Our cities are our best hope as we reimagine how we live
What kind of cities do we want to live in? Since about 81 per cent of Canadians live in cities/urban areas, we need to talk about this. We are never going back to “normal.” Normal wasn’t working very well anyway. As we carefully reopen our cities, we need to equally address our environment, equality, our community health and our economy.
I don’t know what it looks like now, but my ideal for a city is based on when I lived car-free in a triplex on a tree-lined side-street half a block north of The Lakeshore in southern Etobicoke. The street was a mixture of small apartment buildings, single-family homes, a few triplexes, three churches and a very odd semi-underground building for the Independent Order of Oddfellows. The streetcar stop was at the corner, and I could walk to work or Lake Ontario in about 15 minutes. Every once in a while a parade would inexplicably come down our street.
Also within a 15-minute walking radius were an independent grocery store, clothing store, fresh produce store, Polish deli, post office, my bank, drugstore, liquor store, fairly good bar, hardware store, really good Italian restaurant, great greasy spoon for breakfast, and even a second-run movie theatre. A highlight for me was being able to carry our new couch home from the furniture store around the corner. Schools and several large manufacturing companies were nearby; downtown Toronto was just a streetcar ride away.
Our cities have to be welcome, resilient, sustainable and livable for everyone. Even though they make up only two per cent of the world’s land mass, cities consume 66 per cent of the world’s energy and produce 70 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the C40 Cities organization. We need national targets to reduce our carbon output, and our cities need to pick up the pace.
Change is hard work, and trying to drum up political will is frustrating. Former MP Marlene Jennings once shared a great metaphor. She said that making policy changes at a federal level was like trying to turn around an ocean liner; at a municipal level, it’s more like turning around a canoe.
Although our municipal governments are the creatures of our provincial government, they have a huge impact on our daily lives, managing and funding everything from airports to water and sewage. Both The Association of Municipalities of Ontario and the Federation of Canadian Municipalities are great resources to understand their responsibilities.
Who pays for all of this? We do. For example, 38 per cent of The Region of Waterloo’s 2020 Budget is from private and business property taxes, 27 per cent from provincial and federal grants, and 16 per cent is from user fees such as parking tickets.
Our role, as citizens, is to stay engaged with local politicians, to ensure a carbon-neutral future. And we’ve been talking about the kind of changes we need for a very, very long time.
Almost 20 years ago, Gil Penalosa shared his expertise at a Walkable Bikeable Waterloo Forum. As the founder of 8 80 Cities and former parks commissioner for Bogota, Colombia, Penalosa successfully increased parkland and trails and introduced car-free days.
Penalosa moved to Toronto with 8 80 Cities and is still working to “enhance mobility and public space so that together we can create more vibrant, healthy, and equitable communities … that we can grow up in and grow old in.”
His practical solutions included lowering city speed limits to 30 km/h, allowing only pedestrian and bike traffic on certain streets, scramble intersections so all pedestrians cross at the same time, more tables and umbrellas on the street, dedicated bike lanes, and more.
He also said that buildings should never be taller than about eight-storeys high — high enough to optimize population density, but not too high that you lose connection to the street.
With a growing population, we definitely do NOT want to spread sideways and threaten our protected countryside line. Our living spaces must meet the needs of the young and old and everyone in between. Why not Babayagas for senior women, tiny homes or even yearround trailer parks for starter homes? What about co-housing?
We can’t go back to normal. We need a better balance between our environmental, community health, and economic needs. We have to start where we live.