Recently, Civic Action (which seems like an admirable institution) released a video of Chief Planner Jennifer Keesmaat talking about public space. Since public space has been salient of late, this seems like a good time to draw attention to her characteristic modus operandi, whereby a barrage of articulately vacuous Cityspeak is wrapped around a lame and broadly developer-friendly initiative. (Challenge to doubters: send me any Keesmaat interview or presentation, and dollars to doughnuts the same pattern will be present.) The transcript of the video is below; Keesmaats remarks are in quotes, my commentary is in square brackets. Keesmaat: Public space really becomes places and spaces where our lives connects, and as the world densifies, and as we increasingly become tech-savvy, relying on technology ... remote ways of interacting, those public spaces become more and more important for our quality of life. A few factors that are really critical when you are designing public space, and at the very basic level, the first factor is about connections, because there’s no point in having a public space if people can’t connect into it. If people don’t feel connected to the space, or if they’re physically separated in some way from the space---and we’ve all seen these spaces---a wonderful public square, and you can’t quite figure out how to get to it, because there’s a big highway dividing that public space from our everyday lives, and so getting the connections right is really critical. The second I would say is the character, since there’s all the different kinds of public space. You can have little squares and piazzas, little places where a lot of people gather, and then you might also have public spaces where there are places for sidewalk cafes, or public spaces which are places for playing baseball. Each one of those spaces needs to be designed in a different way if it’s going to be effective and it’s going to work. Getting the design right is about ensuring that we understand the use and the character of that public space. [Note that here Keesmaat has said almost nothing of content. She has said we need public spaces (obvious), that we need to have easy access to those spaces (goes without saying), and that there are different kinds of public space (yup). Among substantive things she could have but didnt address would be some obvious facts about Toronto, including (1) we have almost no public squares, much less ones where you can get something to eat or drink, of the sort which exist every couple of blocks in any half-assed European city; (2) we have almost no decent waterfront access---again, of the inviting cosmopolitian sort ubiquitous in other waterfront cities; (3) we have a huge dearth of park spaces, reflecting both that (a) the City is shortsightedly selling, rather than buying, property targeted for public use, and (b) the City is not enforcing green-space requirements on new development (Liberty Village being a particularly salient case-in-point), instead allowing developers to maximize profits by offering cash-in-lieu of parkland. These are just a few of the obvious problems which a substantively as opposed to superficially articulate Chief Planner would highlight as relevant to the issue of public space in Toronto. Meanwhile, to return to Keesmaats completely generic identification of a need for accessible public space of different sorts, whats her proposal for encouraging such spaces?] There’s a few things that we are doing to create those public spaces. One of them is an initiative that we just launched last year, called POPs, which, uh, stands for Privately Owned Public Space, and the idea here is that as sites develop in the city---and some of those sites are actually pretty large---as those sites develop in the city, we will secure, on private land, publicly accessible spaces, so that, as the public walking down the street, you might go, ‘Oh, there’s a really interesting little park, I’m going to go sit and eat my lunch in that park.. um, or a little area for children to go play... to the public the lines between whether it is a city-owned space or owned by a private landowner... those lines start to blend, and in fact it just serves as public space. [So, here it is: Keesmaats big public space initiative. Lets first note what this initiative is not. Her initiative is not to follow City Planners in NYC in successfully pushing to reclaim numerous streets and intersections for public space and pedestrian/bike use (see The Human Scale for this and other remarkable ways in which public space can be drastically enhanced w.r.t. both quantity and quality). Her initiative is not to follow City Planners in Melbourne in transforming laneways into public spaces, chock-full of sidewalk cafes and the like---even though Toronto is a city of laneways. Keesmaats initiative is not to call for City Planners and others involved in approving development applications to enforce the green-space requirements and outlaw the cash tradeoffs that leave vertical communities without any place to walk their dog. Her initiative is not to call for---God forbid!---purchasing privately owned waterfront land for parks, or for withdrawing decades-long concession leases which are the kiss of death to a vibrant waterfront. No, Keesmaats big idea for improving public space in Toronto is to get developers to put some picnic tables in the shadow of their condominium. Hey, its win-win: we get a picnic table (maybe), and they get a good corporate citizen plaque: www1.toronto.ca/wps/portal/contentonly?vgnextoid=239451273e297410VgnVCM10000071d60f89RCRD, Lets be clear. In NYC, the Chief Planner is pushing pedestrianized town squares throughout the City, among other transformative reclamations. In Toronto, the Chief Planner is pushing picnic tables at CityPlace. Keesmaat continues... ] One of the greatest barriers to creating better or more innovative public spaces is in fact that we do have a tremendous amount of development taking place, and a lot of our land is privately owned, and so there’s a tussle that goes on... a real negotiation that goes on, to try and take back some of that land, to ensure that it continues to be a public amenity. So that’s a pretty big barrier. [Cue the violins for the what more can we do? soliloquy. See, theres a barrier, a mysterious force from beyond: developers are sucking up all the land, and theres nothing we can do about it. Be happy, Torontonian earthlings, that we are negotiating to get you picnic tables on highrise plazas! In reality, of course, theres a lot one could do, beyond negotiating with developers to allow us to use scraps of land they havent built on, if one was a Chief Planner who was actually interested in improving the state of public space in Toronto, instead of one who was only pretending to be so interested. Again, one could start by acknowledging and vowing to correct Plannings failure to enforce the green-space requirements; one could call for the budget to immediately include purchase (and even expropriation, for the public good) of targeted green space areas both for parched communities and for purposes of attracting tourists and investment. But wait, whats this---an actual bit of data?] Another big barrier I would say is on the funding side... um... we don’t actually fund our parks system very well. We did, a generation ago, but really since amalgamation, we have been consistently underinvesting in our public spaces. Well, the budget we have today for Civic Design is smaller than the budget was 15 years ago for only the old city of Toronto. So we’ve grown exponentially, now we’re the seven municipalities all brought together into one, and at the same time, we’re growing and our population is increasing exponentially, but we’re not investing in the way we used to invest in the past in those public spaces. And you can see it in the public realm, and that’s a really big barrier. We need to raise, um, the awareness around how important public spaces are to a high quality of life. [Hallelujah, a real fact about the budget. On the other hand, the fact is unspecific and not clearly relevant to the public space issue. What does the budget of civic design have to do with the fact that the developers are buying up all the space that could and should be used for parks and public squares? What exactly does this fact come to? Is the idea that we arent buying land like we used to? If so, why doesnt Keesmaat say so? Indeed, Googling around I came across the shocking fact that the budget of Civic Design---which, Keesmaat implies above, is the notional department for purchasing or transforming public space lands---was $2.2 million. Is Keesmaat suggesting that the entire budget for purchasing public space is the amount of a single house in Yorkville? And good lord, see slide 18 of this presentation (www1.toronto.ca/city_of_toronto/city_planning/home/files/pdf/freedman_presentation.pdf) to see the 8 projects that resulted from that money, which involved placement of a bench and a few plantings. If this is really the state of public space funding in Toronto, we should all just kill ourselves now. In lieu of that, however, we should at the very least get a different Chief Planner---one who doesnt speak in vacuous unspecific platitudes, and one who forwards initiatives that might actually work in the publics, rather than private developments, interests. But speaking of vacuous platitudes, we close with Keesmaats remarks to the emerging leaders at Civic Action... ] One of the best ways for emerging leaders to get involved is to identify, first, what your passion is, what you’re passionate about. And I say that because your participation is going to be most meaningful if it comes from a place of passion and what it is that you really care about. And it might be affordable housing and it might be transit and it might be public space... whatever it might be... first, really kind of go deep and figure out what is it that really matters to you, that you really care about, because you need to be driven by your passion moving forward. [I think from this we can infer that Keesmaats participation in encouraging public space doesnt come from a place of passion.] Well, I think it’s really critical for emerging leaders to be involved in finding solutions for two really simple cases. Um, one is that the region, this city, it’s yours. You own it. Make it yours. You don’t want it to be a region in the city that is based on a series of past outdated ideas. You want it to be about the future, and what this region and what this city can become. The second is because we were recently identified as one of the most youthful cities in the world, New York came second, Berlin came third, so we are in fact a youthful city. Young people between the ages of 18 and 35 are in fact the fast growing demographic in the city of Toronto, and yet young people between the ages of 18 and 35 have the lowest participation in our political processes. So there’s a big disconnect. The future is yours. But the decision-making around the future is being made by people who have been involved in the process for a very long time, and who really don’t own the future. So there’s an opportunity, and it’s critical for emerging leaders to grasp onto this... to take ownership over the future of their region, and over the future of their city, and to inject progressive ideas, that are based on thinking really carefully about the future, into the dialogue, because otherwise the dialogue is going to be very one-sided. So I think it’s not, it’s not a frivolous pursuit, it’s not an option, it’s really essential, that emerging leaders see this region and see this city as theirs for the taking. [Here we have more meaningless blather from the Pied Piper of Developer-friendly Planning, whose generic rhetoric of taking ownership and call to reject outdated ideas nonetheless sets up for inculcation by her retrograde initiatives, which are universally offered with varying degrees of misleading hype (e.g., the Development Permit System; see https://scribd/doc/228649666/CORRA-DPS-Update-June-2014 for details). Heads-up, kids: Keesmaat knows who really owns this city... and she is actively working, both by positively pushing pro-development initiatives, and by neglecting to implement pro-community initiatives, to ensure that you never get your hands on it.]
Posted on: Mon, 08 Dec 2014 04:04:12 +0000