The Accidental City
The Transformation of Toronto
By Robert Fulford
Houghton Mifflin Company, $24.95
ISBN 0-395-77307-5
Review by Christine Kreyling
How to get public life-what urban critic Jane Jacobs calls "the ballet of the streets"-into the city center is the primary preoccupation of North American municipalities as the 20th century draws to a close. Toronto managed to turn the trick, according to journalist Robert Fulford, by a series of accidents.
In the 1950s, Toronto was a private city, "a place where the best meals were eaten at home and no one noticed the absence of street life and public spaces . . . a collection of villages and small towns, self-contained, unknown to each other."
Since the mid-1960s, "city-building in Toronto has become an art of public revelation rather than private expression." What happened?
Fulford describes a series of events that made the marketplace a city:
- At the 1965 dedication of New City Hall, all eyes were focused on the dramatic modernism of the architecture. The adjacent public plaza appeared to be incidental, but for Toronto it turned out to be a more radical departure than the building itself. "It was, unabashedly, a civic space . . . a stage where people could act out their beliefs and understand themselves as citizens rather than consumers and workers."
- Toronto is built over a dense network of ravines that the city's footprint has tried to stamp out or ignore. In 1954, Hurricane Hazel filled these ravines with water, flooding huge sections of the metropolis. In response, the city began buying up ravine properties and turning them into public parks and conservation areas. The process significantly contributed to Toronto's transformation into a city conscious of public spaces.
- The Canadian National Tower began as the centerpiece of a vast 1960s redevelopment project that never happened. Its ostensible purpose-distributing television signalsÑbecame irrelevant shortly after it was completed. It became, instead, a hugely successful tourist attraction and the logo of Toronto. The tower reinforced the city's sense of itself as worthy of attention.
- One aspect of Toronto's new urbanism is no accident. Jane Jacobs lives there. The author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities abandoned New York and chose Toronto. The city got a merciless critic, who became a potent force in restoring of old neighborhoods and the building of neighborhoods.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.
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