GTA Trendwatch #9: We built this city

Gang-related carnage in the Downtown Yonge district risks seeming like a blight on a decade of renewal effort, but downtown Toronto’s centre of gravity was already spreading well beyond a strip of record stores anyhow. The genuinely surreal scene at Dundas Square in mid-November – where a sombre anti-gun violence rally was interrupted by a pillowfight – demonstrated the contrast between the harsher Toronto being depicted in headlines and an ongoing quest to make such exuberant extemporaneousness possible in public areas. The shortcomings of this town can usually be chalked up to bad planning – but efforts to reconstruct the housing mishap that is Regent Park, making the waterfront feel like less of a fortress, and cultural buildings engaged with the outside theoretically add up to an urban renaissance. Condominiums pitching a high-rise, high-tech and high-maintenance solitude may not do much in terms of fostering community; a kind of spirit that’s more easily roused in opposition to proposals like that millionaire monstrosity adjacent to The ROM. The vacant Planetarium is just one of several endangered High Modernist structures, the embodiment of space age optimism, whose perilous fate has moved into the spotlight – passion for the Riverdale Hospital may yet save it from demolition. What’s clear is how conversation about places and spaces has reached far beyond the architecture and development set, resulting in a period where even a ridiculous rash of graffiti on a Starbucks can provoke a genuine dialogue about the process of gentrification. No matter how much scrutiny each construction scheme receives, the spontaneous possibilities within the open source city shouldn’t let anyone down.