MULTIPLI-CITY
Toronto is made up of countless unique perspectives and stories.
2018 is about to arrive and it’s an election year, meaning everybody will be talking about “Toronto” or other municipalities, but what does “Toronto” mean to you?
Over the holidays, a friend posted an excerpt on social media from Rebecca Solnit’s wonderful 2010 book, Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas. It reminded me how great this book is: an unconventional atlas that explore the layers of the city with contributions from other writers, artists and cartographers.
Atlases are often good at recording socio-geographic data, but many don’t dig deeper than that. Solnit’s book explores the emotional layer of the city, how people are connected to it, and some of the hidden histories it contains. She’s done similar atlases for New York and New Orleans, but San Francisco is her home. Of it, she writes:
“As a citizen of this city for some 30 years, I am constantly struck that no two people live in the same city. Your current surroundings exist in relation to your other places, your formative place and whatever place shaped your ethnic heritage and education, and in relation to your role in this current place — whether people look at you with suspicion, whether you’re fearful or confident, whether lots of people or few people look like you, whether you run in the park or drink in the alleys, whether you swim in the bay or work in the towers by day as a broker or by night as a janitor.”
Social media, despite all its terribleness, is at its best around various holidays, when people reveal their own traditions and the things they hold dear. Beginning around Hanukkah and into New Year’s, my feeds were a near-constant view into so many domestic situations, like being invited into the home of friends but also acquaintances and even strangers one only encounters on Twitter or Instagram. All these views expand the idea of Toronto for me.
It also reveals the comings and goings of so many people who weren’t originally from Toronto but who go back “home” at the holidays, so there’s an additional view into those places. Like what Solnit wrote about in her San Francisco Atlas, there many different versions of Toronto: everybody has a unique existence in this city. You can also replace “Toronto” with Burlington, Newmarket, Oshawa or elsewhere and versions of those cities are as numerous as there are people in them.
When you’re on a crowded subway or crawling in traffic on the 401with tens of thousands of other cars, think about how each person has a different trajectory that day, and each their own family, friends or work contacts, and how complex each of those relationships are. Everybody has their own special places in the city, maybe the bench where their partner asked them to marry them. We all have places of deep sadness or even terror that mean nothing to others, too.
The maps of this city layer up infinitely and connect to other places. The interconnected network begins to boggle the mind and is too big to comprehend, yet here we all are riding the subway together in silence, wearing the same Canada Goose or quilted, shiny, puffy ski jackets, a bit of winter sweat running down the small of our backs in the overheated cars. We’re all together, yet live wildly distinct lives at the same time.
I’ve never been in Toronto for the Christmas holiday; instead I always make the drive down the 401to my hometown, Windsor. This year marks 17 years of living in Toronto. The 17th drive. The 17th back-home Christmas. The 17th time away from Toronto. Seventeen is an unremarkable amount of years, not a decade to mark, or even a sweet sixteen, but it has snuck up on me. Seventeen is suddenly a long time to be a Torontonian.
This surprising amount of years and the reminder of Solnit’s writing has me thinking about my own time in this city. I came here in 2000, so for me there’s the Toronto I’ve seen personally since then, and the Toronto that came before that I’ve learned about by listening to others and by reading and watching documentation of it.
I came three years after amalgamation, and everybody was still talking about it then, so it continued to dominate my view of the city. For my U of T civics students who are from Toronto, most born after 1997, amalgamation is a historical event, but not a personal one. To them, there’s just Toronto, with Scarboroughs and Etobicokes that are distinct but not as strong a political identity as they might be for previous generations.
My own 17 years have seen radical changes in the city. If I was zapped back to 2000 and walked the city I moved to again I’d likely be shocked at the amount of parking lots there were, or how thin the skyline was. Less visible to the eye over those same amount of years was and is the growing inequality in the city, something that has yet to really hit home to those who live in prosperous bubbles, like hidden tectonic plates holding up all those skyscrapers, shifting along a fault line.
Being “from away” is part of my identity here in Toronto, and I still bounce so much of what I see off of Windsor, my formative city. From away perspective is valuable, an automatic outsider’s view, but at some point an outsider’s view becomes an insider’s one. I’ll still think about Windsor a lot, but the challenge to any city columnist is not to become insular.
It takes work and sometimes you get it wrong, but to understand this city you have to know your own story, but also the stories of as many other people as you hear about and meet.
Perhaps that’s a new year’s resolution challenge for all of us this election year when Toronto will be reduced to a few slogans and issues: remembering that the city we know and see is not the city everyone else lives. Shawn Micallef writes every Saturday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef