Perfect City by Joe Berridge

Author:Joe Berridge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Sutherland House Inc.

8

TORONTO – THE ACCIDENTAL METROPOLIS

Every year I start my graduate class at the University of Toronto planning school with an exercise on city rankings. Comparative ratings of cities are much the media fashion—I dump about fifty on my students, ranking everything from stock market power to mobile phone usage, gay-friendliness to airport connectivity. The wonk in me wants to foster their suspicion of such indices by examining the often flimsy methodology they employ, but the urban traveler in me wants them to listen carefully to the song these sirens are singing. The rankings are individually suspect but collectively they say a lot about what is going on in the world’s cities. I ask the students what story the rankings tell about Toronto. I get two reactions: shock, followed by disbelief.

Shock, because by evidence of comparisons with other world cities, Toronto is a huge success, a city that scores highly on the soundness of its finance, tech and business sectors and on the quality of its social, community and cultural life. There are, as the range of rankings show, endless ways to assess a city’s success but Toronto is regularly in the top five in the world for its livability and culture, in the top ten for its financial services, international accessibility, creativity and innovation, and in the top twenty for its business clout. Various analysts have tried combining these measures into a composite index of urban significance. Depending on how they weight the numbers, Toronto generally lands between sixth and sixteenth place as most significant city in the world.

The numbers cannot lie—well, individually they might but taken together they tell a clear story of Toronto’s sudden global prominence, inducing in my students, as well as in the general city public, that second reaction of disbelief—almost horror—because this story is profoundly at odds with the city’s self-narrative. Torontonians see Toronto as a place of inadequacy, unimportance, incompetence and inequity. It is an ugly, expensive, second-rate town. Its aspirations to a world-class status are preposterous.

Which raises two fascinating questions: how did this no-account dorp become globally significant? And why is Toronto’s self-image so at war with its actual status?

Outside observers of the city are often struck by these apparent contradictions. One global urban analyst recently commented that Toronto is the only world city whose publicly promoted stories about itself are less impressive than its reality. Which is something of a relief, given that the world of urbanism is over-filled with boosterism. To be at a global cities conference is to be in a room with a herd of Michelin men, their inflated civic personas bouncing off each other. Toronto stands apart. “The biggest city in the world nobody’s ever heard of,” according to a speaker at one such European conference. Toronto’s reticence flows from the core of its psyche. It is bred in its Belfast, Scotch-Irish bones. It is a city where, unlike every other place in which I have worked, the phrase “world class’” is used as a negative epithet, denoting hubristic self-promotion.

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