What happens to a city only the rich can afford?
In addition to being endlessly complex, cities remain forever unfinished. Once they stop growing and evolving, they’re either dead or dying.
This state of permanent change has made cities the centres of thought, creativity and innovation. It has given rise to the opportunities — economic, cultural and social — that keep the urban organism vital.
It is a condition that involves many contradictory players — rich and poor, powerful and dispossessed, established or recently arrived.
Toronto is no exception. In its march from muddy colonial outpost to Little Belfast to big-cityhood, it has remade itself many times. Today, the pace of change is faster than ever. The city we inhabit now is not the one we lived in even four or five years ago.
And as the forces that create urban form become ever more corporate, concentrated, global and, therefore, remote, these time-honoured processes are breaking down.
In recent years, vast swaths of cities, most notably London and New York, have been bought by the uber-wealthy or their corporate proxies and taken out of circulation to anyone but themselves.
In Toronto, the proliferation of five-star hotels and luxury condos designed to attract investors, local and international, is a sign of a city in the throes of such a transition.
Waves of gentrification have also helped redraw the demographics of the urban landscape. Neighbourhoods once consigned to working people are now enclaves of the affluent. That pleases property owners, but in the long term there are reasons for concern.
What happens to a city that only the rich can afford? Judging from what the 1 per cent has given us so far, it’s a safe bet such a place would be boring beyond belief, numbingly generic and politically dysfunctional. Emptied of the poor and powerless but influential, the city becomes a fortress, a giant gated community where access is granted solely on the basis of wealth.
How ironic the biggest players in the 21st-century global city should be so extraordinarily alike. They may come from varied backgrounds and represent ostensibly different interests, but the imperatives of super-wealth reduce the rich to a sort of groupthink startling in its unswerving sameness. Wealth, or should we say, capital, trumps the usual barriers of language, religion, culture and experience.
Toronto, though proud of its ethnic diversity, has become another stop on the way of global capital, not an alpha city, but a safe haven for one’s money and family.
This new culture of success is by its very nature obsessive, secretive and paranoid. Its images are bodyguards, locked gates and armoured cars with tinted windows. It aims to take advantage of the city’s density, but without participating in it. It remains aloof, rootless, able to move at a moment’s notice.
Though there are moments in the life of a city when we must all succumb to its equalizing effects — rush hour comes to mind — increasingly, urban spaces are built for the purposes of exclusion.
The answer, of course, is that we need more rich people. Alas, there aren’t enough to go around. Besides, we also need the middle class, the pre-rich and, yes, even the poor to save the city from the wealthy and the wealthy from themselves.
How cities will respond remains to be seen. In the meantime, even the idea of the public realm is under attack. For many middle-class Canadians, the suburbs are the answer. But already poverty is being forced into low-density areas around the city and altering them beyond recognition. This will be the future, at least as long as the rich keep getting the richer, and the poor poorer. Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca