods and the communities that reside within them – for better or for worse.¹ If we are not careful, however, storytelling can and has been used to per-petuate false narratives, creating deep divisions that have implications for both the urban and social fabrics.

An extreme example is redlining, a discriminatory practice that originated in the United States during the 1930s, when the housing policies of all three levels of government (federal, state, and municipal) entrenched segregation.² Redlining involved banks and insurance companies marking areas on maps with red ink to indicate neighbourhoods they deemed too risky for loans or insurance coverage, primarily based on the racial and ethnic composition of those areas. This practice was perpetuated by the Federal Housing Administration’s false narrative that if Black people bought homes in or near newly built suburbs, those property values would decline – a myth that has since been debunked. Unfortunately, the consequences of redlining have persisted for decades, contributing to economic and social disparities, wealth gaps, and ongoing issues related to housing insecurity in affected communities.

In recent years, in many North American cities, capital-driven narratives have prevailed over community-oriented ones, leading to the disappearance of the public spaces (i.e., squares, parks, and libraries) that provide valuable opportunities for cross-cultural interactions and community-building. The loss of such spaces can lead to a decline in trust in civic institutions, contributing to a type of ‘radical individualism.’³ This extreme individualism manifests as disengagement from civic duties, such as voting and getting involved in community events. As a result, collective action and social unity weaken. This dynamic creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where people become disengaged from planning efforts, and, in turn, institutions overlook the expertise and experiences of locals, making it harder to achieve the community involvement needed for good governance and equitable development. This negative feedback loop results in cities and developments (e.g., the Hypnose Mall) that are disconnected from the realities on the ground and the core essence of who cities are for: people.

This observation brings us to a significant challenge in urbanism today: urban problems have become too big to handle individually yet are simultaneously too small to handle collectively. For example, climate change is both too vast and too complex for an individual to tackle alone. Fighting climate change requires resources, expertise, and coordinated efforts beyond the capacity of any single person or small group. However, these complex problems often manifest in specific, localized ways that may not attract sufficient attention or resources from larger, more generalized collective actions or state policies. Ultimately, addressing issues such as global warming, housing unaffordability, and other challenges facing our cities requires us to find a balance between individual and collective approaches. The key to striking this balance requires an understanding of the duality inherent in urbanism. While there are various lenses and theories to explain this duality, we find it best summed up by the popular adage that ‘everything is everything,’ to which we add, ‘but the details matter.’

The phrase ‘everything is everything’ reflects the idea that certain concepts, patterns, and experiences remain consistent across cultures, communities, and time, even if they may appear different or take on new forms (e.g., a market versus a mall). These transformations can make us perceive them as entirely new phenomena, when in fact they are just an iteration of the previous stage. The principle that the details and the context matters explains why we might see something as novel. While the underlying mechanisms may be similar, the unique details specific to a particular community or era give it the sense of being distinct, creating new narratives that inform decision-making. Thus, this new framing enhances our perception of why a particular challenge or opportunity is different and allows us to tailor solutions to local needs. However, focusing on the details alone can create distractions that result in irrelevant and ineffective solutions.

On Everything Is Everything … But the Details Matter

Let’s return to the mall. Fundamentally, a mall and a market seek to achieve the same goal: facilitating the exchange of goods and services within an urban setting. Ironically, while the Hypnose Mall was positioned as a symbol of progress compared to the long-standing local market, it failed to incorporate the very elements that made such markets successful for decades. It lacked local businesses and provided minimal cultural relevance while providing an overwhelming display of Eurocentric products. So how can this approach be seen as progress when it fails to build on the existing foundation of community life? Meanwhile, the local markets, though perhaps lacking in ‘modern’ amenities or regulated form, remained vibrant and essential to the city, sustaining cohesion and relationships that had been built over generations.

The addition of the modern mall indirectly sent a message that what already existed was inadequate, unrefined, or too ‘messy,’ simply because it didn’t conform to the Eurocentric model of progress. This isn’t to say that a modern mall couldn’t thrive in the community. But the context does matter. Just as malls in other places succeed by aligning with local needs and culture, this mall could have been successful if it had reflected the ethos of the market it was meant to replace, the businesses it was designed to support, and the people to whom it claimed to cater. The mall is a good example of development for development’s sake, rather than development for people’s sake.

Rather than creating something rooted in the community’s culture and values, the Hypnose project followed a bureaucratic one-size-fits-all approach that ignored critical details that would have made the project more innovative or culturally relevant, such as using local materials (notably copper and malachite) and the local artisans who make Lubumbashi a Unesco-designated Creative City of Crafts and Folks Art. The lack of innovation or cultural relevance in development is a trade-off usually justified for the sake of greater affordability and accessibility, yet this mall appears to accomplish neither. The design’s neglect of cultural context resulted in what was initially seen as a failure, despite its adherence to structured formal urbanism processes. Ironically, while the market might be considered outdated or too ‘informal’ by modern standards, its ongoing success highlights the importance of detail, context, and cultural relevance in development. In this case, the ‘mess’ of the local market was far more functional and valuable than a supposedly orderly and progressive mall. Ultimately, that sterility made the mall the true mess in this situation.

The key difference lies in the perceived legitimacy: while seemingly outdated community-led initiatives might appear disorderly, they often address local needs effectively. Conversely, externally imposed developments may seem formal and well-organized in their design, but fail to integrate seamlessly into the community, sometimes causing more harm than good. What’s more, they may create more of a ‘mess’ by disrupting the local commercial fabric, thus causing unintended negative consequences.

What/Who We Talk About When We Talk About Urbanism

There are many ‘isms’ that distract us from the imperative to recognize that ‘everything is everything, but the details matter.’ For example, ethnocentrism leads us to judge other cultures, spaces, and events by our own external standards – often with a bias toward perceived superiority. Institutional blindness also plays a role, as it causes us to overlook the problems created by organizations due to their authority and historical presence. This failing leads to what we refer to as ‘urban myopia’ (or tunnel vision), whereby the details of communities are disregarded and institutional methods are assumed to be perfect simply because of their historical record or what official studies suggest.

Escaping ‘urban myopia’ requires that we centre people and take a closer look at the values underpinning how cities truly function. Ignoring these interrelations – both the microdynamics like culture and values, and the broader socio-political dynamics that undermine local autonomy – often leads to the failure of institutional developments (e.g., the dominance of Eurocentric products in the mall). For as we attempt to streamline development and systematize urbanism, we fall into the trap of misinterpreting urbanism as ordered as opposed to ‘messy.’ This false narrative ultimately obscures opportunities by presenting them as obstacles while dismissing innovation as mere informality.

Reframing the narratives that inform urbanism and our built environment requires public participation, which is key to striking a balance between having just enough detail to make context-informed decisions and having too much, such that it leads to development for the sake of development but not for the community. Participatory decision-making is essential for creating urban spaces that reflect the needs and values of those who live in them. When communities are involved, we can engage diverse perspectives that reveal how the same mechanisms are at work (e.g., local commerce), but in different contexts. Together, narratives and participation create a solid foundation for more inclusive and equitable policies and planning – and, ultimately, cities. By looking at the details for each situation, we can learn the context required to ensure our places and spaces are tailored to the needs of its citizens, a process that reminds us that fundamentally, we are not so different after all.

Endnotes can be found on p. 321.

The Case Against Controlling Infrastructure

Andrés Borthagaray

The extremes of urbanism have clear downsides. On the one hand, inadequate infrastructure, inefficient solutions, and detrimental health conditions can diminish our quality of life, leading to the chaos that breeds some of the darker sides of urbanism. Conversely, top-down, rigidly ordered urbanism can lead to homogeneity, lack of spontaneity, and large-scale interventions that stifle the potential for more incremental and organic growth.

The question is not what kind of urbanism, messy or orderly, is better, but how they interact. The concept of designing a spontaneous city, developed by Madrid-educated architect Jorge Almazán in his recent book Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City, is a powerful reminder of this interaction.

Mobility infrastructure offers an insight into understanding the complexity of urban growth instead of conceiving it in a linear, simplistic way. It could be designed as a network connecting urban activities and public spaces serving multiple purposes, or it could sacrifice everything for individual vehicles, speed, and seamless traffic flows. It could be multimodal and based on active mobility and quality public transportation, or monofunctional, such as motorways based primarily on serving private vehicles.

Too often, as in the case of high-speed motorways, permanent infrastructure that connects destinations over great lengths can become a barrier locally. Once the barrier has been erected, inhibiting any connections that can build inclusive and friendly crossings, it is much more challenging and sometimes impossible to undo.

A view from one of the pedestrian bridges toward the university and the river in Buenos Aires.

The south-north axis along the waterfront of Buenos Aires offers an excellent example that illustrates the contrasts between orderly and messy urbanism. Traffic here is controlled through high-speed infrastructure that goes all along the coast. The design, centred on the automobile, erases any spontaneity. Two places in Buenos Aires can illustrate this impact. One is the road axis along Ciudad Universitaria, a university campus built in the sixties on the city’s northern waterfront; the second, in Dársena Norte, about ten kilometres south, is linked to a more recent intervention (‘Paseo del bajo’), close to downtown Buenos Aires, where the outcome has been a challenge to both environmental and active mobility conditions.

Both projects were designed to establish order and fluidity at the metropolitan macro-scale, but at the expense of the local micro-scale. The results, despite all good intentions, were a degraded quality of life and an urban fracture.

Some minor interventions in favour of active mobility could turn that tide. Ciudad Universitaria is a campus that today receives about forty thousand students on a typical working day. It was initially built as a series of pavilions, isolated from the city. There is quality in the architecture and solidity in the construction, which, after more than fifty years, has withstood endless use by generations of students and teachers. Life there is enriched by open-door sports facilities and a nature reserve on the outskirts of the campus. However, there are no actual streets, the city is on the other side of a barrier of motorways, and the railway is sandwiched between the two directions of the high-speed road. This situation allows little room for diverse spatial experiences; the campus is a monofunctional space in a world unto itself.

However, not everything is neatly controlled. The growth of parking and the way cars arrive have been superimposed on the site, struggling for space and occupying large surfaces that could be richer and healthier. There is some public transportation by bus, but it is not that abundant, and it lacks close and appropriate intermodal connections. More critically, access by foot or bike takes great effort. Not only are distances too long, but they are also dangerous. A better connection between the city and Ciudad Universitaria is needed to create a positive tension between the buildings, the infrastructure, and their immediate green surroundings.

In the second case, in the late 2010s, Dársena Norte, a newly built trench for a waterfront motorway, was supposed to liberate access to the river and the Puerto Madero area, creating a walkable public space and opening up a waterfront view from the city. That is why it was ambitiously called a ‘paseo,’ or promenade. One of the project’s goals was to offer an underground bypass for trucks and long-distance buses that used to create congestion, liberating space on the surface and creating a parallel boulevard for cars, bikes, and pedestrians. However, particularly at its northern and southern ends, it is very harsh for pedestrians; it breaks positive interaction between the city, the riverfront, and its ecological system, not only in physical accessibility but also in the visual relationship and the resulting landscape. The outcome is, therefore, risky, polluting, and illegible.

An infrastructure not conceived for pedestrians nor for contact with the river, despite an expensive capital investment for burying a motorway.

Carefully planned high-speed roads spoil neighbourhood livability. They prioritize passing cars and motorized vehicles, sometimes with great distances between intersections, which forces pedestrians to walk long journeys to reach close destinations, including tourist and recreational attractions, with a particular impact on women, children, and the elderly.

In a counterintuitive way, some of these interventions are recent, despite all the accumulated evidence about the results of these kinds of projects.

Rigidly ordered urbanism, carefully planned for traffic flows, can lead to homogeneity, lack of spontaneity, and large-scale interventions that stifle the potential for more organic growth.

While the damage is already done in both cases, it’s important to reflect on what could be done differently. Within the situation’s complexity, new alternative interventions could emerge. The reductionist idea of the urbanism of order and the linear thinking that defines its priorities have to be called into question. The case for ‘orderly’ urbanism leans on technical efficiency as the prime goal. However, the positive aspects of greater spontaneity and diversity of situations and priorities, although appearing ‘messy,’ can have their inherent order. Putting people at the centre – the mash-up of their daily rhythm of life, access to the river, inclusivity, accessibility, population diversity, gender, age, income, environmental quality, and democratic public space – is what truly brings cities to life.

An example is a city with slower road speeds, shorter blocks, more frequent intersections, and diverse building uses, activities, typologies, people, ages, genders, and interactions between mineral and vegetal landscapes. This kind of city can only be built through time. Many Buenos Aires neighbourhoods, as in other cities, have different combinations of those qualities. However, there is still a tension between everyday life and a predetermined structured grid, between flexibility of uses and the need for mobility infrastructure.

This tension also applies to social housing. There are large-scale projects where it is difficult to accommodate various social needs. In more informal, unplanned settlements, it is challenging to intervene with new roads and passages that shorten walking distances and improve public safety.

Latin American cities have also been associated with negative connotations of messy and disorderly urbanism. Anticipating urban growth and its consequences often requires more creative solutions that can be more expensive in the short term but more efficient in the long term. The seeming disorder can, however, generate solutions using co-operative action, such as informal shelters, shared transportation, and solidarity efforts in housing and infrastructure.

High-speed roads, carefully planned, are hurting existing thriving neighbourhoods with high ratios of women, children, and the elderly. The orderly designs based on sophisticated traffic engineering often result in unsafe, polluting, and chaotic environments. Large-scale commercial developments can offer a sense of order, but they don’t offer the livability and inclusiveness of small retail, scattered shops for pedestrians and users of public transportation.

Livable, democratic, environmentally friendly, and inclusive cities might seem messier. Of course, it doesn’t mean all urban mess is good, nor is every attempt at articulating actions in time and space necessarily bad. There is hope. A positive tension between both extremes can be achieved, offering a promising path forward. Consider the example of birds travelling together, each at its own rhythm, yet all harmoniously combined in a single movement, as evoked by Jorge Almazán in his research about Tokyo, looking at the connection of ground floors with the street and the public sidewalk, where the boundary between public and private space is blurred. This balance, this intertwining, is what we can strive for in our urban design.

Painting the Town

Text: Dylan Reid and Leslie Woo Photos: Matthew Blackett, Leslie Woo, and Dylan Reid

No one knows why or even who in the São Paulo neighbourhood of Vila Madalena, a ‘boêmio’ (bohemian) stronghold since the early 1970s, decided which wall or which street, or why it should be named after Dc Comics’ Batman. But in the 1980s, one mysterious insubordinate act was followed by many more, committed by local artists and students from the University of São Paulo and the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo.

Today, Beco de Batman (Batman’s Alley) is a colourful tourist attraction, two or three city blocks long, blanketed with imagery. It is the feature attraction on any guided tour of the city’s street art. You can learn about the artists – who are no longer anonymous. Some are actually well established, like Speto, who not only has an unofficial ‘quasi-dedicated’ residency at Beco de Batman but also an online store where you can purchase Speto-inspired jewellery and T-shirts. You can even co-brand Speto art with your organization. Beco de Batman has become an economic force.

Graffiti has historically been a way for marginalized people to anonymously communicate their messages, often with an aim to subvert power. Its origins lie outside the system. But, as in many cases, the powerful system then consumes it. The surface appeal can remain, but is the voice of the art stifled?

Paul Cesar Silva, or Speto, infuses folk art and eye details into his graffiti (São Paolo, Brazil, 2018).

Speto’s work in Beco de Batman (São Paolo, Brazil, 2018).

Graffiti raises questions that go to the heart of many of the issues around messy urbanism. Is it ugly or creative? Does it bring disruption or diversity? Should it be left to emerge from below or be managed from above? Is it permanent or ephemeral? Does it benefit communities or just individuals? Does it create opportunity or discomfort? Are there limits around it and, if so, can they be effective?

Artist Paulo-Ito’s themes expose how hypocrisy and deception serve political and corporate agendas (São Paolo, Brazil. 2018).

Graffiti and street art are age-old, perhaps instinctive, drives. It’s as if humans cannot see a blank surface without wanting to make their mark on it. Some of the very first art we know of was paintings on cave walls. The eruption of Mount Vesuvius preserved endless graffiti scratched onto the walls of Pompeii, much of it in familiar themes – names, dick pics, cool figures (gladiators, animals, ships), love notes. It is a timeless and international language. Fighting graffiti is like trying to stop the tide.

Tags – the most basic form of modern graffiti, signature signs sprayed simply on available public surfaces – are considered ugly by many people. Little art is involved, and tags disfigure a wall. Sometimes they take the form of actively offensive graphics. Whether they’re on private or public property, the property’s owners would consider them vandalism, an unwanted intrusion onto their space.

Yet even tags have meaning. They are assertions of individuality, often by people who are marginalized. Collectively, as an accumulation of individual acts, they make a statement about blank and neglected spaces in a city, drawing attention to and populating these spaces. The tags become an argument against emptiness and erasure.

More elaborate signature styles of graffiti, meanwhile, become interventions and art, a statement not just of presence and identity but of ambition and talent.

A store owner has written ‘No graffiti’ notices on their wall, and beside them graffiti artists have written tiny signatures (right).

Even when it’s not based on signatures, street art is still an individual expression that rebels against blankness, forcing variety on the city. Sometimes a particular location becomes a nexus for these displays, as in São Paulo’s Beco de Batman or Toronto’s Graffiti Alley – three blocks behind a downtown main street, whose content evolves constantly and features some of the city’s best street artists. Such locations may emerge organically, but even while remaining unofficial become a destination in the city. They may develop their own unspoken norms, and even conflicts, between artists, and can help launch full-blown artistic careers. Their fame may eventually gain them a measure of official toleration. (Graffiti Alley became recognized by Toronto as a place of ‘municipal significance’ while remaining independently run.)

Toronto laneway graffiti.

But street art can appear anywhere a blank surface offers itself, integrating with whatever idiosyncratic canvas it finds. It can range from simple stencils to elaborate, storeys-high masterpieces. The art may be pretty or disturbing; it may make a statement or just a joke. It’s up to the artist.

Cities have tried to control graffiti – to wash it off, erase it, catch the taggers. But it is impossible to monitor every surface in the city at all hours of the day and night. Many cities have begun instead to create official street art programs. They do so in response to tagging – the idea is, if there is good art by a respected artist on a surface, it will be less likely to be tagged. In a sense, these programs mark the triumph of one of the unspoken arguments of tagging – that a blank surface is dull, deadening, an abomination. Tagging has driven cities to accept street art.

These programs, though generally popular, can be controversial. They seek to erase the individuality of tagging by marginalized communities, but they provide space for the individual expressions of artists, often also from marginalized communities. They are necessarily more anodyne than private street art – but not all art is political or provocative, and there are still spaces for private expression. They constrain artists but also pay them and make it possible to earn a living through art. But official street art can become grotesque when it tries to paint over an unpleasant reality or deliver simplistic propaganda.

Street art does not concern just the municipal government, but also the private property owners on whose walls it is most often painted. If unwanted, the art can require a considerable expense to remove. But as street art has become more accepted – as the mainstream has moved toward street art, even as street art has become mainstream – private individuals and companies, and neighbourhood organizations, have also started to commission it, whether for their garage doors, their infrastructure, or the walls of commercial buildings. Official and private patronage has enabled street artists like Toronto’s Elicser Elliott to build a career through their art, but it does not prevent them from also expressing their art unofficially in other spaces.

Whether official, privately commissioned, or unofficial, street art becomes the ornamentation of a city, a locus of visual interest and engagement. Even when authorized, it is messy – Modernist visions of clean, technological urbanity did not include random, inconsistent paintings on every surface. Each piece is of a different style and subject (and perhaps quality). Together they create a visual clutter, an endless array of varied images covering walls, infrastructure, utility boxes, garage doors, roads, and sidewalks that some may find irritating, but others find delightful. And they are necessarily ephemeral – the image will eventually fade, or be defaced, or painted over, or cleaned off, or replaced by a new piece of street art. No volcano will intervene to give them permanent life as it did in Pompeii.

In 2018, the City of Toronto put jersey barriers on the plaza in front of the central train station for pedestrian safety. In 2024, when the City painted ‘Welcome’ messages on them, they were widely derided as ‘welcome barriers.’

Mural by Elicser Elliott.

Whatever its source, street art is an upwelling of artistry, identity, and energy from the denizens of the city. It is a sign that creativity is thriving and will not be suppressed. It reminds us that a creative city is a messy city.

Tarik Klein is a lesser known artist using surreal Escher-esque combinations (São Paolo, Brazil, 2018).

Urban Systems

Banquets and Belonging

Sneha Mandhan

I remember feeling disoriented. Leaving behind the dense downtown where my sister lived and driving west, the tall buildings slowly giving way to wide roads. The trees disappearing and warehouses starting to dot the landscape. I wondered if we were lost.

But then, nestled between a bunch of dull, industrial-looking buildings, the sangeet venue: Dreams Convention Centre. I would have completely missed it if our taxi driver hadn’t stopped right in front and told us that we had arrived.

Stepping out of the car tentatively, I remember feeling very out of place in that dusty parking lot in my lehenga – the off-white one made from my favourite of mumma’s old sarees, with the gold lace trim, the blue blouse and the red dupatta – and my only pair of heels. I always hated wearing heels.

Walking through those unassuming glass and metal frame doors into the shiny lobby.

A sign saying ‘Welcome to Shilpa and Manny’s Sangeet’ directing us to the hall on the left. Placed on a table at the entrance alongside a basket filled with plastic bangles in many colours and sizes, some with glitter that came off on your hands when you touched them. The basket surrounded by small bags made of shiny fabric – the kind that look so pretty but are surprisingly coarse to the touch. Auspicious gifts for the women and girls to take home at the end of the event – another tradition I didn’t know the meaning behind.

Two women applying mehndi on the hands of guests at tables toward the back of the hall. Girls lined up with excitement to get floral and paisley patterns drawn on their hands in the brownish-green paste that would peel off, leaving orange skin behind.

The smell of mehndi.

Nostalgia.

Caterers setting up snacks on the buffet tables on the other side – samosas, chutneys, pakoras. My tummy rumbling from the smell of freshly fried potatoes and freshly made chaat.

The Dj playing those quintessential sangeet songs – first Punjabi, then Bollywood, mixing in some English pop. The same at every sangeet, whether in Toronto or Delhi.

The photographer and videographer running around trying to capture the moments the guests arrive. The happiness and familiarity of being among family and friends.

The stage – adorned in flowy pinks, blues, golds. Colourful, embroidered fabric umbrellas hung upside down above the stage. Strings of marigold flowers – reminiscent of weddings back home. An ornamental two-person swing waiting for the happy couple.

My parents – elated and proud. Playing the role of the hosts. Parents of the bride.

The bride and groom arriving – dancing – flower petals being thrown as blessings.

I remember thinking, This feels like home.

My first experience in a banquet hall in the Greater Toronto Area (Gta) was in October 2016 – well before I lived here – to celebrate a pre-wedding event called the sangeet (the musical evening), for my sister and brother-in-law’s upcoming wedding.

Then, I had no idea that a few years later I would be living in Toronto as a PhD student and returning to these very spaces as the subject of my research. This research began in the summer of 2021, in the midst of a global pandemic, as a result of a series of phone conversations I had with first- and second-generation immigrants and members of the South Asian diaspora in the Gta.

I vividly remember those phone conversations because after banquet halls came up a few times, I went down a rabbit hole trying to find any documentation or research on these spaces. As a South Asian immigrant myself, I had been to so many celebrations and events in banquet halls all over the world – it seemed to be such a shared experience – so I was fairly surprised when very little came up in the search. Since then, every time I have spoken about my research, whether at academic conferences, in classes, or with friends, colleagues, and acquaintances, the predominant response has been ‘Oh, I had never thought about it that way, but it makes so much sense!’ Generally, among most ethnocultural communities there is an understanding that these spaces are super-important and very heavily used, but (to my knowledge) there is no existing documentation around how these spaces operate and are used, the role they play in the cultural lives of many different ethnocultural communities, and the many ways in which they are falling through the cracks and being invisibilized in municipal planning practice.

In urban cores, where land prices are soaring and space comes at a premium, affordable event halls for celebration are difficult to find. Rental event spaces in urban cores are often located in expensive hotels, restaurants, and theatres, making them difficult to afford for many. Banquet halls and convention centres, which are often located on the urban periphery, provide some of the only affordable space for communities to gather and celebrate. They offer culturally appropriate services to ensure that their users feel safe and welcomed in the space. They host a wide range of events that go beyond just ethnocultural celebrations – from high school graduations and proms, to weddings and baby showers, to trade conferences. Besides hosting events, these places support a whole ecosystem of cultural services – Djs, decor companies, photographers and videographers, caterers – and many cultural workers and ethnic entrepreneurs. However, despite their importance as sites of cultural celebration, urban planning scholarship and practice have not paid these spaces much attention.

In the Gta, most such event spaces are located within zones called ‘areas of employment’ in provincial planning policies. These zones permit primarily industrial and commercial uses and thus offer space for relatively large and affordable properties for development. However, recently, regulations around employment areas have been changing to disallow new event spaces in these zones. These event spaces are not understood to be culturally important and are often not included in any cultural or heritage space inventories. They also do not qualify for any financial or other support from municipalities, despite being critical cultural infrastructure for communities.

Conversations around the preservation of such spaces are especially pertinent in the context of multicultural cities with growing ethnocultural diversity, such as Toronto and its neighbouring cities of Brampton and Mississauga. Within these contexts, heritage and cultural planning practices need to be questioned in order to understand how they are or are not accommodating the ethnocultural practices of their local residents.

In the summer of 2022, I spent a lot of time taking Go buses to dusty bus stops in areas full of large, flat-roofed, one- to two-storeyed, predominantly concrete buildings surrounded by baking parking lots. Most of the banquet halls I visited were housed in either smaller, repurposed industrial buildings or newer, larger, purpose-built venues with a few architectural elements that spoke to their use as event spaces. For all of them, though, the moment you walked through the double doors, you could instantly tell that you had entered a space of celebration and community – shiny floors, ornate bannisters, delicately carved wooden doors, elaborate chandeliers, and patterned carpeting.

I met Osai, an Afghani woman, and Raghib, her husband, who run Sagan Banquet Hall and were in the midst of prep for a Muslim Pakistani wedding reception, on a Tuesday evening. The business is owned by Osai’s in-laws – a Pakistani family who also owns the Shaheen Food Centre, which has been operating for over two decades and is well-known in the Gta’s South Asian community for its food products. Osai and Raghib got married at that very hall in 2014, under its previous ownership – a Gujarati couple who had designed the space with care, including importing delicately carved wooden doors from India with the Hindu deity Ganesha depicted on them.

Charanjeet, who goes by Channi, is Punjabi and has lived in the Greater Toronto Area since 1975. When he moved here, he was in the performing arts business, bringing stage shows and artists from India, Pakistan, and England to the Gta. At the same time, his brother-inlaw Laddi was DJing at various venues across the city. Both of them, in their work, noted a gap in the industry – there weren’t enough event spaces. They identified it as a viable business option and opened their first banquet centre – International Banquet Hall – in Mississauga in 1990. Since then, they have built, opened, operated, and sold several banquet halls in the Gta under the banner of Chandni, which has become a household name among the Gta’s South Asian community.

Pavi is very well-known in the event space business community. Almost every banquet hall owner I spoke with recommended I reach out to him. He was pivotal in organizing and advocating for rent and mortgage relief for event spaces from the provincial government during the pandemic, when these spaces were required to close or operate at 25 per cent capacity. Pavi is one of the three owners and the operator of Pearl Banquet and Convention Centre in Mississauga.

While a large proportion of the clients for all of these halls are South Asian, they cater to a wide variety of audiences, hosting events for the Eritrean, Guyanese, Trinidadian, Filipino, and Nigerian communities, among others. Pavi highlighted how a lot of the weddings they now host are multiracial and multi-ethnic. Their popularity is evident if you look at their event calendars – most of the spaces I visited were booked up for weekends for the next two years, with four to twelve events per week. Their summers were especially busy.

Those who own and run these spaces also hold a lot of deep cultural knowledge about the event-based practices of various subcultural groups they serve. For example, Osai shared with me how, for their Muslim clientele, they need to make sure to serve halal meat, provide options for separate spaces for men and women, and keep track of daily prayer times and lay out prayer mats (which they have in-house) during those times. For their Jain clientele, they need to ensure that the food does not contain any onion or garlic. A lot of their Punjabi clients drink tea (chai) with their appetizers, and many of their Gujarati clients have their dessert at the same time as dinner. If they are hosting a morning Hindu wedding, they typically put out a separate table for the Ganesha deity statue at the entrance to the hall so guests can get blessings as they walk in. Raghib, who is responsible for meeting and liaising with clients, often speaks with clients in Hindi or Urdu. Through language, clients gain a sense of ‘familiarity’ – it gives them an ‘I’m home’ kind of feel.

These halls are well-established among local communities. They have strong intergenerational connections, with repeat clients who come seeking familiarity in the space where their parents married or where they had their high school prom. According to Channi, they’ve been in the industry for thirty-two years and have cultivated a ‘good name in the market.’ When asked for the story behind the name ‘Chandni,’ Channi mentions how, when they were opening one of their banquet halls, they asked a host on the Rangla Punjab radio show to ask listeners for feedback on the name Chandni. Many callers chimed in in support of the name, which means moonlight.

Despite their popularity and cultural importance, these spaces faced severe financial pressures due to the pandemic, with several of them permanently closing their doors. They didn’t qualify for much relief or support from local municipalities and only began to receive provincially-backed rent and mortgage relief in January 2021, almost nine months after lockdowns.

A cursory search for event venues in the Greater Toronto Area yields lists of historic buildings or museums (many of which are attached to or owned by public institutions like universities or municipalities), hotels, outdoor venues (including golf clubs), warehouse spaces, banquet halls, and restaurants. Online searches of these spaces reveal barriers related to access, including higher price points, smaller capacities, and limited cuisine options. Many condominium buildings also have party rooms that are available for rent at affordable prices. However, these are accessible only to those who live and own condominiums in these buildings, and are also often limited in capacity.

Within this context, the popularity of banquet halls and convention centres does not come as a surprise. Their location in zones designated for industrial and commercial uses allows for affordability, larger spaces, and the provision of culturally responsive services by ethnic entrepreneurs. For all that, the lack of recognition and support for these spaces among municipalities did come as a surprise to me. I spent several months speaking to municipal planners working in heritage planning, cultural planning/services, and land-use and zoning planning to understand how they conceptualized these spaces.

Heritage Planning

Heritage has many different definitions, but generally it refers to anything that is an important part of the cultural lives of communities and should be protected for future generations. Often, as in the case of Ontario, institutional regulations and guidelines around heritage are attached to the protection of the tangible – things that can be touched and felt – such as artifacts and buildings. However, this definition of heritage is very limiting because it disregards the intangible heritage – things like expressions, skills, stories, crafts, traditions, rituals, and so on – that are critical to the culture of communities but are not always tied to an object that can be preserved. Because such heritage cannot always be measured and documented in more traditional, quantitative ways, most planning systems do not have defensible means to protect places unless their materiality – the building itself – is considered to have heritage value. There is also often a lack of understanding of the traditional knowledge that informs the intangible values related to the physical spaces in a city, and this lack of understanding can lead to a lack of protection and the gradual loss of the spaces that are important to the lives of local communities.

Given that many of the banquet halls in the Gta are located within repurposed industrial or commercial buildings, it is really tough to make an argument, based on current Ontario regulations, that those buildings should be preserved. There is no tangible way for municipalities to designate and protect the cultural use of spaces without protecting the building that that use is housed within. However, in this case, the buildings themselves are banal and have minimal aesthetic value – it is the cultural uses they support that need to be protected from displacement. In Ontario, many culturally important buildings have been lost due to these restrictive understandings of heritage, and a commemorative plaque has been put up in their place. For places like banquet halls, commemoration cannot be a solution – these spaces need to continue to exist, though not necessarily in their current form, for future generations to be able to pass on their rituals and traditions.

For a planning standpoint, the first step is to identify the intangible cultural heritage value that these spaces carry and map ways in which they can be supported by municipalities. This support requires some comprehensive rethinking of heritage policies and procedures at the provincial and municipal levels.

Cultural Planning

Cultural planning broadly consists of a wide array of strategies, including the incorporation of cultural resources into spatial planning practices, supporting and planning for creative industries for economic development goals, branding and marketing of cultural spaces and identities for tourism, using cultural events and facilities as the basis for urban revitalization efforts, and using cultural initiatives for inter-urban competitiveness. A lot of cultural planning efforts began with an emphasis on preserving a very narrow definition of culture – primarily focusing on the high arts tradition and representative spaces and artifacts, such as museums, art galleries, and public sculptures. Since the 2000s, popular discourse around cultural planning has shifted to discussions around the creative class and the creative city. This shift has been accompanied by increased consumption by urban populations, often of culture-based products and spaces, leading to investment in facilities such as festival venues, entertainment and financial districts, sporting venues, and arts-based spaces.

Planners have since identified that cultural planning needs to encompass a much wider definition of culture, but the operationalization of a broader definition has been limited. In Ontario, municipalities treat cultural planning as an activity geared toward economic development, place branding, and the creation of cultural tourist destinations. Most municipalities incorporate culture into their planning practice through separate master plans or strategic documents often based on limiting definitions of culture. Cultural planning or services divisions engage with development, zoning, and land-use planners only on an ad hoc, project-specific basis. However, culture is deeply embedded in the everyday lives of residents, shaping the ways in which people interpret, react to, and interact with spaces. Culture impacts how people live, shop, work, and visit places. There needs to be a shift in planning practice to incorporate both civic and ethnic culture as a layer into all the work that planners do.

Conventional planning approaches also emphasize the economic values of culture without measuring or recognizing the social benefits. They often engage with local communities on a project-specific basis, at the cost of recognizing cultural assets that are important to the everyday lives of local communities.

Banquet halls have structurally been left out of municipal cultural planning conversations. Despite being spaces that support an entire ecosystem of cultural workers, they are most often not recognized by municipalities in their cultural maps and inventories, nor are they eligible for any financial support. Without a deeper engagement with ethnic and civic culture, spaces like banquet halls and convention centres will continue to be treated purely as privately owned sites of assembly. Given the real estate market and shifting regulations around employment lands, and the financial implications of those regulations, many of these event spaces may cease to exist.

Conclusion

‘Looking at the ordinary in places where it takes unaccustomed forms brings out not, as has so often been claimed, the arbitrariness of human behavior … but the degree to which its meaning varies according to the pattern of life by which it is informed. Understanding a people’s culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity.’

– Clifford Geertz, ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’

Culture is ‘the informal logic of actual life’ that informs behaviour, writes anthropologist Clifford Geertz in his seminal essay ‘Thick Description.’ No two people have the same culture. Based on lived experience, choice, the colour of their skin, where their ancestors have migrated from, and so many other factors, everyone absorbs, adapts, and lives culture differently. Thus, it is inherently messy. It resists categorization and definition. It often becomes the reason why people are different from each other. It does not like to be put into boxes or buckets or siloes. Culture is purely experiential, and words often fall short in expressing it. Because of this messiness and abstractness, planners struggle with planning for and with culture.

Planners are tasked with influencing how development happens, where it goes, and how it relates to the urban fabric around it. Inherently, their profession is tied to the tangible – the built form. Tangible artifacts – private property lots, roads, infrastructure, and buildings – become the sole subject of study and analysis. However, people experience and value space not just based on how valuable a building is, but on how well the space within it serves their needs. It is often the seemingly run-down, aesthetically mundane buildings, such as stores in strip malls or banquet halls surrounded by parking lots, that provide communities with culturally vibrant gathering spaces that are an integral part of their cultures.

When I started doing this research, I had no idea what I would learn. The public discourse on banquet halls has been severely limited. But speak to anyone who has lived in the Gta for a few years, and they will tell you they have attended events in banquet halls located in industrial areas where a sea of asphalt surrounds boxy buildings. You would never know what goes on inside these spaces if you were to drive by them. As soon as you step inside one, it becomes immediately obvious how important they are. They allow people to participate in ritual and to pass on traditions to future generations, to gather and form community, to make memories, and to find employment and make a living. We need to pay attention to these sites of cultural infrastructure and create systems that support them so they can continue to exist as places for future generations to gather and celebrate.

Satisfying Our Thirst for Agency

Colin Ellard

I live in one half of the twin cities of Kitchener-Waterloo, in Canada. My home is on the Kitchener side, which, by reputation, is the grittier, historically industrial, working-class city. Though times have changed and much of our manufacturing industries have been replaced by financial, digital media, and health science industries, the ‘vibe’ of the streets still feels vaguely true to its earlier roots. Waterloo, to our north, is our more gentrified twin. It has two universities, lots of well-paid tech workers, high-value leafy inner suburbs, and a richer tax base. Yet, for as long as I’ve lived in the city, I’ve been fond of Kitchener’s sharp edges. It has taken me about three decades as an environmental psychologist to understand why this is, but I think I may have begun to figure out certain things about how cities work.

On my daily walk through the city, I begin on the Kitchener side, near where I live. I pass a jumble of styles of architecture and a mish-mash of different types of commercial establishments, mostly little indie restaurants, bookstores, small retail, and of course the usual smattering of cannabis shops and tattoo parlours. From one day to the next, I’m never sure what will be happening on the street, which colourful street characters will be holding court, what new patterns will emerge from the buzz. It keeps my nervous system alert and active, not only because I have to be mindful of my surroundings and ready to modify my route at a moment’s notice but also because there’s so much to interest me. Eventually, I find myself in neighbouring Waterloo, or ‘uptown’ as it’s known in the vernacular. Uptown is not at all unpleasant, but it’s more characterized by upscale establishments, tidy edges, clean sidewalks, and a good number of chain stores – intrinsically less interesting than the indies of Kitchener. Even the designs of the building facades seem more integrated, homogeneous, and somehow ‘safer.’ There are fewer occasions when I feel I have to spring into action, exert my own agency, than in the edgier Kitchener. It can be relaxing but also slightly soporific.

In my working life, I study the psychological impact of urban design. One aspect of this work has involved looking at building facades, the skins of the structures that form streetscapes. The most enduring finding, which holds true for every city I’ve studied, including sites in Canada, the United States, Europe, and South Asia, is that we are attracted to complexity in those facades. Though there may be exceptions (like the beautiful repeating rhythms of the facades in a Parisian boulevard, for example), we don’t usually like to be surrounded by uninterrupted, homogeneous pieces of wall. We like streets that vary in appearance, design, and, especially, permeability – that quality of a streetscape that permits easy movement of pedestrians from the inside to the outside and back again. We like streets that provide us with rich layers of information. Not only do we hurry past blank facades, but some of my studies have even shown that this preference can be measured physiologically: we respond to favoured designs with our nervous systems, which thrive or wither according to how well they are nurtured by our surroundings. It isn’t difficult to relate this fundamental truth about cities to the long history of research on boredom and arousal. Noted psychologist Daniel Berlyne, who literally wrote the book (several of them, in fact) on arousal and curiosity, argued that our thirst for information runs as deep in us as our need for food, water, and sex. That deep-tissue need, he argued, goes far to explain our environmental preferences.

In another branch of my research, I study human psychological responses to nature. It’s one of the oldest bread-and-butter findings in environmental psychology that there is something slightly ineffable about scenes of nature that attract us. An enormous body of research suggests that nature exposure, even as modest as a view out a window or a nice landscape painting, can have a positive effect on our mood and can even change the way our minds work. After a few minutes, we pay attention to the world in a different way. One famous study even showed that seeing nature helps us heal from surgery, and it has been the inspiration for much design thinking in health care settings.

I raise this experience of nature here because I think there is a connection between our attraction to complexity in the urban realm and our – presumably evolved – attraction to nature. In both cases, one could suggest that the real attraction is to a sense of vitality. The late architectural theorist Christopher Alexander had a lifetime obsession with our attraction to life in all settings. Though we might sometimes struggle to define what life is in a setting, we know it when we see it, and we like to see it. As the science has now also begun to suggest, our in-built radar detectors for life, presumably evolved to help attract us to bounty in the landscape, also respond to the deep mathematical properties of patterns – fractals – wherever they might be found in the world, nature or not. Though the details are far from settled, it does seem possible that there is a grand view of our relationships with settings that places our attraction to vitality, in all its many forms, in the very centre of things.

But what does this have to do with mess?

Because of Alexander’s interest in designing interactive and responsive architecture, I once spent many hours with a student brainstorming questions about perceptions of vitality. When looking at a simple display, for example, how does a human observer decide that they see life? There is a great deal of research in cognitive psychology devoted to this question, but we began by thinking about a common experience. Imagine standing on a bridge, looking down into the water of a babbling stream. In the water, an object moves. It might be a leaf caught on the bottom of the stream, moving to and fro with the eddying currents. But it might also be a fish. How do we decide? My student and I concluded that the answer lies in our ability to discern agency. A leaf’s movements would simply follow the laws of physics in turbulent waters – far from simple but, with a bit of observation, inherently tractable, we thought. A fish would defy those laws in some way, moving in directions counter to the local turbulence. In those moments, we would see the manifestation of life. Leaving aside complicated philosophical discussions of free will and autonomy, we thought we had a reasonable, seat-of-the-pants beginning for a method for discerning life. If we were on the right track, the same kinds of patterns that might help us to discern life in a stream – by diagnosing agency – might be at the root of our attraction to vitality. Put more bluntly, we are attracted to vitality because it signals the exertion of agency.

Making a radical move from fishy life in a stream to human life in cities, I wonder whether there might be a connection worth making. Does vitality, however we might find it, signal to us the possibilities for agency? When we see mess or ‘disorder’ in an urban environment, is it possible that what we discern is the potential for us to exert our own will on our surroundings? And is that where the pleasure and attraction of messy complexity comes from?

In my field studies, I often try to measure physiological arousal – that is, the state of a human nervous system that suggests they are primed for alertness and action (often referred to as a ‘fight-or-flight response,’ though most of our time is spent neither fighting nor fleeing). It’s easily possible to measure this with simple bodily sensors that allow us to read human arousal on the fly. Some years ago, slightly on a lark, I set out from a lab in Mumbai, where I had been working on psychogeographic adventures, to measure the arousal levels of a lab mate while she negotiated one of the most complicated pedestrian settings in the city – the Kala Nagar traffic junction. Our most interesting observation was that when my friend attempted to cross this fearsome intersection, her level of arousal rose precipitously as she approached the crossing, but then fell sharply just as she stepped into the road.

One might have thought the increase in arousal was caused by the stress of facing danger, but if so, why did the level drop when she stepped into the actual danger of the intersection? In the business of science, we don’t often pay much heed to single case studies like this one, so I’m not making any bold claims based on this one trip across the road, but my speculative self wonders about that single observation. My fever dream is that the reason for the increase in arousal as she approached the corner was that she saw before her a multitude of possible next actions. She experienced many degrees of freedom. Then, as her plan locked in, freedoms melted into a plan for action. Her choices were behind her. In other words, I believe the readings on our meters were telling us that my friend was responding to the feeling of agency as she found a way to cross the busy road.

I admit that it’s a long leap from a single act of pedestrian crossing to an argument about complexity, mess, and agency, but I’m emboldened by the ideas of other thinkers that I see as pointing in a similar direction.

Jane Jacobs, in a speech that contributes the title to a beautiful little volume of her writings, talked about what she called ‘vital little plans.’ The theme of her speech, in accord with the general argument that runs through much of her work, was that it was better to eschew ‘big planning’ principles in favour of the operation of many small plans born at the grassroots level. This kind of planning, she said, was more likely to give rise to thriving, organic urban settings. When small plans are at work, we can read the results clearly in the landscape. Every building is likely to be distinct, every facade shows the operation of human agency, and there is life everywhere. That’s messy. Jacobs’s argument seems a direct endorsement that a level of disorder, in contrast to overarching monolithic organization from above, reveals the operation of many hands.

In his book Building and Dwelling, sociologist Richard Sennett speaks of the contrast between the ville and the cité. The ville is the built structure. The cité is the way that life unfolds in the ville. The interaction between these two realms, Sennett argues, produces a kind of friction. But like Jacobs’s vitality, this friction is the very wellspring of agency. A simple example, though well-worn, is the desire line – the contrast between the intentions of the built design of a walkway (the ville) and the choices that citizens make in walking through the area (the cité). In a place without friction, where all is decided from above, where citizens have no latitude to forge their own path through the city, agency dies and a city becomes lifeless. Seen this way, messiness is the very soul of a vibrant, healthy urban landscape.

I began my research career as a neuroscientist, and I noticed early on, as have many others, that one of the driving forces of all animal behaviour is the search for novelty, the thirst for information. Even the simplest animals are driven to explore the new. So, in very broad terms, one could think of any kind of complexity – in space, pattern, texture, or any other feature of an environment – as a kind of invitation to explore. But why are animals driven to explore? In part, because opportunities for exploration can take place only in settings where there are choices – where animals can exert some form of agency.

As my work has evolved from studies of the behaviour of simple animals to the relationship between neuroscience and urban design, I have found that exactly the same kinds of principles apply. We humans are also attracted to complexity, probably for the same reasons. Where there is complexity, there are degrees of freedom, choices to be made, paths to select from. Great thinkers like Jacobs and Sennett might use a different kind of language to describe our affinity for settings that permit us some level of agency, but I think it’s really all connected.

At every level, from the intrinsic attraction to complexity that seems to be a universal feature of life, to the key observations of some of our greatest urbanists, the common thread is the line that runs directly from mess, disorder, unpredictability, and complexity to designs that satisfy a primal thirst for agency.

Industrial Land’s Secret Sauce

Karen Chapple

The University of California–Berkeley hall was packed with local officials and grad students eager to hear Bruce Katz, vice-president of the Brookings Institution, pitch his new book, The Metropolitan Revolution. Key to the revolution, he said, is the innovation district: ‘Innovation Districts cluster and connect leading edge anchor institutions and cutting-edge innovative firms with supporting and spinoff companies, business incubators, mixed-use housing, office and retail and 21st century amenities and transport.’ For instance, he continued, the 22@Barcelona mixed-use innovation district is redeveloping a 200-hectare industrial area as a cluster of media, medical technologies, information technology, energy, and design businesses, along with housing, retail, and parks.

A City of Oakland planner raised her hand. ‘You’ve described this innovation district in Barcelona that shifted zoning from industrial to mixed use. We’ve discussed that for West Oakland too – we have some similar businesses to Barcelona. But what we can’t figure out is what happens when the new businesses in It can pay more for rent and the existing manufacturers get pushed out? You can’t sustain the mix.’ Katz explained that Barcelona was a little different from the U.S. because of all the public funding available to finance infrastructure and development. But the question about industrial displacement and the impermanence of mixed use was just too tough to tackle.

Strong market regions around the world are losing the messy industrial land near the core to office, residential, and mixed-use development – often in the name of creating new innovation districts. The idea of cross-fertilization between sectors, as in Barcelona, is exciting and may well yield interesting new ideas. But most innovation doesn’t occur in cafés in expensive new mixed-use districts; the garage where Hewlett-Packard started is a much more accurate image of Silicon Valley. Innovation is not just about developing new ideas or scientific discoveries but also about introducing them into the marketplace or implementing them into production processes. It is thus highly experimental and variable, and benefits from low land costs and sites that permit different business configurations, but also proximity to inputs and markets. For businesses that are just starting up or expanding, redeveloped space in a branded mixed-use innovation district brings a premature formality. Thus, how can we preserve the existing messy but productive industrial spaces?

Even if the theories of regional and sustainable economic development suggest we should foster existing industrial businesses, why should we protect those in the region’s core? The line of argument typically put forward by chambers of commerce is that these businesses are mostly heavy manufacturers that have been leaving the city for decades anyway or distributors that are using the land inefficiently, mostly for parking. With resistance to infill development in urban neighbourhoods, and high land costs downtown, the industrial land near the core becomes the low-hanging fruit for developers.

Often, an odd growth-machine coalition in support of converting industrial land emerges, armed with ideas like innovation districts. This coalition might include not just the chamber and developers but also non-profit housing developers concerned about the need for affordable or workforce housing downtown, planners interested in more housing to achieve jobs/housing balance, politicians seeking fiscal revenue streams, environmental justice advocates concerned about pollution in high-density areas, and economists advocating export-based regional growth based on high-tech.

At the same time, a broad movement is supporting the preservation of industrial land in the urban core of regions in many North American cities. It includes organizations working to preserve and promote urban manufacturing as well as entrepreneurial city agencies. They share the recognition that industrial businesses support both the residential sector and other businesses, that they need to be located close to their customers downtown, and that the availability of affordable land is key to maintaining these businesses.

There are equity-related reasons to support industrial land as well, ranging from its positive fiscal impacts to the high-quality jobs it provides, often for local residents. Cities often turn to mixed-use (or now, innovation) districts as a compromise that will accommodate the different interests. But that diversity is not sustainable.

The Tension Between Mixed-Use and Industrial Land

In the industrial city, industrial land was typically located near the urban core, for easy transport of goods and access to labour. Over time, competing uses, like office and high-end residential, that could pay more for centrally located land, outbid industrial uses, and those businesses moved out. Still, many core industrial districts remained intact, particularly if they were located on less desirable land, next to railroad tracks or highways. By the 1970s, many of the industrial businesses had departed for the suburbs or overseas. Thus, when artists, young families, and, soon, investors began seeking out unique live-work spaces in non-residential areas, they quickly gravitated toward these deindustrialized zones. Their transition to mixed use was part of a larger trend.

Most credit Jane Jacobs with illustrating the value of mixing uses. Her critique of urban renewal contrasted single-use residential tower superblocks with the vibrancy of blocks containing a fine-grained mix of diverse uses. But most North American cities relied on an entrenched system of single-use zoning that would prove hard to modify. The 1916 zoning code in New York City had introduced the notion of the hierarchical zone – with housing at the top, then commercial, then industrial – and little or no mixing in order to protect higher uses. These reflected societal ideals of order and privacy, with homogeneous residential districts placed at a distance from the chaos of commercial development. Arguably, single-use districts subsequently shaped not only North American culture but also its construction industry, which separated into home builders, office developers, retail developers, and industrial developers. This, then, made it more expensive to construct developments that would mix uses.

By the 1980s, community acceptance of mixed use had grown, to the point where today a majority (53 per cent) of U.S. residents prefer to live close to restaurants, shops, and offices. From the 1980s to today, mixed use gradually became integrated into planning. Cities have modified zoning regulations to permit and intensify the mixture of uses – residential, commercial, open space, institutional, and, less frequently, industrial. New Urbanists, particularly the transit-oriented development advocates, are strong proponents of mixed use for sustainability reasons. Proponents of traditional neighbourhood design focus on its impacts on the quality of life, with the mixing of home and work in the dense and diverse European city as their model. But even planners who have embraced mixed use see challenges in including industrial businesses in the mix.

Despite the gradual institutionalization of mixed-use zoning codes, communities do not always embrace them. NIMBYism often occurs in response to attempts to mix use in residential areas by adding public facilities or high-density housing (or even parks!). The benefits of mixed-use communities are clearer for workers with high-consumption lifestyles than, say, families with children, which might benefit more from socially cohesive communities. Retail, restaurants, and nightlife can create impacts such as noise and trash that make life challenging for local residents. Even if community residents prefer mixed-use in principle, they have not yet proved willing to get out of their cars. As Jill Grant and Katherine Perrott point out, ‘The kinds of cultural changes necessary to save the café and transform the retail landscape of suburbia into an urban form require more than mixed-use policies can deliver.’

The greatest implementation challenges for both mixed-use developments and districts lie in the market. Although multiple examples of successful large-scale mixed-use developments now exist, they are still relatively high risk. As high vacancy rates of ground-floor retail attest, mixed-use requirements have led to an oversupply of retail space. Large chain stores and internet retail have absorbed much of the mom-and-pop market, and even if gentrifying neighbourhoods brings new markets for boutique small-format retail, the market is generally slow to respond to neighbourhood change. At the district scale, increasing the mix can paradoxically decrease diversity, particularly in formerly industrial areas: as residential and commercial uses paying higher rents move in, existing industrial users will gradually be displaced.

Industrial Districts: To Mix or Not to Mix

What type of district helps industrial users thrive? In principle, we might encourage zoning land to exclusively industrial use for two reasons. Hierarchical zoning, separating lower (agricultural, industrial) uses from higher (commercial, residential), prevents the impacts of production from affecting other, less noxious uses. Zoning can also help the market understand the land’s highest and best use, or the types of development that would be most appropriate (and able to pay rent) on the site.

The problem is that zoning designations often remain in place while the market shifts, and zoning can be very hard to change. Since it may appear to be obsolete, pressure builds on cities to revisit its designations. Across the U.S., over twenty municipalities and counties undertook studies of industrial land supply just in the early 2000s, typically in response to developer pressures to convert the land to residential, commercial, or mixed use. Debate about industrial strategy continues today, often at the regional scale – e.g., Metro Vancouver, the Puget Sound Regional Council, and the Province of Ontario. It is mostly the strong market regions that are re-evaluating how much industrial land they need.

Industrial areas contribute to the regional economy in multiple ways: as job and tax revenue generators; providers of supplies and services, such as back-office functions or automobile repair, to businesses and households; and reservoirs of low-cost space that can incubate start-up businesses. Land that generates employment, whether in industrial or commercial uses, tends to have net positive fiscal benefits. Many sites house large buildings with potentially flexible uses – not just production but also back-office functions, storage, loading, parking, and even research and development. They can also be subdivided when firms decrease in size. In contrast to more modern office buildings, this type of space offers firms the flexibility they seek in today’s economy, with the ability to shift between vertical and horizontal organization, and to easily add or shed employees.

More recently, advocates for the preservation of industrial land have argued that this land is most likely to support the coveted middle-skill jobs. Production, distribution, and repair businesses locate in many different types of buildings on industrial land and typically provide jobs that pay well over a living wage. The rise of sustainable and niche manufacturing has suggested the continued importance of industrial zoning in the core.

The location of production, distribution, and repair businesses within the region also has important implications for smart growth and regional sustainability. Locating last-mile logistics businesses in particular – e.g., wholesale distributors of goods to consumer homes – in the urban core helps ensure the efficient movement of goods. Displacing these firms from the core into peripheral areas would mean a significant increase in vehicle miles travelled from trucks.

However, critics continue to raise the issue of inefficiency, arguing that the benefits are not high enough to warrant the cost to the city of subsidizing the land. From their perspective, policies that slow the relocation of these businesses to more appropriate areas may actually impede regional economic growth. Moreover, rezoning to the highest and best use – often thought to be commercial office or apartment buildings – might yield higher returns in terms of business attraction and local tax revenues – with these higher-density uses more likely to be occupied by transit users. And in many cities, ‘industrial chic’ is valued for its potential to attract innovative entrepreneurs – the fabric of these new innovation districts of the ‘metropolitan revolution.’

Not surprisingly, council meetings over the rezoning of industrial land attract hundreds of stakeholders on both sides of the issue. The battle is playing out in New York City, Boston, San Francisco, Toronto, Chicago, Los Angeles, Denver, Baltimore, Minneapolis, Charlotte, Portland, Seattle, much of the D.C. metropolitan area, and many other smaller cities. How can we bolster the regional sustainability argument for preserving industrial land?

The Secret Sauce of Messy Industrial Land

Industrially zoned land comprises just a small share of many urban regions. But it plays an outsize role in the regional economy by providing flexibility – specifically, offering a reserve of relatively large sites that accommodate uses from storage to research and development. It allows firms to experiment, and to shift focus from production to distribution to R&D as need be. Once firms reach a certain size, they might move some operations: management can work downtown, and production can take place in another country. But most do not reach that size, and, in fact, most add and subtract jobs several times during their lifespan. These low-cost districts are indirectly supporting, not stunting, high-tech growth by providing this messy space. Meanwhile, the high-tech businesses can still locate in transit-friendly locations with the amenities that creative workers covet.

But many cities have opened up their industrial land to a variety of uses, including commercial and residential, risking unsustainable rent increases that will gradually displace industrial businesses. Some cities preserve industrial zones, but open them up to many types of industrial users; this typically occurs in cities seeking more economic development, like Oakland, California. In the face of competition for land from higher-rent-paying office uses, rents will escalate beyond the means of some of the firms that are contributing more jobs to the economy. Other areas are gradually eliminating special zones; for example, the Province of Ontario has proposed to eliminate its designation of provincially significant employment zones, due in part to housing market pressures.

Policy recommendations for the preservation of industrially zoned land generally follow three tactics: regulation, penalties, and incentives. Regulatory tools are the most powerful; they include restricting the types of uses that can locate within a zone, instituting criteria for land conversion, and rezoning land.

Policies that preserve industrial zoning are essentially exclusionary zoning: they prohibit higher uses, despite market interest. This approach has costs in that it may mean inefficient use of resources and a slowdown of the transition away from industrial uses. These policies may impact the local tax base in ways that are rarely made explicit. However, it may be appropriate to pursue exclusionary zoning under certain conditions, in particular (i) when the industrial district is economically viable, functioning as a business incubator or housing businesses linked to other local clusters; (ii) when there is a high level of structural unemployment; or (iii) negative externalities are an issue. Exclusionary zoning can not only keep rents low for businesses but also provide certainty to developers about the city’s intentions.

In practice, exclusionary zoning for industrial use has existed only in a few cities since the 1980s, due to fears that demand from commercial and residential uses was displacing viable industrial businesses. Some of these districts – called Planned Manufacturing Districts in Chicago, Industrial Protection Zones in San Francisco, and Industrial Business Zones in New York – permit the mixture of uses in the districts but limit land availability for non-industrial users.

Another zoning tool currently in vogue is form-based zoning. These codes regulate urban form rather than land use, detailing requirements for both buildings and the surrounding built environment. By controlling form rather than use, the zoning allows the market to select the optimal user for the space. However, very few cities have enacted form-based codes. And by lifting use restrictions, this form of zoning actually threatens industrial use: if a developer were to build an industrial-style building, it might attract higher-end users who appreciate the industrial chic – and can outbid true industrial users for the space.

Key among incentives for industrial land preservation is the industrial land trust or bank, an approach in which the public sector acquires industrially zoned land and leases it for qualifying uses; examples include the Marine Industrial Park in Boston, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and the Cleveland Industrial/Commercial Land Bank. Other specific incentives may include brownfield remediation or site assembly.

Industrial Land Preservation as a Regional Sustainability Strategy

Older industrial areas near the urban core are coveted by non-industrial users because of their proximity to the centre and their built fabric. The pressures to convert core industrial land occur because of higher land prices at the centre – a phenomenon that even occurs in ‘doughnut-hole’ metros like Detroit as they are hollowing out.

From a regional sustainability and equity perspective, there are several key reasons to preserve this land for industrial uses. Low-cost land permits firms to add jobs faster, and often the jobs are of higher quality, paying a living wage. Allowing industrial uses to locate near the core also reduces truck-related vehicle miles travelled.

What, then, of the innovation district? There is probably room for both – innovation uses and exclusively industrial uses – in many cities, as San Francisco has shown. Redeveloped areas of such innovation districts, preferably those nearer to transit, could house the creative high-end firms that comprise today’s urban innovators, using either form-based or permissive mixed-use zoning. If industrial users are displaced, developers can be required to replace the square footage. Messy low-cost land could be preserved in exclusionary industrial zones nearby.

Zoning, that much-maligned tool of planners, can make all this possible.

A longer version of this chapter was published in Planning Sustainable Cities and Regions: Towards More Equitable Development by Karen Chapple (Routledge, 2014).

Thinking Twice About Consultation

Lorne Cappe

My most memorable public meeting was one I wish I could forget. It was a warm spring evening in June 2002, and approximately 350 people filled the large meeting room at Fellowship Towers at 877 Yonge Street in Toronto. The purpose of the meeting was to solicit public feedback on the renovation of an existing seven-storey building in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood. Built as a hotel in 1975, it’s the kind of building that people often see in their daily lives but might not be able to place when asked. Owned by an offshore investor, the hotel was neglected, with fewer and fewer guests. The remaining tenants were largely people working in the sex trade or dealing drugs.

The late Jon Harstone, then the creative and shrewd executive director of St. Clare’s, a non-profit housing agency, saw an opportunity. At the time, hotels were allowed in residential and commercial areas. Harstone submitted an offer to the offshore company to purchase the building, with the intention of upgrading it and providing transitional housing for folks moving into permanent housing from shelters or the street. The proposal did not require any new zoning. The only change involved the demographic of the tenants.

When Annex residents found out, a huge neighbourhood outcry ensued, aimed at stopping the project. Many had common concerns about the people moving into supportive housing: safety, drug use, crime, loitering, health and safety concerns for their children. The Annex Ratepayers Association and local politicians hastily called a public meeting to put City staff and St. Clare’s on notice that this project was not going to happen on their watch.

As one of the City staff at the meeting, I had to appear before what appeared to be a neighbourhood jury. The participants were angry, and I was terrified. It was early days in my career promoting and helping to create affordable housing. Irate residents thought they had the right to decide whether ‘those people’ could move into their neighbourhood. Those of us supporting the project tried to explain that they and their children would be fine, that there was no evidence to show that well-run supportive housing creates safety issues, especially since social service staff would be on-site 24/7. Despite those assurances, my team and I were subject to intense rage, name-calling, screaming; someone spat at one of my colleagues. A few residents asked if there would be any Indigenous people moving into the building. We could have provided answers to all their questions, but given the upheaval in the room, we could not get a word in edgewise.

When the crowd recognized there was nothing they could do to stop the project since the building was zoned for housing, they became even angrier. Many participants even insisted that the new tenants must undergo frequent blood and urine tests to ensure they were not on drugs.

This reaction is not uncommon and demonstrated that we’d only heard from a segment of the Annex community. The residents who turned up that night were almost exclusively people who opposed the project. They did not reflect all voices in the community and pointed to a power struggle between those with the loudest voices and everyone else. Many Annex residents understood the need for this housing and realized that the potential future residents of the building were not able to advocate for themselves. Including all those dissenting voices at the meeting would not have been in the organizers’ interests. The attendees had been selected not to represent everyone, but rather those who felt threatened by this housing and wanted to stop it.

We left the stage knowing we had failed to provide information that may have helped the audience better understand the project. St. Clare’s was planning to provide on-site support services, overnight staff, physical and mental health supports, and programs to help tenants succeed in their future. In addition, a derelict building would be improved with the spending of millions of dollars for renewal. However, the residents who came out that evening weren’t interested in those details. Notwithstanding this outburst, the renovations began just seven months after the transaction closed, a staggeringly short period for a project like this. It ultimately went forward and continues to serve as a successful transitional home for many people.

As a student, educator, and practitioner of public engagement, I understand the importance of meaningful and representative consultation as a democratic necessity. People have the right and responsibility to provide input so municipal authorities, architects, urban designers, landscape architects, engineers, and planners hear and consider their concerns. This is not always an easy process, and it gets messy sometimes. Reaching out to all voices is challenging, but essential in ensuring that engagement is meaningful.

Yet should there be a limit on public engagement? When does consultation lead to exclusion? The Ontario Human Rights Code recognizes that controversy around the creation of new affordable housing continues to be one of the biggest barriers to building places for people to live. The Ohrc’s position speaks to the importance of building inclusive communities where everyone feels welcome. Neighbourhood groups, in turn, must be open to having a diversity of people living in their communities. The key takeaway from the Ohrc is that overcoming community barriers to affordable housing is required to prevent the violation of human rights.

Should we seek public input on who gets to live in a community? That act could be considered ‘people zoning,’ for which there is no legal or moral basis and which is indeed exclusionary. In the St. Clare’s example, a neighbourhood group called the meeting to stop specific people from moving into the community. When community consultation is used to exclude others, I believe we have to re-examine when and why we seek feedback. If an affordable housing proposal meets all the building and zoning requirements, there should be no further reason to engage the public.

Toronto’s housing crisis has hit everyone, not just marginalized people. Yet deeply affordable rentals are the hardest housing to find. There has to be a better way to ensure that all reasonable forms of affordable housing can be approved quickly, without confrontational community consultation.

Many housing non-profits are finding new ways of engaging local residents early in the planning process by providing people with information about the kind of housing being proposed. The purpose of this outreach is not to condone people zoning, but rather to prevent rumours and misinformation from taking root. This proactive approach is more about information-sharing rather than permission-seeking. St. Clare’s now has its offices in the Fellowship Towers (the scene of the unfortunate public meeting), and now the Annex Rate-payers are supportive of its work.

WoodGreen, a large non-profit housing provider, has successfully conducted this kind of engagement. During the early stages of their housing projects, they let neighbours know what they were proposing by knocking on doors, answering questions, and providing evidence that there is no reason to fear their future neighbours. They also spoke to local businesses about the problem of homelessness. Most reasonable people recognize the need to provide housing and understand the extent of problems associated with homelessness – among them the additional costs to our health care system, use of emergency rooms, policing, and the issues arising from vulnerable people living on the street or in the park encampments that sprang up during the Covid-19 pandemic and continue to be present in our cities. Thanks to WoodGreen’s communication strategy, residents understood these objectives, and many became champions of housing projects.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, municipalities and the federal government rented empty motel and hotel rooms as temporary housing for people who didn’t want to use shelters. This was never going to be a sustainable solution, and policy-makers developed an initiative to create new modular housing projects, which could be assembled quickly, on underused city sites.

One was a parking lot at 540 Cedarvale Avenue, in Toronto’s East York. From the start, the City was responsible for engaging the community and transforming the site into a fifty-nine-unit, three-storey modular affordable housing project. Area residents found out early on, due to rumours circulating in the community. Should they have been notified that a transitional housing complex was going up on this parking lot?

Once residents found out, many became extremely angry at their local councillor and City staff and sought to stop the development. I attended the virtual public meetings, and people were indeed angry about not being informed, about the loss of the parking lot, and about their new potential neighbours. They expressed their concerns about the safety of their children, crime, public drug use, and other ‘undesirable’ behaviours. The meetings were virtual, and some participants did not hesitate to say and write appalling comments in the chat.

Many people complained about the loss of their parking lot, describing it as a ‘community hub.’ The site is adjacent to a large ravine system and near an elementary school, daycare, community centre, hockey arena, and other community amenities. Was the parking lot really their community hub? What were the protests really about?

The parking lot was a pretext. In public engagements, people will often use excuses to support their positions instead of coming right out and saying they do not want low-income people to be their neighbours. I have seen other pretexts used to stop affordable housing, including the fear of increased parking and traffic, strain on local services, concentration of affordable housing, height and design of buildings, and many more.

Following that early chaotic response, the City selected WoodGreen to operate this building. The agency had a lot to overcome, but they understood the community reaction because they had seen it before. WoodGreen has a reputation for looking after vulnerable residents with supports on-site and nearby. Despite the difficult start to the community discussion, they began meetings with local residents, knocking on doors and explaining the benefits.

After sounding out the community, WoodGreen worked with the City to make physical improvements in the area, such as better park lighting across the street and around all community facilities. The City promised additional parking spaces to compensate for the lost lot, while WoodGreen circulated an Faq sheet with information about the building and the tenants.

All of these actions by WoodGreen and the City led to a smoother entry for the new residents. Indeed, many nearby residents provided gift boxes of household and personal items to welcome their new neighbours once the project had been completed.

While this ended well, could the area improvements promised by the City be considered a method to build buy-in to promote the housing for marginalized and vulnerable people to move into their neighbourhood? Is that appropriate? I’m not sure. However, WoodGreen was able to move beyond the lengthy process of angry meetings and delays. They found a much better way forward.

Generally, when a non-profit proposes affordable housing in a neighbourhood, they usually have to go through the same challenging approval-seeking process. It is often confrontational, expensive, and time-consuming, and forces housing providers to explain that human rights apply to everyone, not just the privileged.

Are there other solutions? Perhaps relaunching a new and improved city-wide education and communication campaign could help overcome this issue. Explaining the importance and benefits of building housing for everyone, everywhere – not just as a human rights issue, but one that speaks to the kind of society in which most of us want to live – could be beneficial. Such an initiative could demonstrate how more deeply affordable housing ensures that city parks are not full of encampments, that sidewalks do not become places to sleep, and that homeless people do not feel the need to use public transit to warm up or cool down. Such a campaign could show how health care costs (including mental health care) and emergency room visits rise when people live outdoors or in substandard housing. Most importantly, it could stress how housing provides people with a chance to stabilize their lives, heal, and become more productive citizens.

Fred Victor is a non-profit whose mission is ‘to improve the health, income and housing stability of people experiencing poverty and/or homelessness.’ According to its data, there are over twelve thousand people in Toronto experiencing homelessness on any given night. Shelters are overcapacity and challenging places to live. Affordable and transitional housing is an obvious benefit for people living in these conditions but also for society as a whole.

While I fundamentally believe there should be no public discussion about who will be housed in a neighbourhood, some engagement could help get housing built with less drama and costly delay. This form of engagement, at which WoodGreen excels, could take the form of information-sharing, but it should definitely not ask residents what they think about new potential neighbours.

Public engagement is an evolving field. It has changed from the early days in the 1960s, in which community groups sought to preserve historic buildings or stop expressways. But it evolved into a kind of formalized, one-size-fits-all method centred on municipally organized or statutory public meetings. Such sessions provided residents with information about new projects but did not necessarily solicit their feedback. In many cases, engagement meant hearing feedback from those with the loudest voices and did not provide the kind of input that design teams and City staff need to be successful at their work.

Over the past few years, we have seen the emergence of many excellent engagement methodologies that encourage more meaningful community involvement. Large-scale projects, such as the redevelopment of Toronto’s waterfront and the revitalization of Toronto Community Housing neighbourhoods such as Regent Park, Alexandra Park, and Lawrence Heights, have used methods to seek input from everyone. In these initiatives, engagement also entails capacity-building events early in the process, focused on large community meetings with food provided, as well as smaller facilitated focus groups, pop-up information kiosks, digital and online engagement platforms, community Bbqs, etc.

Every community needs an engagement plan that is specific to the characteristics of that area and its residents. Organizing one meeting on a specific evening does not necessarily create the conditions for meaningful engagement. Many residents work in the evenings, or are home with children. I’ve been involved with successful engagements in which a meeting was repeated several times to ensure that many more people have an opportunity to participate.

Community engagement done well is a fundamental democratic right for city residents. However, city-building projects often have messy approval processes that involve many actors and stakeholders. Inherent tensions and conflicting interests are a constant. How can we reconcile these tensions? We could begin from first principles: There is no justification for people zoning. Elected officials and city staff should not support events that attempt to prevent reasonable, affordable, and supportive housing projects. Approvals should be based on zoning, official plans, and municipal regulations that relate to built form and use. Lastly, affordable housing should be given priority and an expedited approval process with few obstacles.

Communities are complex and so is public engagement. But when it comes to housing in a high-cost city, we should always be looking for ways to minimize conflict and enhance cooperation.

A Lifeline at the Door

Dr. Eileen de Villa

Every morning, the city outside my office window at the Toronto Public Health building awakened in a symphony of honks, chatter, and the rhythmic thrum of construction. Tourists snapped selfies amidst street performers in Yonge–Dundas Square and students sprinted to class with backpacks bouncing, while office workers grabbed hurried coffees before diving into the day’s grind. But in the early hours of the morning when I would usually arrive at the office, before the city fully wakes, a different scene unfolded right outside our doors.

As I exited the subway and walked the block to the office, I could see small groups begin to gather. Some people were sitting in their usual spots asking for change, a few bundled in worn blankets carrying the chill of the night and others clutching their belongings in worn shopping bags. These are often clients of one of the few clinical services we offered at Toronto Public Health – our supervised consumption service, which frequently sparked heated debate, emotional reactions, and furrowed brows of concern about the messiness this service represents.

The supervised consumption site at 277 Victoria Street, established in 2017, was one of the first such services in Toronto. It provides a clean, safe, indoor space for people to use pre-obtained injection drugs under a health professional’s supervision. It’s a response to the harsh reality of the unregulated drug market, a reality far removed from the sanitized warnings on cigarette packs or the well-designed labels on your favourite spirits. The drugs used by clients are generally obtained illegally. Some are even outright illegal under current Canadian drug law, and they’re often laced with potent and unpredictable substances like carfentanil and other very strong anaesthetic drugs. Some have even been found to contain substances not meant for human use – like xylazine, or ‘tranq,’ a tranquilizer drug meant for use in large animal veterinary medicine. So, using drugs is a roll of the dice with potentially life-altering consequences.

Let me put it this way: imagine buying a bottle of wine or beer. You know the alcohol content because alcohol is sold and distributed within a well-developed regulatory framework. We know the precise alcohol content along with information about the other ingredients of what we’re drinking. Data from Toronto’s Drug Checking Service in January 2024 showed a shocking variability in fentanyl content in samples – some samples had as little as 0.3 per cent fentanyl while others contained a staggering 83.1 per cent. With the level of variability in the supply, and without supervision, the person who is purchasing these drugs for use really has no idea what they’re ingesting, turning a desperate attempt at relief into a potential death sentence.

Every single week, our team intervened in (or reversed) approximately seven overdoses, or roughly one a day. These aren’t just numbers on a page; they represent lives saved. That means 365 deaths that were averted, 365 fewer funerals every year. What’s more, no overdose deaths have ever been reported in an Scs in Toronto or across Canada. Perhaps the Scs is not as messy as one might think at the outset? The Scs also provides an opportunity to connect clients with vital treatment options, offering a path toward recovery and a healthier life. And the benefit of the Scs doesn’t stop at the doors of our clinic. Evidence shows an almost 70 per cent reduction in overdose-related deaths within a five-hundred-metre radius of the Scs in Toronto.

The Scs goes beyond immediate life-saving measures by fostering vital connections to other essential services and resources. Each person who walks through our doors is not just a client, but an individual with a story and a chance for a new beginning. Staff act as a lifeline, particularly during Toronto’s harsh winters and blistering summer heat. Clients experiencing homelessness can access referrals for basic needs like shelter and food. As a clinical service, nurses can provide some basic medical care, alleviating pain and restoring function. For more complex issues, ‘warm hand-off’ referrals are offered, connecting clients with emergency or specialty care.

Given the impact the Scs has daily, it makes sense that people tend to gather outside the doors in the morning. And, because they do not have homes to go to, clients spend quite a bit of time in and around the clinic. These gatherings can be jarring for many passersby, particularly those unfamiliar with the realities of homelessness and addiction. Some might look at the front doors of the office building and see ‘messiness,’ a disruption to the city’s usual flow. They might see people with shopping carts holding all their worldly possessions, hear loud conversations, and perceive a lack of order amidst the controlled chaos of Toronto’s downtown core.

But the truth is far more complex. Many clients struggle with social isolation, a loneliness that can be as gnawing as any physical hunger. As is the case with any service, clients of the Scs get to know one another. Some even become friends and form part of each other’s social network, which we know is so important for health. Research by Robert Putnam and others highlights the importance of social networks for both mental and physical health. The Scs, in a way, can be a lifeline for those who have lost theirs, a place where a shared struggle fosters a sense of community. Think about the moms who become lifelong friends because they met in a breastfeeding clinic, or the people who start as fellow cancer patients and ultimately become like extended family members. The Scs is just like that. People meet other clients of the service and get to know each other – sometimes going on to become friends, often even closer than actual family members.

The perception of messiness often extends beyond the gatherings themselves. Our clients’ struggles with homelessness can come with moralized judgement and may be seen as a reflection on them, rather than a symptom of a larger societal problem. Worn-out clothing and lack of access to hygiene facilities are not choices, but consequences of their circumstances. Unlike the gatherings of students or office workers sitting on benches chatting over lunch, or a crowd assembled to watch the buskers at Yonge-Dundas Square, the gatherings of Scs clients are characterized as ‘messy’ by many who pass by our doors. Some local businesses and area residents have described the presence of such gatherings as evidence of disorder and decay – other words for ‘messiness.’ It’s the lack of affordable housing, not the presence of people who are homeless, that creates true disorder. It’s the empty storefronts lining once-vibrant streets, the vacancy signs multiplying like weeds, that symbolize the cracks in our social safety net.

The Scs is part of the solution – not the problem – and a critical intervention. The service, however, is not a silver bullet or a stand-alone solution. A comprehensive approach to drug policy is needed, one that moves beyond punishment and embraces harm-reduction strategies like needle exchange programs, along with readily available treatment options for addiction, and a shift toward a model that views addiction and challenges with substance use from a health perspective and prioritizes support.

Drugs are woven into the fabric of human experience, from the pain-relieving properties of aspirin to the social lubricant of alcohol. We use caffeine to jump-start our mornings and, in some cases, nicotine to unwind at the end of the day. While some substances are tightly regulated and socially acceptable (caffeine, alcohol), others are demonized and criminalized (cocaine, heroin). This distinction isn’t always based on inherent risk. In Canada, alcohol, legal for over a century, produces the highest levels of harms (for example, through impaired driving, violence, and many cancers), deaths, and economic costs (through such things as health care spending and lost productivity). The point is that all drugs have the potential for harm.

The reality is, despite the ‘war on drugs’ costing trillions and the global illegal drug market thriving at upward of $500 billion annually, punitive approaches haven’t curbed use. Instead of continuing to fight a losing battle, it’s time to raise the white flag on criminalization and embrace a more compassionate approach, one that is grounded in evidence and impact. We need to see drug use as a health issue, not a crime.

This doesn’t mean endorsing widespread unregulated drug use – it means acknowledging the complexities of human behaviour. There will continue to be messiness, including those who will struggle with addiction and suffer from overdose. But a health-first approach is safer, more humane, and more likely to succeed. We can increase access to treatment. We can save lives by providing more harm-reduction services. We can create housing and mental health support for the vulnerable, and above all we can treat drug use as a health issue. Too many people are dying, and these deaths are preventable. The challenges are significant, but the human cost of inaction is even greater. We can build a cleaner, healthier future for everyone by focusing on prevention, harm reduction, treatment, and social support. It’s about addressing the hidden struggles alongside the vibrant ones, creating a more humane space for all.

Public Health in the Post-Covid Era

Dr. Andrew Boozary

The Covid-19 pandemic cracked open the myths we tell ourselves about public health and equity in Canada. Universal health care? Not when the unhoused face ten times the death rate of the housed during a pandemic. Not when racialized neighbourhoods endure three to four times the infection rates of affluent ones. And certainly not when millions still lack access to primary care.

The pandemic forced us to reckon with a truth that should have been obvious all along: health isn’t just about medical care. It’s about where you live, the air you breathe, the food you can afford, and whether your job lets you work safely from home. For far too many in our cities – especially those without housing – the pandemic exposed systemic inequities that weren’t just cracks but chasms.

What was surprising wasn’t just how stark the disparities were but how quickly they could be mapped once we started asking the right questions. Early on, Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health dismissed the need for race-based or socio-demographic data. ‘We have universal health care’ was the refrain. But when Toronto Public Health took the initiative alongside community leaders to collect that data, the mirage of universality vanished. Racialized populations bore the brunt of the virus – and unhoused individuals died at rates five to ten times higher than those with stable housing.

The numbers were devastating, but they were also devastatingly clear. They revealed not just who was most vulnerable but why. Income inequality, housing precarity, and systemic discrimination were no longer abstract concerns for policy briefs or academic papers – they were life-and-death issues.

Yet here we are, years after the initial waves, with much of that clarity and urgency dissipating. The public health gains we made – better data collection, emergency housing initiatives, cross-sector collaboration – have not translated into systemic change. The fear now is regression: slipping back into the pre-pandemic norms of neglect, where the gaps in our systems widen further.

The Housing Crisis Is a Health Crisis

Nowhere is this clearer than in housing. The life-expectancy gap between housed and unhoused individuals is staggering – thirty to forty years, depending on the jurisdiction. Let that sink in: we are effectively stealing three to four decades of life from the unhoused, not because of personal choices but because of policy failures.

Housing policy isn’t usually framed as health policy, but it should be. How can a physician ask a patient to take their medications if that patient has no place to store them? How do we expect someone to manage a chronic condition when their daily reality is a toxic mix of overcrowded shelters, exposure to harsh weather, and the constant threat of violence?

We’ve treated the housing crisis with band-aid solutions: emergency shelters, revolving-door admissions to hospitals, and discharge plans that send people back into the very conditions that made them sick. These aren’t solutions – they’re symptoms of a system that has accepted, even normalized, structural cruelty.

If we truly believed in universal health care, we would invest in supportive housing – not as an afterthought but as a core component of health policy. Housing is health care. Without it, we’re just spinning our wheels, pouring resources into a system designed to fail.

The challenges aren’t just about resources – they’re about coordination. Ontario has a Ministry of Health, a Ministry of Mental Health, a Ministry of Long-Term Care, and a Ministry of Community and Social Services – each operating in isolation. The people we’re trying to help don’t live in silos. Their lives are messy and interconnected, and our systems need to reflect that reality.

Take supportive housing. Even when someone is identified as a candidate for housing, administrative barriers often delay or derail the process. These delays aren’t just inefficiencies – they’re fatal for people in crisis.

This isn’t a new problem. The Lalonde Report in 1974 identified housing as a critical determinant of health when social housing accounted for 20 per cent of all housing stock. Today, it’s less than 4 per cent. The gap has grown, and with it, the consequences for people’s health.

The Structural Determinants of Health

The conversation around the ‘social determinants of health’ has expanded in recent years to include structural determinants – the systems and policies that shape our environments. For example, neighbourhoods with more green space have lower rates of diabetes and heart disease. Yet, in many low-income neighborhoods, access to green space is minimal or nonexistent.

Climate change intersects with these structural inequities in troubling ways. I recently signed documentation for a patient to obtain air conditioning in a social housing unit. Without it, their heart condition made them vulnerable to heat-induced complications – hospitalization, even death. A $300 air conditioner might have prevented thousands in health care costs.

These aren’t individual failures – they’re systemic ones. And they’re compounded by the toxic narratives that frame poverty, addiction, and homelessness as moral failings rather than policy failures.

Addiction and the False Dichotomy

The opioid crisis offers another lens into these intersections. The drug supply has become increasingly toxic, leading to record overdose deaths in 2023 and 2024. Yet the political rhetoric often pits harm reduction against treatment, as if the two are mutually exclusive.

The reality is simple: you can’t help people access treatment if they’re not alive. Harm reduction – safe injection sites, overdose prevention – saves lives in the immediate term. But it’s not enough without pathways to treatment and housing. The challenge is to build a system that integrates these approaches rather than forcing false choices.

The Primary Care Crisis

Even as we grapple with housing and addiction, another crisis looms: access to primary care. In Ontario, 2.5 million people – one in four – don’t have a primary care provider. Without primary care, we can’t manage chronic diseases, ensure vaccinations, or conduct early screenings for cancer.

Primary care is the bedrock of a functioning health care system, yet it’s crumbling. The solution isn’t just more family doctors, it’s reimagining care delivery. Nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and interdisciplinary health teams need to be part of the equation, especially in neighborhoods hit hardest by Covid and other chronic inequities.

The future of public health in cities like Toronto depends on whether we can integrate housing, primary care, and social services into a cohesive system. It requires partnerships across the public, private, and non-profit sectors. It requires listening to Indigenous, Black, and newcomer communities who have long understood that health is much more than health care.

Above all, it requires a shift in our public policy mindset. Health isn’t just something we access in clinics or hospitals – it’s something we build in our homes, our neighbourhoods, and our communities. The question isn’t whether we can afford to make these investments – it’s whether we can afford not to.

Another Fine Mess About Regionalism

Sabine Matheson

In the late 1990s, I had a ringside seat at a debate about the governance of Toronto and its neighbours. Across a distance of that much time, public memory recalls the contentiousness of the amalgamation of Toronto’s six lower-tier municipalities and Metro, the regional one.

As an advisor to the government of the day, I can confirm that the debate was intense.¹ This is the way the politics went down.²

There was civic concern that the Greater Toronto region – that collection of suburban municipalities arrayed around Toronto – had been slow to recover from the recession of the early 1990s. In response, Bob Rae’s Ndp government (1990–95) created a task force to study whether Gta local government could be improved to accelerate that recovery. It was headed up by urbanist Anne Golden.

After the Progressive Conservatives defeated the Rae government in 1995, incoming Premier Mike Harris’s cabinet inherited that task force when it was midway through its work. Premier Harris had taken office with a commitment to reduce the cost of government, with the goal of reducing taxes while maintaining health care and education.³

There had been no firm platform commitment by the Tories on municipal restructuring. Rather, there was a general desire to reduce the cost of local government, a belief that the two-tier structure was probably no longer needed in Metro Toronto and therefore a potential source of savings, and a political predisposition to protecting the local municipalities instead of the more remote regional one (Metro).

As the review of the future of municipal government in Toronto began, the sentiment at Queen’s Park was to ‘get rid of Metro.’ However, two factors intervened.

First, when the provincial government analyzed the total package of services delivered by Metro and the six lower-tier governments, it found that, by value, 70 per cent were delivered at the Metro level. There was no business case that savings could be achieved from breaking up the regional government (Metro) and distributing those services among the lower tiers. There was, however, a business case that savings could be achieved by merging all seven organizations into one.

Second, Premier Harris was attending a trade mission in Japan, where he saw for himself that, internationally, city-regions are the branded building blocks of the global economy. He had this realization when he was introduced to a group of senior Japanese leaders as the newly elected premier of Ontario. They politely asked, via their interpreter, if Ontario was anywhere near Toronto. Premier Harris has often told that story to explain that Toronto needed to be strengthened, not further divided, the way it would have been had Metro been dissolved.

By the time the analysis was complete, the government had settled on amalgamation. When Al Leach, the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, announced this plan in the Legislature, he argued that the move would benefit the region as a whole: ‘We will leave behind the confusion over which level of government does what job … We will bring in a new Toronto that is more efficient … and move forward in the best interests of all.⁴

Later, the province enacted similar amalgamations in Hamilton, Ottawa, and Sudbury, also resulting in larger, single-tier municipalities.

Unlike earlier municipal governance reforms from the 1970s, the Harris government’s decisive approach to regionalism was to create a single municipality out of many. It is possible to see that program of amalgamation as simply the next step in the evolution of those communities. But the messy drama that accompanied the Harris amalgamations was next level in terms of political impact.

In a 1997 referendum, Toronto residents voted overwhelmingly against the proposed amalgamation. The government did not accept the validity of the referendum and proceeded anyway.

The ensuing controversy sapped the political will of the provincial government to regionalize local governments across the Gta. In response to accusations that it was ‘destroying local democracy,’ Queen’s Park deliberately took a light touch on implementation, to demonstrate that this was not the case.

One approach was to create a transition team, tasked with planning the structure of the new amalgamated city. This approach ensured that much – probably too much – would be left to the new council and its administration. In the first year, many in the new city openly dragged their feet with the implementation in the hope that the 1999 provincial election would lead to a new government and an ‘undoing’ of amalgamation. But when Premier Harris was re-elected with a majority government, these hopes faded. However, the moment to create an all-new structure for municipal government in Ontario, one based on best practices, had passed.⁵

The overall controversy had several negative effects. The fierce resistance to restructuring left a lasting mark on political memory that amalgamations were too ‘risky.’ The experience of a unified Toronto made the Ontario government concerned that further regionalization in the Gta would make Toronto too powerful. Lastly, the squabbles over amalgamation damaged public and political confidence in local government in Toronto.

Anne Golden’s Gta task force report, which was made public in early 1996, did not just comment on governance within the boundaries of Metro Toronto. It also concluded that the new economic region should include Halton, Peel, York, and Durham. As Dr. Golden put it, ‘the region has outgrown the five regional governments … The existing regional governing structure does not permit proper planning for land-use or transit, for roads and highways, for water and sewers, nor does it permit a common coordinated economic development strategy. That is why we recommended the elimination of the five regional governments.’⁶

She recommended the creation of a Greater Toronto Council, and a winding up for the regional municipalities of Halton, Peel, York, and Durham. Some of their powers would migrate up to the proposed council, and the remainder would be transferred down to the local municipalities.

That reform, however, wasn’t in the cards. To the Harris government, those restructurings seemed premature. Metro Toronto had been fully built out, but the other regions were not. Thus, those upper-tier governments were still needed to manage the development of their member municipalities.

Overall, the local politics was against Golden’s reforms, which meant the provincial politics also looked bad: the so-called 905 regions were political heartland for the Harris government. Eliminating regional government was too much, even for a government prepared to take on the amalgamation of Toronto. Perhaps more importantly, the Harris Tories feared that if it established a Greater Toronto Council, this new government would have rivalled the province in its political clout.

Still, the Harris government agreed to take some action at the Gta level, establishing a Greater Toronto Area Services Board (Gtsb) to coordinate area-wide services such as public transit, water and sewer, economic development, and linked services such as police.⁷

What the government actually delivered was less than what Golden recommended. The new Gtsb came in a weaker form than what Leach had intended and lasted for a shorter time than anyone expected, from 1998 to 2001.

There were several reasons behind the failure. By the time it got around to establishing the Gtsb, the Harris government no longer had the stomach for another municipal fight like the amalgamation of the City of Toronto. Within the government, many considered municipal restructuring to have been an unnecessary, unpopular political distraction.

Nevertheless, a promise was a promise. When the Gtsb was finally created, it was constructed in a weak form to avoid the appearance of being threatening. In practical terms, it had no real authority. Designed to not offend, it had forty members, with at least one seat for each Gta municipality. It was thus inclusive to a fault and functioned more like a small legislature than an effective board. To avoid making it look like another layer of government, the Gtsb was also under-resourced, so when the board started meeting, it felt like no one was in charge.

For all these reasons, the Gtsb failed and was disbanded after three years. There were many lessons to learn, however. Perhaps the greatest: don’t create an intergovernmental body unless it has an active, realistic, and meaningful mandate. You cannot get away with creating a new level of government unless you can prove there’s a need for one and are then prepared to follow through. The product of a messy and protracted exercise in municipal governance reform across a very large region, the Gtsb in the end found itself relegated to the status of footnote.

Endnotes can be found on p. 322.

We Can Live With That

Leslie Woo

At the turn of the millennium, the Greater Toronto Area, a multi-centred megacity that had become home to about six million people, was turning into something of a metropolitan hydra. Sprawl was gobbling up prime farmland north, east, and west of the core. The highways were clogged, transit expansion had stalled. Capital and people were pouring into the region. Yet municipal politicians were constantly squabbling with their neighbours. It became increasingly clear to those of us working for the Government of Ontario that no one was in charge and, more troubling, no one had any idea of where we were going. We needed to change course, and quickly.

The scene is a rural conference centre on the fringe of the Greater Toronto Area in late 2002, at one of the final meetings of the Central Ontario Smart Growth Panel. Present were mayors, regional chairs, industry mavens, grassroots activists, advisors, and provincial bureaucrats – all of us gathered in a closed-door session in a board-room to hammer out a consensus on how to manage growth in the Greater Golden Horseshoe (Ggh), Canada’s largest and most populous urban region.

Over the course of the previous year, the evidence to support the plan had been assembled. The public and stakeholders had been consulted. Multiple research papers had been completed. The horse-trading of priorities had been made. Suddenly, in that boardroom, it seemed as if we’d finally arrived at an agreement. ‘Okay,’ I whispered to one of my colleagues, ‘they can all live with that.’

And there it was – a plan to guide the evolution of the Ggh’s underlying urban form. This agreement, meant to address population growth and direct public infrastructure investment, would mostly hold for the next two decades. That deal would produce legislation, regulations, large-scale investments, land-use policies, and media sound bites to support the Province of Ontario’s first-ever regional growth management plan. We called it ‘Places to Grow,’ and its goal seemed audacious, to turn density from a four-letter word into a welcome remedy for tackling population growth while holding back the aggressive tide of sprawl.

It wasn’t a perfect plan, technocratically speaking; in fact, some have argued that on that day, consensus bred compromise. In hindsight, however, the trade-offs weren’t such a bad thing. This less-than-perfect plan, developed with imperfect data, without absolutely exhaustive public engagement, and by a not-so-diverse collection of decision-makers, did, in fact, positively impact the course of urbanization in the GGH.

Land developers who saw the writing on the wall would quickly move their investments into the declared centres that the plan prescribed. One has to admire the entrepreneurial spirit and energy embedded within the capitalist system that creates such agility and speed. If only bureaucracy could be equally agile. Some municipalities raced to be first to the post to have their Official Plans in conformity – so as to create more certainty and curry favour for the anticipated infrastructure investments that might follow in areas such as transit, water, wastewater, and other services.

Yet over the plan’s twenty-year existence, the Ontario government never adapted the Growth Plan’s regulatory ramparts to address the changing conditions that two decades of rapid expansion brought. Bureaucratic short-sightedness, ironically, eroded the original vision of a more sustainable future, enabling, perversely, the very forces the Growth Plan had been designed to withstand.

The Growth Plan was primarily a land-use plan for a twenty-five-year period (2006–31) directing where density and urbanization should be concentrated, where transportation infrastructure servicing the twenty-five urban growth centres (UGCs) should go, and what lands should be protected from development. This integrated land-use plan was to allow the region to accommodate the forecasted 110,000 new residents annually into existing centres like the Toronto downtown, and also into the Main Street areas and downtowns in emerging and rapidly urbanizing suburban cities, such as Mississauga, Markham, and Oshawa. Municipalities would be required to bring their Official Plans into conformity with the assigned densities within a five-year period and prescribed boundaries for Ugcs were to be set. The Growth Plan also reinforced the protection of the Greenbelt’s pristine ecosystems, agricultural lands, and parkland, forming a green edge to the urban boundary.

A regional urban boundary was eventually declared and fixed in legislation. No more reckless urban sprawl onto the Oak Ridges Moraine, the region’s most valuable aquifer.

It would take four more years from that day in late 2002 and a change in government before this polycentric concept for managing the region’s forecasted growth would be institutionalized into legislation and regulations, with detailed policies, density targets, and specific population projections for each large city. The direction set at that meeting in 2002 remained the underlying foundation of that legislation. Twenty-five dense Ugcs connected by a rapid transit network. That network was later crystallized in a regional transportation plan – the Big Move. Provincial funding commitments now totalling $60 billion to build that network would start to flow seven years after that day in 2002. The polycentric metropolitan plan enabled future residents to live, work, and play outside politically defined municipal boundaries.

In Ontario, the Planning Act serves as the cornerstone of municipal planning governance, laying out the framework within which local municipalities establish their land-use rules. These policies are instrumental in shaping the fabric of communities, from municipal wards and districts to downtowns, neighbourhoods, streets, and individual properties. This regulatory cascade underscores the complexity and importance of urban planning, highlighting the interconnected layers of decision-making that influence the built environment.

However, while a planning approach anchored solely in fact, evidence, and analytics may seem ideal, it often fails to account for the practicalities of implementation, the nuanced dynamics of communities, and the inevitable influence of politics. Planning for an entire region involves navigating a complex interplay of variables, including local political considerations, economic factors, and community aspirations. A plan that disregards these realities is likely to encounter significant challenges in its execution.

Aseem Iman, a prominent architect and planner who is the chair of urban design at Cardiff University in the U.K., underscores this point in his research on urban transformation. He argues that successful planning is not merely a technical exercise but also a creative, inherently political act. Plans that prioritize perfection over practicality often remain confined to shelves, existing more as theoretical constructs than actionable frameworks for change.

In 1968, Guy Benveniste, an organization theorist at University of California, Berkeley, began writing about the politics of planning and ways of encouraging bureaucracies to be more adaptive to change. Benveniste was trained as an engineer, economist, and planner, and his insights reveal a messy truth: the bureaucratic tango between technical prowess and political savvy often resembles a chaotic dance floor. His work underscores the need for planners to not only master the technical steps but also navigate the unpredictable rhythm of politics. In this dance of ideas and interests, Benveniste suggests, success lies in knowing when to twirl the technical facts and when to dip into the political fray, creating a planning process that’s as unpredictable as it is complex – one that requires bending some truth to power. It means settling for what everyone can live with – no real winners and no real losers. Everyone is equally unsatisfied.

The interplay between objective and subjective elements often makes the process of city building feel messy. While data and analytics provide a solid foundation for decision-making, they rarely offer clear-cut solutions to the multi-faceted challenges of urban planning. The subjective nature of community preferences, values, and cultural dynamics adds layers of intricacy that cannot be easily quantified or standardized.

Successful city building means searching for the delicate balance between the objective and subjective, the tangible and intangible. It involves not only designing functional infrastructure and efficient systems but also creating spaces and places that resonate with people on an emotional and social level. Planners and policy-makers must engage with local communities in meaningful ways, listening to their concerns, aspirations, and ideas, and then incorporating these insights into their plans.

In this context, the seemingly chaotic nature of city building is not a weakness but rather a strength. It is through the messy process of negotiation, collaboration, and compromise that cities evolve and adapt to meet the changing needs of their residents. Embracing these complications, rather than seeking to simplify or control them, is the key to creating vibrant, resilient, and inclusive urban environments.

In the boardroom where the Growth Plan happened, back in 2002, the art and science of planning converged. The ‘messiness’ of concocting the plan served to underscore the pragmatism of the ensuing action: legislation, regulation, billions of new capital infrastructure investments, new urban forms, new business models for development, and, yes, new protections for environmentally critical ecosystems. Not a bad outcome for an imperfect process and plan.

In 2002, Benveniste’s balancing act played out. The Ugcs in the Growth Plan represented an eclectic mix of both existing town centres as well as hubs with aspirations for enough higher-order growth to transform sleepy suburbs into something more city-like. In the Growth Plan, both these extremes coexisted.

Twenty-plus years later, the Ontario government under Premier Doug Ford finally got around to repealing the Growth Plan. So what can we learn from this somewhat disorderly attempt to find order in a city-region as vast as Greater Toronto?

First, Jane Jacobs’s accusation, back in the 1960s, that strong centralized planning was responsible for the excesses and failure of urban renewal today seems almost inconsequential in light of the realities of how concentrated power and decision-making have become. While the all-powerful planners of her era are gone, today’s planners need to be confident team builders, deft project managers, creative fund-raisers, imagineers, and diplomats.

Second, the planning profession and planners themselves need to make sure they remain relevant. The provincial stewards of the 2006 Growth Plan did not follow the best practice of continuous improvement. The day-to-day work of rote conformance to legislation overtook the necessary ongoing assessment, invention, analytics, and engagement. Over time, the Growth Plan’s constituency for a vision of communities supported by a strong economy, a clean and healthy environment, and social equity, waned. The imperfect 2006 version required stewards who were continually working toward greater states of perfection, not holding on to old data or old insights but rather continually expanding their curiosity about the region’s future.

Ultimately, the effectiveness of a regional planning process should not be judged solely on the degree of consensus or the level of compromise achieved. While these elements are important for fostering community engagement and building a shared vision for the future, they are only meaningful if they lead to action.

A plan that languishes on a shelf, no matter how well-crafted or widely supported, is invariably a failure. The true measure of success in city building lies in the implementation of that plan, in the tangible improvements it brings to people’s lives and the lasting impact it has on the urban environment.

Consensus and compromise are valuable tools in the planning process, but they must be accompanied by an ongoing commitment to collective action. Planners, policy-makers, and communities must work together not only to create plans but also to ensure that those plans are translated into concrete actions and outcomes. Only then can the messy, complex process of city building truly fulfill its promise of creating better and more livable cities for all.

Postscript: In August 2024, the Growth Plan was replaced and some of its elements were incorporated into a new Provincial Planning Statement. This change reverts the region back to its former state as a collection of competing and balkanized municipalities. Municipalities, especially the larger ones, are no longer compelled to collaborate or negotiate collectively for a common future. Rather, more siloed and independent decision-making will likely reign. The value of a regional mindset, which was what drew that group together in 2002 and produced messy and intertwined relationships for a better future, has been put to bed. Hopefully, it will awaken once again when the pendulum swings back in its favour.

Endnotes can be found on p. 322.

Confessions of a First-Time Parade Organizer

Zahra Ebrahim

‘A parade is really a dance choreographed by anarchists,’ shared my friend and neighbour Leah when I asked her advice about a neighbourhood event I was planning.

This gathering was to be a parade – my first – planned with a couple of fellow organizers from my Junction Triangle neighbourhood in Toronto’s west end. Nervously texting anyone I knew who had organized parade-like activities before, I was flooded with advice about brass instruments, rhythm, puppets, and theatrics. What we thought would be a community event like any other turned out to be a journey into a distinct and joyful subculture, one that fosters social connection and does important city-building work, but without all the jargon and labels.

When I say ‘nervously texting,’ I’m not exaggerating. Since I was a teenager, I’ve hosted events and organized in community. I’m known as a person who initiates gatherings. But with this parade, I was quickly learning that it was more than just a matter of gathering people together. Rather, a parade was a performance of sorts. It involved music, rhythm, dance, spectacle. I have many gifts I offer the world, but being ‘musical’ or even ‘on beat’ are not qualities that people who know me would name when asked to describe my skills. As I quickly learned, however, these two qualities are key to a successful parade. This knowledge, together with a sense of just how contentious the site of our parade – the West Toronto Railpath – had become, made for an apprehensive few weeks as my collaborators and I got down to work.

Finally, after weeks of preparation, it was 5:05 p.m. on the appointed day, November 1, 2024. I had to finish work and quickly pull myself together – in parade-speak, that means ‘costuming up’ and grabbing the nearest megaphone – to get to the meeting place, the Wallace Avenue Footbridge, for 5:15 p.m. I love dressing up for Halloween, but in the flurry of planning, I had neglected my costume. I frantically reached for all ochre items in my wardrobe and made a green cardboard ‘stem’ to stick on my yellow toque. Now dressed as a gourd, I packed up my glow sticks and homemade ghost puppets and speed-walked to the bridge to prepare for the parade to begin.

The parade’s chosen route was not an accident. Earlier that summer, I had been asked by a long-time community organizer to take on the stewardship of a grassroots group, Friends of the West Toronto Rail-path. The Railpath, according to its website, is a ‘2.1 km multi-modal human-powered trail that runs north to south through Toronto’s Junction Triangle. Built on an abandoned rail line, Wtrp was designed as a safe, car-free, linear park. The Railpath follows what was one of many Indigenous trails starting at the shoreline of the ancient Glacial Lake Iroquois; now Davenport Road. Since opening in 2009, its naturalized ecology has become a canvas for art, a lively community gathering space, and a catalyst for major neighbourhood changes and connections.’

The group’s long-time leader – lovingly dubbed ‘Mr. Railpath’ in our neighbourhood – was ready for a new role and to focus on programming and storytelling around this wonderful piece of infrastructure he had worked on so tirelessly on for almost two decades. Friends of the Wtrp had gone through many evolutions over the years, first advocating for the path’s creation and then orchestrating programming, public art, and community events at the site itself. The Friends of Wtrp also served as a point of connection for the City of Toronto, regional transportation agency Metrolinx, and other groups so these agencies would understand the needs of the surrounding community. In the decades that have passed since the inception of Friends, many of its members have moved away or become involved in other community groups, leaving the organization ready for an infusion of fresh energy.

For the last few years, the Railpath has been undergoing significant construction as Metrolinx expands its rail network to build the Kitchener Fourth Track. Segments of the Railpath have been closed during this work. Frustrated by the loss of a beloved piece of recreational and commuter infrastructure, local residents anxiously awaited its reopening.

The summer of 2024 saw a pair of significant developments for the Railpath. One was the announcement of a long-awaited federal investment of $23 million in the extension of the Railpath to connect it to downtown Toronto. This move would create a much-needed link between Dundas Street West and Sterling Road, where the Railpath currently ends, to Abell Street at Sudbury Street, a stone’s throw from the Martin Goodman Trail, which follows the shore of Lake Ontario. The project, also carved out of the right-of-way next to the rail corridor, would allow walkers and cyclists to travel safely across the city, from east to west, without having to interact with cars.

Then, only weeks later, the City of Toronto announced that the two-kilometre connection would come with a price tag of $150 million. This revelation posed a fair question: Why should a single recreational space in a west-end neighbourhood get this kind of investment when multiple parks across the city – especially those in Toronto’s inner suburbs – could be significantly improved at just a fraction of the cost?

Between the local frustration with the construction-related closures and the city-wide attention on the Railpath, we were forgetting a key detail: beyond being a place for commuting, exercise, and recreation, the Railpath in its current form was very much a gathering place, where neighbours ran into each other, as well as friends from across the city visiting the attractions along its route: the Museum of Contemporary Art, a local bookshop, the Spaccio café, and the Pause Platforms along the trail, each affording a view of the aspens along the embankment.

I’d spent the months since the summer rounding up friends and neighbours to join me in rebooting Friends. We decided to meet up at a local restaurant one afternoon in early October to talk about what we could do to remind the public that, irrespective of all of the announcements – and thus controversy – around the Railpath, it remains a place worthy of celebration.

Early in our brainstorm, we realized we needed to celebrate the infrastructure we already have. It just so happened that Halloween was only weeks away, and with a local Pumpkin Parade taking place at Carlton Park, at the Railpath’s north end, we wondered, why not parade friends and neighbours, their pumpkins, their children, and their pets along the Railpath to the event in the park? A parade would give enthusiastic costume wearers young and old an opportunity to extend the Halloween fun for one more day and support another community event, all while creating delightful new memories of a path that had fallen out of favour.

If you mention ‘parade’ to any Torontonian, the first association that comes to mind is the Santa Claus Parade, which is not about spontaneity at all but rather ritual. People like that ritual, but it’s all meticulously planned. The second association is Pride, which began as anarchic protest but then became ritualistic and predictable, and now doesn’t quite know what it wants to be.

For our little parade to be successful, we knew it had to feel spontaneous, DIY, community-made – to have a different texture than the more established parades in the city. In the process of quickly learning about parade culture, we loved examples such as the boisterous community participation in New Orleans’ funeral parades, or the locally crafted costumes and floats for Cinco de Mayo celebrations, or even the still quite raucous Toronto Caribbean Carnival.

Our mighty crew of three divided roles at the restaurant that night. We’d split the tasks of designing posters, creating and posting social media content, emailing elected representatives to let them know of our plans, and, of course, trying to find Torontonians who actually knew a thing or two about hosting parades. From the advice we received, we knew that a few elements were of the utmost importance to a successful parade: a band, a beat, and things for parade-goers to wave in the air. We learned that a punctuated start and end would give the parade energy, connection, and purpose. For three working professionals who tend to like systems, work plans, and a certain degree of order, the process felt significantly more emergent and messy than we were used to. We’d left ourselves little time to plan, so communication had to be frequent.

We decided to coordinate by text message, which meant that over the few weeks, being apart from our phones for even an hour meant returning to it to find dozens of missed messages:

‘So i just learned we need a megaphone’

‘Do you have one?’

‘No’

‘i can ask around’

‘My friend might have one’

‘Let me text them but post on insta in the meantime’

‘In a meeting now but remind me to tell you about the streamers’

‘Oh and one of us needs to get glow sticks’

Every day brought new micro-problems to solve: who could print posters at their workplace, who was buying tape to put up said posters, where they should go, how many puppets were enough puppets, how many glow sticks were enough glow sticks (and did we want bracelets or necklaces), what time the music should start, and what to do about the streamers if it rained.

We furiously texted all the musicians we knew. By a stroke of luck, a week later we had secured a local band, Little Rambunctious, to lead our parade (musicians love parades!). We had taped up hundreds of posters around the community and in nearby neighbourhoods, spent a couple of evenings making puppet ghosts, procured glow sticks, and fielded dozens of messages about the neighbourhood’s excitement around a chance to be together and just have a little fun.

It was coming together almost too easily, and I wondered if there was something we were forgetting. I’ve organized community events for over twenty-five years, but I’ve never experienced anything falling into place as seamlessly and smoothly as this parade. It was too easy, and that made me nervous, which led me to lean into defaults I’d used in other community organizing and professional contexts: making detailed runs of show and supply lists, as well as ensuring that everyone knew their role and what they had to bring. I even jotted down some speaking notes.

When the evening of the parade finally arrived, my fellow organizers and I, dressed as a gourd, showed up half an hour early to meet the band, work out last-minute logistics, and greet community members as they arrived. The band, dressed in Diy skeleton costumes, had arrived early and started to warm up. There was no physical setup or tech check to do, no registration desk, no signage. The posters told people to meet under the Wallace bridge, and thirty minutes later, dozens began to arrive. There were families, couples out for an evening walk, groups of friends, even lone attendees who didn’t have a costume, a pet, kids, or a pumpkin, but wanted to join nevertheless.

Our seasoned parade band kicked off the festivities by calling out to the audience for song names and proceeded to improvise songs inspired by community members (‘hot Halloween pizza,’ anyone?). Our small organizing team handed out glow sticks and puppets, and after a few short, informal welcome remarks on a borrowed megaphone, we embarked on our 750-metre parade route north to Carlton Park.

Community members danced, sang, made new friends, pushed and pulled strollers and wagons, ran into old acquaintances, waved homemade puppets, and generally just boogied along the West Toronto Railpath. Any and all passersby – runners, walkers, and cyclists – were quickly swept up into the evening’s festivities. Some people came for just half the thirty-minute walk, veering off to make it to their dinner plans or to manage hungry kids. Others stayed all the way to the end, where we joined a vibrant community celebration with food, pumpkins, and music already underway at Carlton Park. With one last improvised song, the band ended the parade. After a few thank-yous, we spread out into the diaspora of this wonderful community event. Unlike other more planned events, there was no cleanup, no teardown – nothing to do but enjoy the celebrations and chat with friends old and new.

The band Little Rambunctious performs under the Wallace Avenue Footbridge.

Countless community members let us know that our nearly spontaneous parade had made them feel hopeful again about the Railpath and connected to their neighbours. They realized that we needed more joy in our urban lives. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive.

Just after 7 p.m., only an hour-and-a-half after arriving at the Wallace Avenue Footbridge, I was on my way to dinner, incredulous that such a successful community event hadn’t required a day’s worth of prep and a full evening’s commitment. I was shocked that, as an organizer, I had nothing to do but relish the good feelings I, too, felt – to be among so much play and joy.

Only two hours earlier, I had been all nerves, hurrying down the street, parade accoutrements in hand, wondering if anyone was going to show up. I wondered how we would do without a ‘run of show,’ a pre-event call, and role descriptions. But 5:15 p.m. had rolled around, and we were under the Wallace Avenue Footbridge, ready to go. The participants, in turn, didn’t need anything but to delight in the sounds of the band warming up as they chose between a puppet and a glow stick, and talk about about pumpkins, costumes, and candy hauls from the night before. Everything went according to plan, which, in effect, was ‘no plan.’

The parade took place at a timely moment in so many ways, when we’re seeing the accelerating polarization from all parts of the world and here in Toronto as well. We hear on the news that Torontonians feel the city has become harder to live in, that we’re not meeting our neighbours, that we’re more isolated than ever.

In part, the parade showcased the urgency of meeting each other, in real life, and having difficult conversations and learning how to share and negotiate space. But, just as important, before we have these conversations, we need to bond by coming together simply to have fun. Urbanists sometimes overcomplicate what the parade did so well, which was inviting us to focus on making connections and to play together. These are things we all inherently know how to do. The parade reminded us that our communities can (even just for an evening) bridge differences in an effort toward addressing, and even healing, our divides.

Organizing this parade energized my own urbanism practice, reminding me that it’s one thing to talk about social connection and quite another to practise nurturing it. There’s so much rhetoric about inclusive city-building and creating spaces for meaningful connection, but we also need to be conscious of how rhetoric meets action. We need to show, not just tell, that we’re connected. The parade also reminded me that in the same way we don’t want overdetermined cities that leave no room for messiness, these moments of engaging community reflect that same principle. We can’t (and shouldn’t) plan everything.

While parades may not solve our most intractable issues, they can help us learn how to be together and trust each other, which comes in handy when we want to embark on the harder stuff – ideally, with ghost puppets in hand.

Conclusion

Whose Messiness Is This, Anyway?

Zahra Ebrahim, Dylan Reid, Leslie Woo, and John Lorinc

As the submissions in these pages came in, and we began to really think about the ideas we were trying to express in this collection, the voices of aunties – those older relatives, born outside Canada and grounded in the wisdom that comes with both age and dislocation – insinuated themselves into our conversations.

Why, they seemed to be asking, would anyone want disorder, or seek it out in their neighbourhoods? We, the aunties told us firmly, did not come to this place for more mess. Trust us: we know mess. We came here in search of order, peace, quiet, predictability.

It’s tough to disagree with the aunties, because they’re not wrong. After all, Canadian cities are mainly populated with people who came from elsewhere, or whose parents did. They uprooted themselves for a reason – often aspirational, but in many instances out of self- preservation – and so the shimmering promise at the end of journeys steeped in uncertainty envisions some kind of stability, along with opportunity, safety, and a new start.

But we also know that cities filled with people from so many diverse backgrounds are inherently messy. How could they be otherwise? What’s more, all that social messiness – which, in an immigrant city like Toronto, has become a baseline condition – frequently lands in urban environments that were not designed with complexity in mind. Like so many North American cities, Toronto is still a colonial place where the streets mainly meet at right angles and where the edicts of planners and the imperatives of capital determine what happens where. Messy urbanism, one could argue, occurs when these tectonic forces collide.

This tension isn’t new. Across history and geographies, the physical expression of urbanism reflected both an appetite for order and the inevitable chaos generated by the ingathering of people, goods, and ideas drawn by the magnetic force field that cities have always exerted. The ambitions of those in power might have been expressed through assertions of military might, ceremonial precincts, and religious monuments, but those could be undermined by changing political winds and inevitable decay. Cities may have sought to enable commerce and the accumulation of wealth, but the economic forces they generated had their own volition. In turn, cities may have tried to find ways to control the waste, pollution, and other messy externalities generated by that economic activity, such as by isolating the most noxious industries. The best-laid plans of those who had or have the power to build the city are constantly challenged by the sheer force of organic urban development.

Messy urbanism has always been descriptive, then, but we ask here if it should also be actively programmatic, a way of thinking about how we should build cities in the twenty-first century. It is certainly the time to ask this question. The bulk of humanity now lives in cities due to a century and a half of rapid urbanization and the emergence of megacities. What’s more, we live at a time of mass migration and mass dislocation, with over 110 million people displaced from their homes due to war, famine, environmental disaster, and political persecution. These global trends have exerted enormous pressures on urban regions, which are investing untold billions into all forms of infrastructure and are also attracting unprecedented amounts of private capital. In short, the physical and social messiness of cities from earlier epochs is now exponentially more forceful and present.

In formulating a vision of messy urbanism in this context, we have sought to avoid conflating chaos with complexity. Extreme overcrowding, lack of adequate sanitation, oppressive pollution, chronic homelessness – these conditions are messy, to be sure, but not the kind of messy we are advocating. Yet, as some of our contributors have explained, such situations provide opportunities for individuals to drive local and institutional change, or at least defy the rigid ‘solutions’ that city officials have imposed on urban communities to tamp down disorder they do not wish to condone.

We also want to avoid valorizing corporate messiness, which may take the form of ersatz graffiti or postering, as well as efforts to orchestrate messiness to advance a gentrification agenda. One might describe the way that formidably powerful platform companies – Uber, Airbnb, etc. – aggressively disrupted a range of municipal functions as inherently messy in their outlook. More relevant to our purpose are the ways in which individuals at the very margins of big-city labour markets – e.g., food couriers who use commuter rail to bring their e-bikes into affluent downtown neighbourhoods – have taken advantage of these platforms to carve out economic toeholds for themselves.

Good messiness expresses itself in many other ways – the grittiness of civic disagreement, the serendipity of a search for the perfect mango, the guerrilla expressiveness of street art, the unexpected sense of community fostered by pop-up night markets in suburban parking lots. It can be discerned in the ways that communities inject energy into otherwise bland spaces. We can also locate desirable messiness in physical structures, such as the ways some cities tolerate highly eclectic approaches to buildings – for instance, allowing a radical mixing of uses within a high-rise or apartment blocks that haven’t been forced to adhere to a bureaucratic design convention. These kinds of messiness provide us with physical or social spaces to realize the urban coexistence that hyperdiversity demands.

Good messy, ultimately, is an invitation to contribute to city-building, but to do so outside the permission structures that lead to overdeter-mined outcomes. We know that the conflicts articulated in this book will never be resolved. But when messy urbanism can propose new forms of inclusion and engagement in the alienating spaces of the twenty-first-century city, we think our aunties would agree that it’s a way of being even they might embrace.

Notes

These Walls, These Roads (p. 26)

1. Jerusalem Plan No. 2000, Jerusalem Municipality, 2004, 204.

2. Francesco Chiodelli, ‘The Jerusalem Master Plan: Planning into the Conflict,’ Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 51 (2012): 10.

3. Francesco Chiodelli, ‘The Spatial Dimension of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict over Jerusalem,’ in Shaping Jerusalem (Routledge, 2016), 15–36, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315644462-7.

4. Shahd Wari, ‘Jerusalem: One Planning System, Two Urban Realities,’ City 15, nos. 3–4 (August 2011): 462, https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2011.595115.

5. Tom Angotti, ‘Palestine’s Problems: Checkpoints, Walls, Gates and Urban Planners,’ in Transformative Planning: Radical Alternatives to Neoliberal Urbanism, ed. Tom Angotti (Black Rose Books, 2020), 165.

6. ‘West Bank Demolition and Displacement,’ Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, 2022, https://ochaopt.org/data/demolition.

7. Noga Kadman, Erased from Space and Consciousness: Israel and the Depopulated Palestinian Villages of 1948, trans. Dimi Reider (Indiana University Press, 2015).

8. Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, ed. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Blackwell Publishers, 1996).

Living Loud: The Migration of a Steelpan Soundtrack (p. 38)

1. Ronald Emrit, ‘Cultural and Sports History of Trinidad & Tobago,’ http://www.bestoftrinidad.com.

2. Kate Wagner. ‘City Noise Might Be Making You Sick,’ The Atlantic, February 20, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/02/city-noise-might-be-making-you-sick/553385.

3. Filipe Dimas. ‘Here’s How Loud You’re Actually Allowed to Be in Toronto,’ blogTo, March 13, 2021. https://www.blogto.com/city/2021/03/everything-to-know-toronto-noise-regulations.

4. Note the Trinidad equivalent of the East York bungalows.

Everything Is Everything … But the Details Matter (p. 231)

1. Lieven Ameel et al., Narrative in Urban Planning: A Practical Field Guide (transcript Verlag, 2023), https://doi.org/10.1515/9783839466179.

2. Terry Gross, ‘A “Forgotten History” of How the U.S. Government Segregated America,’ NPR, May 3, 2017, https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history-of-how-the-u-s-government-segregated-america.

3. Don Mitchell, ‘The SUV Model of Citizenship: Floating Bubbles, Buffer Zones, and the Rise of the “Purely Atomic” Individual,’ Political Geography 24, no. 1 (2005): 77–100, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2004.06.003.

Another Fine Mess About Regionalism (p. 295)

1. It is notable that since the amalgamation occurred in 1998, there has been no serious effort to undo it.

2. Contrary to a fanciful conspiracy theory of the day, amalgamation was not some attempt to ‘punish the City of Toronto.’ Happily, the people leading the province were better than that. Beyond that, the government had won roughly half the seats in Toronto at that time, including the riding of the municipal affairs minister.

3. It remains a misconception that the Harris government cut overall health care spending. Indeed, if the Harris government can be faulted, it is for permitting health care spending to increase so dramatically, from $17.4 billion per year at the start of the mandate to over $33 billion by the end, without any perception of improvement. Much of the need to drive savings on the munici-pal side came from the need to ‘feed the beast’ of health care spending, a matter that caused considerable tension inside the government at the time. The misconception comes from the memory of criticism of specific program cuts that were made and misunderstood as an overall reduction.

4. ‘Hansard Transcript 1996-Dec-17,’ Legislative Assembly of Ontario, https://www.ola.org/en/legislative-business/house-documents/parliament-36/session-1/1996-12-17/hansard.

5. Even today, elements of the pre-amalgamation structure still exist, in the numerous City financial reporting systems that had yet to be integrated in 2023.

6. Anne Golden, ‘The Ecstasy and the Agony,’ Plan Canada 38, no. 6 (1998): 22– 25, http://dx.doi.org/10.25316/IR-1558.

7. ‘Hansard Transcript 1996-Dec-17,’ Legislative Assembly of Ontario.

We Can Live With That (p. 300)

James Throgmorton, ‘Planners in Politics, Politicians in Planning,’ Planning Theory and Practice 22, no. 3 (2021): 495–502, https://doi.org/10.1080/14649357.2021.1921972.

Thomas Campanella, ‘Jane Jacobs and the Death and Life of American Planning’, Places Journal (April 2011), https://doi.org/10.22269/110425.

The Editors

Zahra Ebrahim is an urbanist, educator, and strategist. Her award-winning work focuses on building bridges between institutions and their public, working with communities to co-design toward better social outcomes, and leading some of Canada’s most ambitious participatory infrastructure and policy programs. She currently co-leads Monumental, a national organization focused on projects that advance fair, just, and culturally competent city-building, with previous experience leading organizations across multiple sectors. She is currently an adjunct professor at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, and Urbanist-in-Residence at the University of Toronto’s School of Cities. She lives in Toronto with her partner and their whippet, Zada.

John Lorinc is a Toronto journalist and editor. He writes about cities, business, and climate for various media, including the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, Corporate Knights, Walrus, and Spacing, where he is senior editor. John is the author of five books, including Dream States: Smart Cities, Technology, and the Pursuit of Urban Utopias, which won the 2022 Writers’ Trust Balsillie Prize for Public Policy, and the memoir No Jews Live Here, both from Coach House Books. He has also co-edited and contributed to Coach House’s uTopia series, including The Ward: The Life and Loss of Toronto’s First Immigrant Neighbourhood.

Dylan Reid is a co-founder and now the executive editor of Spacing magazine, an award-winning print quarterly about Toronto urbanism and public space that recently celebrated its twentieth anniversary. He is the author of the Toronto Public Etiquette Guide and co-editor of other books about Toronto. He was co-chair of the city government’s Toronto Pedestrian Committee and later co-founder of the advocacy group Walk Toronto. He is also a Fellow at the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies at the University of Toronto, and author of several scholarly articles about the history of cities in Renaissance France.

Leslie Woo is a tri-sector athlete with expertise in convening public, private, and not-for-profit leaders to co-create urban policy solutions. An urban planner, architect, and community activator, she presided over urban infrastructure development in Canada’s fastest-growing metropolis for decades. Leslie is the Ceo at CivicAction, a charitable organization with a winning formula for collaboration through civic engagement. She sits on the boards of Waterfront Toronto and the Yee Hong Centre for Geriatric Care and is a trustee of the Urban Land Institute. A Senior Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, Leslie champions women city-builders at @shebuildscities.

The Contributors

Growing up in Scarborough, on Williams Treaty territory, Ajeev Bhatia is grateful to Allah for a life of perseverance, deep personal and professional experiences, and a keen combination of street smarts and book smarts. The diversity of Toronto has helped him explore the complicated intersections between faith, land, power, and community. Ajeev’s professional work as an urban planner and land developer is shaped by a deep awareness of colonialism and the invitation to be a better Treaty person, carrying the responsibility of occupying Treaty lands while building a better city.

Matthew Blackett is the publisher, creative director, and one of the founders of Spacing magazine. He has won multiple awards for his work as a graphic artist, product designer, and deeply committed advocate for Toronto. He’s the author or editor of thirteen books, including his photo collection The Beautiful Mess of Toronto Laneways (Spacing Books, 2018).

Dr. Andrew Boozary is a primary care physician, researcher, and founding Executive Director of Population Health at the Gattuso Centre for Social Medicine at Toronto’s University Health Network. He completed his medical training at the University of Toronto and his health policy training at Princeton University and Harvard University. His work at the intersection of health policy, social justice, and equitable health care delivery aims to improve health outcomes for marginalized populations.

Andrés Borthagaray is an architect from the University of Buenos Aires with a postgraduate degree in public administration (ENA) and a doctorate in urbanism (Sorbonne nouvelle). President of the Furban Foundation, he has been director of the City on the Move Institute (Latin America) and undersecretary for decentralization, strategic planning, and transportation at the City of Buenos Aires.

Lorne Cappe (Fraic, Rpp, retired) has worked as an architect, urban designer, and planner in the public and private sectors. He held a range of positions with the City of Toronto and Toronto Community Housing, and served as a project manager on large city-building initiatives. Lorne is a past chair of the Toronto Society of Architects and was on the Ontario Association of Architects’ governing council. He teaches public engagement at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.

Karen Chapple is professor of geography and planning and director of the School of Cities at the University of Toronto. She is also Professor Emerita of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, where she served as department chair. Chapple received the 2023 Sir Peter Hall Award for Lifetime Contribution to the Field from the Regional Studies Association.

Cara Chellew is a PhD candidate in Urban Planning, Policy, and Design at McGill University. Her research includes the politics of public space, urban governance, and cities at night. She is the founder of DefensiveTo, a multimedia project that documents defensive/hostile urbanism in Toronto and beyond.

Carolynne Crawley, founder of Msit no’kmaq, is Mi’kmaw, Black, and Irish. She is from Mi’kma’ki territory, also known today as Nova Scotia, but Tkaronto has been her home for the past fifty years. Carolynne is one of the founders of Turtle Protectors in collaboration with Indigenous Elders and community members. This project focuses on advocating, supporting, and protecting our turtle relatives and kin.

ElsaMarie D’Silva is the founder of Red Dot Foundation (India) and president of Red Dot Foundation Global (U.S.A.). She created the technology platform Safecity, which crowdsources personal experiences of sexual violence and abuse in public and private spaces globally. Visit www.elsamariedsilva.com.

Colin Ellard is an environmental neuroscientist and head of the Urban Realities Laboratory at the University of Waterloo in Canada. He is broadly interested in the impact of urban design on psychological state. His most recent book is Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life.

Sami Ferwati, a founder of Untitled Planning, strives to create value that honours both people and place. Guided by his diverse lived experiences, his work is shaped by the integrity of his interactions across different spaces and places. Committed to community progression, his approach centres on knowledge-building, emphasizing human adaptability and resilience.

Jake Tobin Garrett is a writer, illustrator, and cartoonist in Toronto whose work has appeared in the Toronto Star, Broken Pencil, New Quarterly, Chatelaine, Maisonneuve, and more. You can find him online at jaketobin.ca.

Daniel Gordon is a management consultant in the health care sector. He has a background in urban planning with an interest in housing policy and the connection between urban planning and public health. Daniel enjoys biking around his hometown of Toronto and exploring new cities.

Kofi Hope is a Rhodes Scholar and has a doctorate from Oxford University. He is the co-founder of consulting firm Monumental and Urbanist-in-Residence at the University of Toronto’s School of Cities. He previously founded the CEE Centre for Young Black Professionals, Canada’s largest charity serving Black youth.

Ameer Idreis is a writer, playwright, and urbanist fascinated by the stories cities tell and the ones we create about them. He has penned novels, essays, and stories for the stage that explore place, identity, and the human experience. Ameer holds an MSc in Planning and finds inspiration in watching coming-of-age films, curating niche playlists, and discovering the hidden corners of Toronto’s neighbourhoods.

Lorraine Johnson is the author of numerous books on habitat gardening and tending the earth. Her most recent is A Garden for the Rusty-Patched Bumblebee: Creating Habitat for Native Pollinators (titled A Northern Gardener’s Guide to Native Plants and Pollinators in the U.S.), co-authored with Sheila Colla.

John Kamp is an urban and landscape designer, writer, and facilitator who runs the landscape and design practice Prairieform, where he has developed innovative tools to engage people of all ages and backgrounds in design. He is the co-author with James Rojas of Dream Play Build: Hands-On Community Engagement for Enduring Space and Places.

Shari Kasman is a Toronto-based writer and multidisciplinary artist. Her books include Galleria: The Mall That Time Forgot and Rocks Don’t Move and Other Questionable Facts. She has tried fixing Toronto through urban interventions such as Bloordale Beach and spoof route diversion signs for the Toronto Transit Commission.

Perry King is an author, communications strategist, and urbanist based in Toronto. His first book, Rebound: Sports, Community, and the Inclusive City, was published by Coach House Books in 2021. He is working on his next book, on Blackness and baseball, for Dundurn Press.

Kite (Dr. Suzanne Kite) is an Oglála Lakhˇóta performance artist, visual artist, and composer, concerned with contemporary Lakota ontologies through research-creation, computational media, and performance practice.

Alexandra Lambropoulos, a founder of Untitled Planning and Urban Limitrophe, is committed to pushing for greater civic accountability from both the individual and collective scale, developing resilient cities centred on community, creativity, and care. Inspired by the term limitrophe, her approach highlights the importance of the in-between space from neighbouring ideas.

Shane Laptiste, a Toronto-based architect, is a founder and principal of Studio of Contemporary Architecture (Soca). His work explores how communal narratives and spatial imaginaries can be translated into built form. Soca, recipient of the 2023 Canadian Prix de Rome, is contemplating the ways in which Black communities create spaces of joy.

Nina-Marie E. Lister is Professor of Planning at Toronto Metropolitan University, where she founded and directs the Ecological Design Lab. Winner of the Margolese National Design for Living Prize, Lister is an ecological designer whose work connects people to nature in cities. Her meadow and habitat garden once got her in trouble.

Karon Liu has been the staff food reporter with the Toronto Star since 2015. Before that he was the food reporter for the alt-weekly The Grid. He has also contributed to Coach House Books’ What We Talk About When We Talk About Dumplings.

Sneha Mandhan (she/her) works at the intersections of planning, urban design, architecture, research, and community engagement. She consults on city-building and engagement projects, teaches courses in urban design, and holds a master’s in city planning from MIT and an undergraduate degree in architecture from Nit, Bhopal. She successfully defended her PhD in planning at the University of Toronto recently.

Fadi Masoud is associate professor of Landscape Architecture and Urbanism at the University of Toronto and the director of the Centre for Landscape Research. Masoud currently leads projects on climate adaptation and the design of resilient public landscapes. He sits on Waterfront Toronto’s Design Review Panel and helped launch the City of Toronto’s first Resilience Strategy through its Urban Flooding Working Group.

Sabine Matheson has been hip-deep in the politics of regional governance for almost thirty years, first as a municipal affairs advisor in the Harris government, and then as a partner at StrategyCorp Inc., a Canadian management, government relations, and communications consultancy.

Shawn Micallef is the author of Frontier City: Toronto on the Verge of Greatness and The Trouble with Brunch. The updated edition of Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto was released in 2024. He’s a Toronto Star columnist, instructor at the University of Toronto, Senior Fellow at Massey College, and a co-founder of Spacing magazine.

Kimahli Powell is a senior leader in the Ingo field with expertise in community-building and strategic advocacy with a focus on international development, law and policy, Hiv/Aids, and internally displaced persons. Among his career highlights is supporting Dignitas International’s innovative work in supporting community-based system health strengthening in Malawi, as well as helping launch the HIV Legal Network’s constitutional challenge to Jamaica’s anti-sodomy law while developing a monitoring and evaluation framework on legal advocacy. At Rainbow Railroad, Kimahli led the organization through transformational growth, helping thousands of people in the process. He completed his undergraduate studies in political science at the University of Ottawa and holds a Doctor of Laws from the University of Victoria. Kimahli is currently a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights in the Kennedy School at Harvard University.

Wesley Reibeling is a queer multidisciplinary artist and city-builder dedicated to inclusive, equity-driven urbanism. As co-chair of Jane’s Walk Toronto and Toronto program manager at Park People, Wesley blends creative engagement with advocacy, championing queer resilience and belonging. His work spans public space activation, storytelling, and participatory arts, bridging communities through collaboration.

James Rojas is an urban planner and artist who runs the planning, model-building, and community-outreach practice Place It! Rojas is also one of the few nationally recognized urban planners to examine U.S. Latinx cultural influences on urban design and sustainability.

Daniel Rotsztain is the Urban Geographer, a writer, cartographer, and illustrator whose work examines our relationships to the places we inhabit. He is the co-lead of plazaPops, a community-led initiative to transform parking spaces into people places.

André Sorensen is professor in the Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto. His current research examines urban institutions, institutional change processes, and urban governance, with a focus on urban land and property development, infrastructure provision, and urban form. His monograph The Making of Urban Japan: Cities and Planning from Edo to the 21st Century was awarded the book prize of the International Planning History Society in 2004. His recent paper ‘Taking Critical Junctures Seriously,’ published in Planning Perspectives, won the journal’s Best Paper Award in 2024.

Brendan Stewart, associate professor of landscape architecture at the University of Guelph, focuses on adapting overlooked landscapes through community design processes. Co-leader of plazaPops, he aims to create accessible and inclusive public spaces that enhance social connection. He holds a Bla from Guelph and an MLA from Uc Berkeley.

Chiyi Tam (MScPl, she/her) is an urban planner and anti-displacement organizer. Chiyi is the managing director of the recently established Toronto Chinatown Land Trust. She frequently supports groups from all corners of Turtle Island, exploring community ownership and wealth building as an anti-displacement strategy for racial and economic justice in municipalities of all sizes.

Tatum Taylor Chaubal is a writer, heritage planner, and Texan transplant currently working in Toronto. She holds a master’s degree in historic preservation from Columbia University, where she wrote her thesis on interpreting queer heritage sites. Tatum has co-edited three anthologies for Coach House Books on the histories of marginalized communities, including The Ward Uncovered (2018).

Jason Thorne, chief planner for the City of Toronto, is the former general manager of Planning and Economic Development at the City of Hamilton, where he was responsible for overseeing the City’s land-use planning and development approvals. His reflections on the role of messy urbanism and how it can be better embraced in the planning of Canadian cities draw upon his urban explorations across Southeast Asia in 2024.

Dr. Eileen de Villa is Toronto’s former Medical Officer of Health, in which capacity she led the largest local public health agency in Canada, serving Toronto’s 3 million+ residents. She has been at the forefront of public health efforts in Toronto, notably the City’s Covid-19 response and the largest vaccination campaign in the city’s history.

Tura Cousins Wilson is an architect, educator, and co-founder of the Studio of Contemporary Architecture, based in Toronto. He is inspired by creating uplifting spaces of beauty and contends that architecture’s power lies in its ability to transform collective imaginations and narratives into reality.

Robbie Wing is an artist, musician, and composer born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. His practice focuses on composition, sonic sculpture, psychogeographies, and performance.

Acknowledgements

Anthologies are quintessentially team projects, and we, the co-editors, Zahra Ebrahim, John Lorinc, Dylan Reid and, Leslie Woo, would like our readers to know how thoroughly we enjoyed the opportunity to make common cause on the book you’re now holding – kicking around ideas, having excellent conversations about how cities work and what we love about them, and then working with the many talented and insightful contributors to bring the whole volume to fruition. Collaboration is a word that gets thrown around a lot these days, but Messy Cities felt, at every stage, like the genuine article. Thank you sincerely to all who participated.

Dylan Reid: I am grateful to my wife, Molly, for her encouragement and for suggesting the Mfa program that provided the inception for this book, to my mentors at the King’s College Mfa in creative non-fiction program, David Hayes and Gillian Turnbull, and to the writing group that came out of it – Virginia, Robin, Nancy, Wendy, and Chris. I am also grateful to my father for his constant interest in my writing. I also want to thank all the people who took the time to talk to me about their messy urban projects and experiences but who did not make it into this book – your insights helped to shape the book, and my understanding of cities. Thank you for everything you do for your city.

Zahra Ebrahim: My lifelong obsession with books and reading can be credited to my incredible parents. Our journeys to libraries and bookstores, wherever we found ourselves in the city and in the world, transformed books from objects to meaningful companions, and made the process of shaping one especially magical. Every moment of developing this book has been a joy, and I have to thank Dylan Reid and John Lorinc for welcoming me into this special project. Big love to my partner, Brandon, who always has the perfect prompt to move me from writer’s block to flow, and to all of the people who make exquisite messiness in cities around the world, thank you – our cities are better for it.

Leslie Woo: Gratitude to my grown-up kids, Laurin and Evan, who are the reason this small island girl is driven to transform cities to places of belonging: it is for their future. Warmth to my partner, Noah, who encouraged me on this adventure. And finally, to the many city-builders, established and rising, who have touched my own journey through this mess that we all call home – you are all my inspiration.

John Lorinc: I would like to thank the many editors who let me write about cities, this vast and ever-replenishing trove of stories that never ceases to fascinate me. Over the years, this work has also enabled me to spend time talking to all sorts of people who think about, live in, and shape cities, and it is never less than a privilege to be able to have those conversations and so enrich my understanding.

The co-editors would like to thank the team at Coach House Books – Alana Wilcox, Crystal Sikma, Sasha Tate-Howarth, James Lindsay, Phil Bardach, Rick/Simon, Emily Cook, Stuart Ross, Julliana Santos, Olivia Parker, John DeJesus, and, of course, Stan Bevington – for taking a rather messy idea and turning it into a concrete, beautifully designed reality.

Photo Credits

p. 29, map by Ameer Idreis; p. 30, photo by Ameer Idreis; p. 33, photo by Ameer Idreis; p. 36, photo by Ameer Idreis; p. 40, photo by Leslie Woo; p. 41, photo by Leslie Woo; p. 44, photo by Jason Thorne; p. 47, photo by Jason Thorne; p. 77, photo by Shari Kasman; p. 82, photo by Shari Kasman; p. 85, map developed with research assistant Matthew Canaran; p. 89, photo by Duane Cole; p. 90, photo by Kat Rizza; p. 157, photo by Lorraine Johnson; p. 177, illustration courtesy of Jake Tobin Garret; p. 201, photo by Andre Sorensen;p. 239, photo by Albano García, photographic research for Arquis Review (2017); p. 240, photos by Andrés Borthagaray; p. 243, photo by Leslie Woo; p. 244, photos by Leslie Woo; p. 245 (left), photo by Matthew Blackett; p. 245 (right), photo by Dylan Reid; p. 246, photo by Dylan Reid; p. 247 (top), photo by Matthew Blackett; p. 247 (bottom), photo by Matthew Blackett; p. 248, photos by Matthew Blackett; p. 249, photos by Matthew Blackett; p. 250, photo by Leslie Woo; p. 312, photo by Zahra Ebrahim.

Typeset in Albertina and Helvetica Neue.

Printed at the Coach House on bpNichol Lane in Toronto, Ontario, on FSC-certified Sustana recycled paper, which was manufactured in Saint-Jérôme, Quebec. This book was printed with vegetable-based ink on a 1973 Heidelberg Kord offset litho press. Its pages were folded on a Baumfolder, gathered by hand, bound on a Sulby Auto-Minabinda, and trimmed on a Polar single-knife cutter.

Coach House is located in Toronto, which is on the traditional territory of many nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples, and is now home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples. We acknowledge that Toronto is covered by Treaty 13 with the Mississaugas of the Credit. We are grateful to live and work on this land.

Edited by Zahra Ebrahim, Dylan Reid, Leslie Woo, and John Lorinc

Cover design by David Gee

Interior design by Crystal Sikma

Coach House Books

80 bpNichol Lane

Toronto On M5S 3J4

Canada

mail@chbooks.com

www.chbooks.com