Whenever I am asked to describe what Toronto feels like, I always respond as follows: it’s a big city without the big city feel. Toronto is a city that never likes to show off. None of the new buildings littering the skyline claim any height records, nor do we top the leaderboards in Michelin-star restaurants. But it used to not be this way.
I grew up mostly within a homogenous Asian suburb of Toronto. For most of my life, I was primarily exposed to a suburban lifestyle. That is, until high school when I enrolled in a Downtown school. To get there, I needed to commute by train, subway, and streetcar every day. Although this seems like a waste of time to many, to me it wasn’t: commuting allowed me to immerse myself in the city’s vibrant culture. I could tune into conversations on the train to hear about what was happening in the city, and sometimes I changed my commute route to explore different communities along the way. It was these experiences that allowed me to experience the excitement of urban life, leading me to discover my urban exploration hobby and a record collecting hobby (as record stores were only located Downtown).
But most importantly, these hobbies fostered a new way of how I view the built environment around me. Every time I’d explore places Downtown, I’d browse the City of Toronto Archives to see what each area looked like decades prior, owing to my record collecting hobby that got me interested in 1960s history. It was here that I discovered the mixed legacy that the city had with urban development. During the 1960s, the city embraced bold ideas of modernism and of a “car-oriented future”. We began rapidly tearing up pedestrian and streetcar lanes for cars, and razed low-income neighborhoods that were viewed as blighted, constructing urban renewal projects for the sake of “progress”.
The future we got (Highway 401, circa 1978) (Government of Ontario Archives)
But as quickly as this started, these projects were axed in the 1970s, facing community Urban Revolts led by Jane Jacobs. This mixed legacy is why Toronto never builds anything too extreme or showy, for fear of causing significant problems to its residents. And this carefulness was why I could attend high school Downtown and explore so many neighbourhoods in the city, because the public transit I took was never axed as it was planned to be back in the 1960s.
How it started vs. how it's going (BlogTO)
Whenever I explore Toronto, or other cities for that matter, I am reminded to always explore cities using their public transit networks and learn about how the city has changed over time. My experience living in Toronto taught me that urban planning has a mixed legacy, and I can fully understand why Toronto does not like to feel like a big city for fear of projecting bad planning practices on its facade. But this brings humble excitement about Toronto’s future, as I know that every step the city takes is another opportunity for someone else to relive my own walkable, urban experience.
Positively Torontonian (own photo)
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