2013/10/17: The Suburban Revolution

Only 11 per cent of the Toronto region’s population live in the active core neighbourhoods. More and more people are moving to Toronto’s booming downtown, one condo tower after the other is being built. From 2006 to 2011, Toronto’s core neighbourhoods grew by 52,000 people, the so called transit suburbs grew by another 26,000 people. But: in the same time, 390,000 people moved into automobile dependent outer suburbs! The Greater Toronto Area is growing by about 100,000 people every year, and more than 80 per cent of the regional growth happens in the outer suburbs or exurbs.

I took these figures from David Gordon’s Toronto Star article “Condo boom masks out-of-control-sprawl". The article mentions all the problems caused by ongoing sprawl (“social health implications for those who are too young, too old or too poor to drive a car”; higher energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions; higher obesity rates; …). I had to smile on this reader’s opinion published some days later: “biological scientists (unlike geographers) blame obesity not on cars, but on corn”. The biological scientists may be right at first glance, but geographers are obviously better in thinking outside the box :)

I use this newspaper article as a starting point to finally post something about the conference “A suburban revolution? – An international conference on bringing the fringe to the centre of global urban research and practice” which was organised by the City Institute almost. I won’t post an abstract of all keynotes and panels I attended, but at least some examples of the different topics:

Claire Dwyer explained how the “Highway to Heaven”, a collection of religious buildings from different religions along Road #5 in Richmond, British Columbia (yes, mum and dad, that’s what I showed you on our way to Vancouver Island), developed and which unintended consequences (celebration and marketing of “spectacular multiculturalism”; development of “regional religious centres”) it caused.

Rachel Heiman presented the concept of supporting local shopping with tax credits in the suburban New Jersey Town of Marlboro. Watch this movie to see how the system works.

Pierre Filion, one of my personal heroes on the conference, talked about problems in achieving recentralization and the persistence of dispersed suburbanism. According to Pierre Filion, the most important factors for a successful city are density, multi-functionality, and a pedestrian-based focus. Sounds like Jane Jacobs 40 years ago, but it has still not reached all politicians and developers…

I heard other interesting speeches on the financialized urbanisation; the comparison of suburban developments in Austria and the Netherlands; the Urban Geography of Globalization in Madrid; Montpellier’s suburban face-off; Urban development and labour-community advocacy in Toronto and Los Angeles; etc. But as always I was first of all interested in transport topics.

I already mentioned Antonio Gómez-Palacio (“Transforming cities through transit”) in another blog entry – and recommended this video. I didn’t mention so far Karl Schmid (“Oil-dependency and the vulnerabilities of the suburbs”) and Alan Walks (“Automobility and the politics of Canadian suburbs”). I met Alan already five years ago, when he gave our excursion group an introduction on the social geography and political structure of Toronto. This time he presented results of a research showing that across the globe, in political elections the suburbs are shifting to the right and the inner cities are shifting to the left. Examining the statistics in Toronto, he showed that the variable which explains best who voted for Rob Ford in 2010’s mayoral election is the modal split: the higher the percentage of people driving to work in a voting district, the better the result for Rob Ford! No wonder, that this guy is not interested in bicycles and light rails, as these sustainable means of transport could take space from Ford’s voters’ favourite mean of transport, the holy car.

The undisputed highlight of the conference was the live performance of the movie “Highrise: Out my Window”, a National Film Board of Canada’s Emmy-winning web documentary. It portrays the lives of thirteen high-rise residents from thirteen cities around the globe. On the conference the movie was performed by the director and accompanied by a live music score of a pianist and a cellist. This performance remains unique, but you can watch the interactive documentary online.

No, I did not only listen and watch at the conference, I also “worked” as a volunteer, showing participants the way to the next panel session and walking a microphone through the Q&A sessions (I also didn’t know the term Q&A before, it stands for “Questions & answers” after the speech).

As a thank-you for our “work” every volunteer got a copy of the book “suburban constellations”, which I meanwhile almost finished reading. The authors of the book are mostly participants of the conference, the editor, Roger Keil, is the main organiser of the conference. There are really interesting texts, from “Walking out of Tallinn” to “Decline and Renewal in Toronto’s In-Between-City” and “Chinese Suburban Constellations”. But don’t be afraid, I won’t start summarizing them. I finally stop writing now and post some pictures of Toronto’s suburbs and exurbs that I took in the last weeks.