 |
| Chandni Chowk |
I spend a lot of time thinking about the ways I'd like city life to be better. I'm not a daydreamer, although I do give the occasional interview in my shower, pretending that I'm running for mayor. However, I am fascinated by the ways we design our spaces and places to reflect our collective priorities, especially when it comes to cultural life.
When we went to Iceland in 2012, I fell in love with the street art in Reykjavik. So many buildings are painted with huge murals of robots fighting or migrant caravans or cartoon suns, and it brought the city a sense of vibrant urbanism. Reykjavik is a small city in a small country—Iceland only has about 370,000 residents, and a third of them live in the capital city—but it was refreshing to see art, especially art associated with urban culture, prioritized in such a brash way. Toronto has graffiti and street art as well, but ours is famously hidden down multiple back alleys. Stratford, where I live now, has very few public art displays: we have one relatively recent mural in the downtown, and, yes, an alley that shared the history of the local music scene. It's big city-style art writ small.
I think you can tell a lot about a city based on what it prioritizes. Toronto is a place of commerce, of course, and most people live close to a corner store or a shopping corridor. On the other hand, the city's quilt of public parks and playgrounds allows residents access to green space that may not be exactly in their backyard, but is at least within walking distance. Stratford's core is oriented mostly to tourists, so we have a fair number of restaurants and boutiques, but you'd be hard-pressed to pick up a non-artisanal apple in the downtown. And a playground or a place to get lunch with your kids? Forget it.
This is one of the major bummers about living in Stratford. Private homeownership and large-ish property sizes are common, so most of us do have our own backyard. The idea of the commons—places where we can go and gather, for leisure and social time—seems relatively foreign, and the places that do exist are designed for consumption. Visiting the relentlessly hardscaped Market Square, with its plastic picnic tables and sidelined greenery, is my showcase point. It's used and useful as a gathering place, but it's not beautiful for its own sake.
I'm not mad at Stratford for this, but I am frustrated. There are so many ways in which we could design shared spaces in order to maximize pleasure, beauty, and connection. The library desperately needs more square footage, and can't access it. Huge sections of town lack a playground within walking distance. The playgrounds we do have are often outdated and uninspired. The city's affordable housing is on the edge of town and looks much like affordable housing in most North American cities—that is, cheap and embarrassed by itself. Sure, there are gardens and a great-looking City Hall, but gardens are designed to be seen and not played with, and City Hall isn't a social site.
As a town, we've gotten a bit lazy. We've downloaded that beautiful streetscape onto private homeowners, creating an intense sense of keeping up with the Joneses and a singular "right" way to have a garden or a lawn. The culture that attracts tourists often comes from private organizations like Stratford Festival or the Chef's School, and while they are admittedly so much fun to attend, their priorities are driven by butts in seats. I'd love to see more art festivals like the Lights On event: a month-long celebration of light sculptures in our darkest months. We tend to play it really safe, because we don't want to alienate anyone. It's a bit....boring. And it's sort of baffling, given how many current residents and visitors come from bigger cities with diverse cultural landscapes! Semi-weird culture is accessible—and accessed—all over. We don't need to be so staid in our approach.
I think about what I had access to in The Big City and there's a sense of youthfulness, of experimentation. I once saw a light installation in an underpass! There are street festivals and community hubs, art outlets like the AGO and the Harbourfront Centre. Am I being unfair to Stratford, a place that has 1% of Toronto's population? Yeah, probably! But there is a sense of holistic lack, as though the city is only interested in me if I'm shopping at the boutiques or going to the theatre. My child, my need for fresh food, my desire for good housing, my yen for green spaces, are all much less served in Stratford's cultural core.
Some of this can be chalked up to the relative dearth of young people in Stratford. Iceland's average age is a youthful 36; Stratford's is 44, and Toronto is right in the middle at 40. Youth is a time of experimentation, of creation and identity-building, and young people often leave Stratford because there's not much here for them. I did it myself—I waited tables here a few summers in my 20s, but when it came time to start a career in non-profits, Stratford just didn't have the job market I was looking for. It didn't have the space to get weird in a way that felt primally necessary at that age. I wanted to fall in love, ride my bike at midnight, get drunk on a Thursday, walk kilometres gossiping with friends, quit a job six weeks after I started it. I wanted to be a writer, an artist, a designer, a board member, a student. I wanted to kiss my friends on their rooftops and watch as the sun came up over Bloor Street. Toronto in the late 2000s and early 2010s was romantic, dumb, inspiring—a transitional moment between David Miller's utopianism and the embarrassment of Rob Ford, before the vast majority of people in my generation were squeezed out into the hinterlands.
Stratford, on the other hand, is known for having the most secretive city council in the country. Make of that what you will.
It's been a fascinating return to the city over the last five years, navigating the ways Stratford feeds and stifles its own community. For example: despite being a flat and dense little town, there is precious little cycling scene here—the drivers are too aggressive and the roads are too chewed up. The cycling champions here are rich-dad weekend warriors. There are no regular-gal cyclist scenesters, the kind who would bike to brunch because driving is for suckers. There are two movie theatres in town: one is a twee micro-cinema that usually focuses on private events, and the other is a cinderblock octoplex that never met a blockbuster it didn't want to screen. Live theatre is here, and might even be accessible if you snag tickets on sale, but there's no fringe fest, no comedy scene, and no regular live music venue.
I'm not trying to dunk on Stratford, and believe me, by the time I left Toronto, I was ready to go. But it's funny to consider how "culture" manifests in different ways, on different scales. It's interesting to see whose perspectives and values get reflected, and how: are events free or paid? Are they family-focused or date-night material? What does "diversity" mean in a town that is mostly white, or where there are twice as many seniors as there are kids?
Whose voices get heard when we talk about this?
We all want to live in a place that seems to want us back, right?
