Tonight I attended and gave a short talk at a city building themed PechaKucha night here in Toronto. If you aren’t familiar with the PechaKucha 20x20 presentation format, click here.
The first PechaKucha night was held in Tokyo, but it has since expanded to over 800 cities around the world. Each city has a local organizer who acts as a steward and here in Toronto it is Amy Bath. She did a fantastic job this evening.
Tonight’s event was all about non-traditional forms of city building. It was not so much about how architects and developers are shaping the built environment – thought there was some of that. It was more about how interdisciplinary artists, graphic designers, bloggers, and others, are having an impact on cities. So in my case, I was speaking as a blogger, rather than as a real estate developer, which was a bit unique for me.
What excited me about tonight is the amount of talent and passion that we have in this city, and how so much of it is being harnessed to make cities better.
Jay Wall of Studio Jaywall is doing incredible work at the intersection of graphic design and city building. My friend Mackenzie Keast of Distl and NXT City Prize is organizing public space competitions and then working with the city to get them built. And my friend Justin Broadbent, who is an interdisciplinary artist, is just killing it and putting Toronto on the map. I don’t know how else to say it.
And this is just naming a few of the people in attendance.
I have so much respect for people who love the city they call home and actively try to make it a better place. That’s a lot harder to do than just complain about why your city isn’t (insert other allegedly better city here). But it’s also a lot more productive.
Last night was The Laneway Project’s inaugural summit here in Toronto. And I think it was a huge success. This is what the crowd looked like (don’t forget to check the upstairs balcony area):
This is what over 350 people who #lovethelaneways of Toronto looks like! Amazing night. #athiscity pic.twitter.com/ywMOKX6bYD
— Brandon G. Donnelly (@donnelly_b)
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Over 350 people showed up to fill The Great Hall at Queen West and Dovercourt. It was absolutely incredible. To be honest, I initially thought that it would end up as a small group of city geeks. I mean, it was a summit to effectively talk about back alleys.
But it turns out that there are a ton of people in this city who are passionate about rethinking our urban fabric and finding new uses for these underutilized public spaces. And that’s both really encouraging and exciting. Many thanks to everyone who came out!
The Laneway Project team did an incredible job spreading awareness and, given the success of this initial summit, I can only imagine where this initiative will end up in the future. So a big congratulations to Mackenzie Keast, Ariana Cancelli, and Michelle Senayah for making this happen.
I’m not sure if the event was filmed or not, but hopefully it was and it’ll be made available online. But in the event that it wasn’t, I did want to share one question that the panel got during the Q&A session after our presentations.
The comment made was basically that Toronto will never be Sydney, Melbourne, or Seattle when it comes to our laneways. They have a temperate climate and we don’t. So while it’s nice to show great pictures of their laneways, it’s just not going to happen here.
And that really pissed me off.
So I responded by saying that I disagree. Saying that we’ll never be Sydney or Seattle is capitulating. There are many months of the year where it’s beautiful outside in Toronto, so just because we have a winter doesn’t mean we should throw our hands up in the air and give up.
I then went on to argue that the fact that we have a “shorter season” should be all the more reason that we need fantastic outdoor and public spaces. For the months of the year where it’s beautiful outside, we should be maximizing our enjoyment!
I hope many of you agree as well. Happy Friday all :)
This morning my friend Mackenzie Keast – who is famous and was on the radio in Toronto today talking about The Laneway Project – sent me an interesting article from the Guardian talking about the marginalization and growing irrelevance of city planners. It’s called: For the sake of our cities, it’s time to make town planning cool again.
The gist of the article is as follows:
While the cult of the star architect has soared over the decades and property developers have displaced bankers as the new super-rich, the figure of the local town planner has become comic shorthand for a certain kind of faceless, under-whelming dullard.
But what really stood out for me are the following two things. First, that people are genuinely interested in cities. I would say that it’s almost trendy to be into cities these days.
Urbanism may have displaced cultural theory as the favoured subject of the academic hipster, but talented young men and women rarely consider becoming town planners.
And second, that we’ve made it difficult for these same interested people to participate in the planning process.
Planners have become simultaneously under-respected and over-professionalised. Their training and practice too often leaves them able to communicate effectively only with other planners and professionals, working in an abstract language that alienates them from people. People are occasionally allowed into the professional planner’s world, but in highly mediated terms dictated by the profession.
This stands out for me because I think that architecture is in a somewhat similar position. I often joke that the more architecture training someone has, the more likely they’re going to like buildings that the rest of the world doesn’t. It all becomes quite insular – just like the Guardian is arguing with respect to planning.
And that may in fact be the reason for the marginalization of both planners and architects (minus the few starchitects that have a distinct brand and can command a premium). If the general public doesn’t like what you do or understand how you create value, why should they care?
I’ve written before about the future of the architecture profession, as well as the reasons for why I decided to never practice architecture. So I won’t repeat it all here.
But I will say that it had nothing to do with me not loving architecture. Because I do and always will. Instead, it was about recognizing that professions are not set in stone. Just like pretty much everything else in this world, they can and will be reinvented.
Image: The Guardian / PA