UTOpia: Towards a New Toronto.
Edited by Jason McBride and Alana Wilcox
Coach House Books, 2005
By Craig Finnigan
Posted February 15th, 2006
The idea of building a utopian community is an old one. Every city or state is started with a dream for perfection that never seems to last very long. Too many conflicting ideas. Not enough money. Toronto is no stranger to this.
In the early aughts, the idea of Torontopia took off, quickly plateaued and then nearly died. After years of complaining that there was nothing to get excited about in this town, suddenly there was everything to get excited about: a new mayor took to City Hall, bringing with him positive ideas to make Toronto a better place; a music scene that was finally coming into its own after years of hard work by a tight group of friends and co-conspirators who used their music as a stepping stone for a social paradigm shift.
And maybe things died off for a minute there. Too much self-congratulation, not enough new blood. But with the release of UTOpia the idea is back.
Edited by Jason McBride and Alana Wilcox and featuring essays from Toronto residents and admirers, UTOpia paints a beautiful picture of what this city is, and how much more it could be.
Erik Rutherford discusses Paris, a city too caught-up in its own myth to allow growth or change. "Paris," he says, "is becoming a pastiche of itself, an airbrushed city of reconditioned stone." Toronto, though, is "a city where the beginning is forgotten and the end is unknown." Paris is past its prime and too focused on the good old days. We're still figuring out what we want our city to be, which gives us freedom. It's an interesting essay to kick off the book with, because it underlines Toronto's youth, arguably the best and worst thing about it.
The book is divided into loosely gathered sections that are supposed to deal with common issues, but I found them unnecessary and a little kitsch; the section names continue to make a visual gag of the title (TOpography, TOols and TOys).
Edward Keenan discusses Toronto's music scene and its incestuous groupings (Wavelength, the Toronto Public Space Committee, Blocks and Trampoline Hall) and puts them on a dangerous pedestal, giving them their due accolades, while mythologizing them. Still, the essay gives an interesting and much-needed history of the current scene for those not in the know (myself included).
These essays I've mentioned come out fast and strong, but towards the middle, in the section dealing mostly with Toronto's architecture, there are some serious duds. Dylan Reid discusses at length University of Toronto's campus in the book's most tedious entry. Philip Evans manages a close second though, dissecting the city's sidewalks.
The waterfront gets some deserved attention in essays by Jacob Allderdice and Sheila Heti. Allderdice lays out a plan to convert the island airport to a miniature city not unlike the community on Toronto Island: a car-free zone utilizing a single streetcar line and bicycles. It's a foolish utopian dream, probably not possible within the confines of dollar signs and red tape, but still a magical idea. Imagine living on an island park!
Heti's piece is less an essay than a free-form poem that sounds again, slightly magical. She asks for the waterfront to be a stretch of beaches and caves and coves like they were in the thirties, complete with cigarette women and hot dog boys, a place where money and the work-a-day world are forgotten.
James Bow talks about the transit system, the subway lines in particular, giving a brief history of times when extensions to York University and beyond weren't so far-fetched. He also mentions a map (pictured), which expands the subway system five-fold, with routes criss-crossing like they should in a proper metropolis. There's a possibility that subway extension could come back under the spotlight, but it's unlikely –– the city is focused heavily on augmenting and adding to existing surface routes using streetcars.
The final section, TOmorrow, deals with the future of Toronto in a series of interesting 'what if' pieces by such notables as Johnny Dovercourt and Dave Meslin. Some of the book's most promising essays are here, but few of them spend enough time on the transition period between imperfect present and utopian future.
Now that the Toronto scene has come together to envision a light at the end of the tunnel, let's hope they can stay together to dig us all out.