A couple days ago I attended a panel discussion hosted by Architecture for Humanity at the very pretty Design Exchange building. It was about how the city of Toronto is transforming and how these urban changes are being understood and/or challenged by the communities affected.

Anyways, I thought that while it’s all still fresh in my head, that it would be a good idea to get down what I felt were the best take-away points and ideas of the discussion:

• Is democracy important when it comes to determining what our public realm should look like, or is this something that is best left to the experts?

The old model of ’show them what you want to do and then discuss whether this is a good or bad thing’ doesn’t work. It’s like a comment thread on a blog post, you’ll have the conversation dominated by a small minority of people with very strong opinions, and because of the polarizing and linear nature of the discussion, these extreme members end up being overly critical and biased and dominate the conversation through sheer volume.



Some ideas were thrown around about more collaborative forms of public consultation where instead of saying “this is what we want to do”, you say “to solve this problem, here are all the potential options available to us and here are the costs and pros and cons associated with each”. Then, in theory, the people can use the information to come to their own idea of what the larger goals and priorities for their neighborhood should be and the best solution will just seem organically obvious.

In reality, it may not work because of it’s the nature of the people in that vocal minority to whine because they fundamentally don’t want things to ever change or be different. An example of this is the offshore wind turbine project that, despite it’s many environmental benefits and necessity, has been held back by spurious negative claims from a very small local minority (less than 15%).

In these cases democracy can be a bottleneck to positive/smart development. This bottleneck of good decision making is affected by media and politicians which treat people like idiots and not as adults that should be hearing reasoned discussion and analysis of issues. The bottleneck is also in the way we communicate with people, and there may be a strong benefit to leveraging collaborative internet technologies (like an open wiki system and a more visual presentation of issues), consulting with people early and asking them the bigger questions rather than backing the public into a corner with a single choice.

• Do we hamper ‘creativity’ in an effort to democratize our planning/urban design process?

Basically, very much yes. Creativity and vision are things that come from one or few people. We look at architectural works like we do paintings, “oh that’s a Gehry building, and that’s a Zaha Hadid - you can tell because it has that style or individual look to it”. When you introduce democracy to this in our system, you’re saying here’s a work of art, tell us what you don’t like about it. What you’ll get back is that it’s too different, too expensive, too .. etc etc. and when everyone finally agrees on the finished product you’ll basically end up with a Toyota - inoffensive to everyone, interesting to none. Basically the same boring crap the city is filled with now.

One idea I really liked was the proposition that we should flip the process upside down. So we start with the citizenry and ask them what they want this space to be (values, etc.), and then let urban designers and architects loose with it to work uninhibited. People are less likely to complain because 1. you haven’t asked them too, and 2. the final product has everything they asked for.

• How democratic is Toronto in terms of the public’s (opportunity for) engagement in the planning/design process?

People with more resources can exact more change, especially because they’ll be able to drum up enough resources and partnerships to bypass the bureaucracy, mediocrity and inefficiency of most government funded development. So for example, say a group of influential citizens wanted to update and beautify one of Toronto’s many ugly subway stations, this group of people could get together and raise the funds themselves to do so - through possibly a collection box at the station labeled something like “donate to help make this station not crap anymore”. These same people could also form partnerships with developers and local business leaders because they are also better connected socially.

The downside is that less advantageous areas which are most in need of local regeneration and services are stuck. And of course the popular knowledge class criticism that if only one group of people are creating change or having things changed to adapt to their needs, this leaves everyone else on the outside isolated and quite screwed.

Well that’s all for now, there were a lot of other interesting points made but this is getting long. Honestly, I really enjoyed it, learned a lot and came out rather charged about many of the issues discussed - I’ll certainly be attending the next one too.