I’m about to wax a little bit politically in my allotted column width for HeroX, so my apologies at the forefront. But when I think about HeroX, what crowd-sourcing a great idea really means — ultimately, leaving it up to people to decide what works best for them, not the systems in which they live — I think about my hometown, Toronto.
I think about what she’s become, where she’s been, who she once was. More than anything, I think about how a city of great ideas sits teeming with them, all but quivering with unrealized intellectual potential, and it makes me frustrated. And through that frustration — something many of us Torontonians share, no question — I think about the great forward leaps that might result from that uninvested energy. Like a frown using so many more facial muscles than a smile, a negative status quo all but pokes and prods and wrenches great ideas from the people with flaming sticks, to put it mildly. Maybe that’s where we are as a city. If anything, maybe that’s the constructive element.
And for cities like Toronto, held hostage by partisan ideas of what a city should be — despite the science of it all that says otherwise — maybe that’s our hope.
Here’s the thing: I’ve lived in Toronto since the summer of 1999, back when I was a first-year student at York University. Before then, I lived in British Columbia, on the sandy, rainy, occasionally sun-beaten shores of Vancouver Island.
Coming here from there, I had negative first impressions of Canada’s largest city, as I’d have with any city. Over time, though, what I saw on the streets and in the lane ways, what made the parks bloom with life in the depths of the urban jungle, inspired the hell out of me. This was back in the heyday of Mel Lastman, too — a guy whose idea of running a city involved fibreglass moose and awkward photo ops more than city-building or big ideas. We weren’t the Toronto of David Miller yet, the civic regime that defined Toronto’s growth spurt between 2003 and 2010. But even then, with Mel Lastman wearing the civic medallion, we were doing pretty okay.
But when David Miller came along? Oh man, forget about it. Overnight, it’s like the floorboards were pulled up at city hall and all the great, unexplored, potentially transformative ideas of being a global city came out to play. In the years before that, we had already seen wind turbines down at the waterfront and bike lanes championed from the east end to the west. But with David Miller came ideas, some unexpected, that upended what people think about when it comes to a city. Ideas like tower renewal, in which the looming high-rises of Toronto’s suburbs would be retrofitted with solar technology, geothermal power generation, and other additions, making the city’s many apartment blocks self-sustaining nodes unto themselves. More than that, they’d feed into the system, too, taking the untold watts of power they generate and sustaining the power grid at large.
Or how about the green bin program? Before these heady, big-thinking days, a compost bin for every household in Toronto wasn’t a given. Neither was a green roof on every building, commercial, residential or industrial, that would mitigate the heat-island effects of a large city. Rather than the old days of the Spadina Expressway, a civic poison-pill that Jane Jacobs fought with her best, brightest ideas — successfully, I might add — the Toronto of the Miller Years thought about itself from the other direction: how a well-placed meadow of grass on a rooftop could serve everyone, not how a looming eyesore like a freeway or a casino might serve a select few, and only for a fleeting time. We were a global city nursed by simple, revolutionary ideas, and by the time David Miller left office, we were an exemplar to the world.
Ultimately, though, there’s a cautionary tale to all of this, no matter who’s in charge. Despite all the great things that David Miller did while he was in office, we can’t just sit around and wait for the next golden civic saviour to come along before change happens — and that goes for all cities. Whether we’re talking about Chicago or Toronto or Brussels or Jakarta or Campbell River, British Columbia, what can sustain a city, making it greater, already exists within its civic boundaries. I’m talking about its people. You and me. Taxpayers, voters, activists, residents.
During my time as a journalist in Toronto — if you’ll forgive me for getting even more autobiographical — I’ve been inspired by what Toronto’s academics and city councillors have to say, but twice so by the supernova-brilliant collective intellect of its ordinary, tax-paying, web-surfing people.
Many of us live in cities, too. And if we don’t, we live in places that are affected by the same thinking, the same question of how to make limited resources work for as many as possible — ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million, whatever. And every place is different. Every neighbourhood a personality of its own, every city an ecosystem incomparable to anywhere else on the planet. And with cities having the capacity to mitigate the effects of climate change, to use one example — after all, our towns are the repository for most of the globe’s population — we might be the salvation of the world.
So look at your own back yard, wherever you are, and ask yourself: what bold, simple, overlooked idea could save the world?
