Ken Greenberg,
We need to treat this experience of society mobilizing as a dress rehearsal for collective action
Ken Greenberg is honoured by the University of Toronto as a Doctor of Laws “for his outstanding service for the public good as a tireless advocate for restoring the vitality, relevance and sustainability of the public realm in urban life, and excellence in the professions.”
I would like to express my profound gratitude to the University of Toronto for the award of an honorary Doctor of Laws. I was invited to make some remarks at this year’s convocation, which of course will not happen, and the following are some of the things I would have liked to say.
First that the U of T has meant a great deal to me. It was my first very welcoming landing place as a young immigrant to Canada leaving the U.S. as a draft resister during the Vietnam War and where I was able to complete my studies in architecture at 230 College St., becoming my alma mater.
As a student I almost immediately got swept up in the political and social life of Toronto in a period of great turmoil as the city was making profound decisions about its future.
I had the good fortune to connect with Jane Jacobs, who became my great friend and mentor from the time we both arrived in the country months apart, members of what became the city’s Reform Council, and many inspiring and motivated civic leaders and thinkers. I didn’t so much choose my career path as it chose me.
The context was a paradigm shift as profound as the one that had occurred in the decades following the Second World War, when, infatuated by the liberating possibilities of the car, we experienced a mass exodus from cities and a freewheeling concept of the “good life,” developed based on the assumption of an endless supply of cheap energy.
I found myself immersed in the early stages of the aftershock as that shaky assumption unravelled. Young people like me begin to vote with their feet, repopulating the centre of the city, appreciating what Toronto’s older neighbourhoods had to offer in pursuit of a new competing urban version of the North American dream, to experience the stimulation of city life while being able to walk to buy groceries and having our kids walk to school, to bike and use transit close to home.
What I began to understand was that cities are among our most remarkable creations. Soon housing 50 per cent of the world’s population, they are the crucibles where solutions are found to problems that are otherwise intractable. They have the capacity to learn, adapt, modify, invent and innovate. That insight became the basis for my career from my launchpad in architecture and urban design.
In the end, I was able to write two books, “Walking Home” in 2011and “Toronto Reborn” in 2019, tracking my experiences in this my adopted city, and in many others, working on projects in which urban districts pursued new, more environmentally and socially sustainable models.
The stakes are very high. This was not just about lifestyle preferences, but a question of survival on Spaceship Earth. We were being forced to move beyond the false dichotomy that had divided our behaviour in the places we live from our relationship with the natural world. And unless we were fatalistically resigned to spoiling our nest to a point of no return, clearly some big adjustments in our way of life were needed.
Before the pandemic, we were making