City
Toronto: "Shabby" or "Vibrant"?
It's that time of the year again! The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, the roads are crumbling, the fastfood wrappers are flapping about! Can you smell Spring in the air? I do, and it smells like someone just stepped into a big dog pile that has been carefully preserved through the winter by the almost-but-not-quite-record 194 centimeters of snow. Welcome to Toronto the Beautiful!
Sarcasm aside, spring is the time of year when Toronto hardly looks its best. The snow has already melted to reveal the underlying layer of filth, and the green leaves and colourful flowers that turn drab into cheerful have not yet appeared. This is probably one of the reasons why many Torontonians become especially aware of the ugly stains and tears in our urban fabric, and some go as far as to proclaim Toronto ultimately shabby.
And even if you love Toronto with all your heart as I do, you have to admit they have some pretty strong arguments to back up their use of that strong term. From garbage-strewn streets to ad-plastered transformer poles, from a mismatched hodgepodge of street furniture to tiny dried-out trees in big concrete boxes, from leaky subway station roofs to abandoned storefronts to cracked sidewalks to never-ending construction to our poor neglected waterfront... The truth is plainly obvious: we are seedier than Singapore, meaner than Munich, and maybe even scruffier than New York, since New York has really been cleaning up its act lately. Perhaps in not-so-distant future people will start referring to it as "Toronto run by the Swiss".
Yet there is a point of view that "shabby" might not be so bad. Few people would argue that broken, filthy, run-down urban spaces are good in and of themselves, but maybe the chaos and cacophony of urban space is necessary for a city's vitality? Maybe the vibrant indie spirit of Toronto would be stifled in a sterile gentrified a.k.a. non-shabby environment? Maybe you can't have true urbanity without a certain amount of urban grit?
Granted, the city is a living organism, and the only way it could be perfect is if it's hollowed out, mummified, and put up on display for naive tourists. Some shabbiness is probably a necessary evil, and some would even argue it's not shabbiness so much as "character". But would Toronto's creative energies suddenly wane if abandoned storefronts turned into thriving businesses, if our sidewalks weren't made obstacle courses by dusty newspaper boxes, if we had more green space downtown? At what point does making Toronto more beautiful turn into evil "gentrification" that's so despised by every hippie out there?
I know, more questions than answers. So what do you think? Are we "shabby"? Or are we "vibrant"? Both? Neither?
Photo: Untitled by Jason Tavares
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Wait until June and we'll see who's shabby!
Alex Delarge: I do, but she has to look good for me sometimes..she cant always be letting herself gooo..*yikes*
The station bellow in the waiting area has huge pubbles and no signs to caution people?
I work as a liability analyst at an insurance company and i know that there is alot of exposure for injury claims
The city isn't exactly shabby; I say it's more
careworn than anything else.
That's what the 20-minute clean-up is all about.
As an ideal state I would be perfectly fine with shabby but vibrant retail/architecture as long as the landscaping/streets were kept clean and sparkling.
Let's start planting some conifers around the city when time comes for replanting. A few well placed ones will help fill the holes created when the leafy trees lose their leaves.
And even leafy trees don't look that bad without their leaves if they are given a chance to grow. Of course planters are going to look bare when the trees are frail and thin.
Get rid of the choking cement planters!
Toronto has a real grungy, filthy, dusty, trash-blown, dead tree kind of honesty to it. Like the way horrible scars are beautiful.
I once said to someone while back packing in Europe: Toronto is like family, you know it well enough to know it's really f*cked up, but you love it cause it's yours.
And like apetimberlake said, just take a drive to any town south of Algonquin and you'll come screaming back to downtown TO with a new-found appreciation.
A bigger concern for me in Toronto than shabbiness is the air quality. Shabbiness doesn't affect anyone's health, and it plays a big part in making the city seem gray and filthy.
" No money, no pride, a brain-dead hipster intelligentsia that views the shabby and decrepit as "having character" and celebrates the mediocre, fears and sneers at excellence, restraint and discipine, and encourages sloth, indifference and contempt of the public realm in the form of squalor ("grit", as in we're not Coburg etc.), vandalism ("street art") and endless, mindless spam-like postering ("reclaiming public space"), and there you are. Shabby is as shabby does. We get what we deserve, really. "
and
" I think Toronto's shabbiness speaks to the twin Canadian problems of being a) cheap, and, b) a general contempt toward aesthetic considerations as a 'frill'. "
This city is vibrant, but shabby. And not shabby in a NYC way -- shabby as in cheaply constructed, like nobody here really gives a damn about quality or longevity.
Example of a recent offender? That urban beach nonsense at the waterfront. A cheap stunt done for magazine appeal. All the chairs were busted within a month.
If I was a super rich philanthropist myself, I might give everyone in Toronto a plane ticket to visit an American or European city to see where the bar really stands these days. With the blinders ripped off their eyes and their heads full of ideas, the citizenry might then be able to elect leaders who could make some real improvements.
PS - Concrete planters are death sentences for trees by the way -- no landscape architect in their right mind has used them in 20 years. Why they persist in Toronto is a strange mystery.
I told him all I knew. Which was this. Toronto had been abandoned by everyone. Including Torontonians.
The overhead wires and wooden poles are symbols of our city's aesthetic failure.
I don't know about you, but in my opinion, Toronto's shabby and vibrant all in one package. And as for the litter content, the 20-minute clean up was essentially effective in cleaning some of that up, but we all know we can't BAN garbage (the same way banning certain drugs is ineffective).