The staff of the city’s chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat may be the smartest land use planners in North America. But no one would be rash enough to believe that they are capable on their own of creating a plan which makes Toronto’s downtown sparkle in the next few decades.
Except Jennifer Keesmaat.
Apparently she has such confidence in her staff that she has determined they are the ones who will determine the direction of the downtown and the mechanics of how to get there.
It’s a pretty confident strategy. The project is called TOCore, and the city’s website lists the many studies undertaken by staff and consultants retained by staff, all fodder for the final plan due within two years.
No one would think that developers on their own could be entrusted to sort out the future of the downtown. Or, for that matter, environmentalists, community groups, faith leaders, artists, social workers, business people or some other segment of society. Few of us are that simplistic.
Each of those sectors has a terrific amount of important knowledge about certain aspects of this complex city, but on their own they can’t make an innovative and satisfying plan.
It’s the same with Keesmaat’s planners. Whatever they come up with on their own or with their consultants will be thin, brittle and will probably antagonize more than assuage.
A collaborative approach is needed, where representatives of these sectors sit down with each other over a series of meetings to see what they can agree on and how they can resolve their differences in the public interest. The key is intensive dialogue that leads to new insights.
When Toronto City Council decided in 1973 that it wanted to replan the downtown to ensure it was not just an area of sterile new large office towers, it appointed the Core Area Task Force, which included representatives from these different sectors. Under the chairmanship of Alderman Colin Vaughan, the task force looked at various scenarios, and the city planners reported to and took direction from it. That’s how the central area plan was devised, a plan that introduced housing into the downtown, saved heritage structures, sorted out transportation options, improved the streetscape and generally put Toronto at the forefront of cities in North America. It was the central area plan process that led Time magazine to put Mayor David Crombie on the cover and led to Toronto being called “the city that works.”
It is hard to understand why Keesmaat and city council are not willing to use that model now when the downtown is certainly faced with some big choices if problems are to be resolved in a positive fashion. Maybe it’s an unwillingness to recognize that collaboration is a much more effective strategy than pretending you have all the answers.
Instead, Keesmaat is promising that her planners will report every three or four months to a select group, which she calls the leadership table, as though a few two-hour meetings four or five times a year can ever generate the frisson necessary for creativity.
She has also commissioned a firm to bring her a representative group of several dozen Toronto residents in the hope that this group, few of whom will know much of anything about the intricacies of complex city decision making, will be able to make intelligent choices. It’s more show than substance.
As well, the process in place has no high-level political leadership. As usual, Mayor John Tory is off to one side when he and his team need to be committed 100 per cent to a collaborative process just as Mayor Crombie was 40 years ago. An opportunity is being wasted as Toronto is in the midst of a growth cycle that needs to be carefully redirected to ensure maximum public benefits.
One wonders what Jane Jacobs would say to all this if she were still with us on this, the 100th year of her birth. American critic Saskia Sassen recently noted that Jane understood that it is “the weaving of multiple strands that makes the city so much more than the sum of its residents, or its grand buildings, or its corporate economy.”
That’s what we are missing.
