I’ve written before on how Toronto needs more autonomy and how I think there’s a huge opportunity to create a Third Coast Megaregion spanning from Chicago all the way to Quebec City—a region that could compete with the rising urban agglomerations of Asia and elsewhere.

The central theme around these arguments is that there’s clear evidence in support of a return to city-states.

Today, the 388 metro areas in the United States make up 84 percent of the nation’s population and an astonishing 91 percent of gross domestic product. The top 100 metro areas alone total two-thirds of the U.S. population and three-quarters of GDP.

And the reason why I say “return” is because, if you think about it, this is largely how the world used to operate before the shift towards nation-states. 

Ironically, given the nature of our high-tech, super-connected age, the future will look more and more like the city-states that ruled the world for millennia, from the days of Athens, Sparta, Carthage, and Rome, and that were last dominant 500 years ago, in such places as Venice and Florence, before the formation of most modern nation-states. Today, the shining example is Singapore, the city-state of 5.2 million people that, all by itself, has become an Asian tiger. The city-state of the future will not be sovereign, of course, but instead will act largely independently. “What we are experiencing is a metro-centered driving force of change. This is the center of the economic universe,” says James Brooks, program director of the National League of Cities. “The United States is not one national economy but a series of smaller metropolitan economies.”

If you’re interested in this topic, here’s the article by Michael Hirsh from which the above excerpts are taken. It’s called, “The Nations’s Future Depends on Its Cities, Not on Washington.”

The distance between Chicago and Quebec City is roughly 1,000 miles (or 1,609 km). There are 6 major cities and a population of over 25 million people. You have the 4th and 5th largest cities in North America (Chicago and Toronto); the largest city in Canada; the capital of Canada; 2 different languages; 2 different countries; and 5 different states/provinces.

Now imagine if all of these 6 cities—Chicago, Detroit, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec City—were effortlessly connected through a high speed rail network, allowing you to travel from one end to the other in just over 5 hours. How would that impact the movement of people, goods and services across the region? How would it change our economies if you could wake up in Detroit and, without any lead time, travel 1 hour and 15 minutes to Toronto for a meeting?

This morning I was reading about an anti-development activist group in Vancouver that’s trying to fight the Bjarke Ingels designed Beach and Howe Tower.

Here’s a “rendering” of the project that the group is using to galvanize the community:

And here’s an official rendering of the project:

I’ve seen this tactic used before here in Toronto for the Minto Midtown towers at Yonge & Eglinton. These were highly controversial towers and someone in the community created a depiction showing 2 large monolithic black towers (meant to represent the TD Towers downtown).

Now, I’ll be the first to say that renderings are abused from both sides of the table. Developers obviously want to represent their projects in the best possible light and upset communities try and do the exact opposite. But where I do become concerned is when communities start to form opinions and make decisions based on rumours and rhetoric, rather than fact. 

We should be having intelligent conversations about the future of our neighbourhoods and communities. And I think the best way to do that—as well as to counteract potentially unnecessary NIBYMism—is to ensure that the correct information is out there and that it’s widely accessible. Transparency is king. This often scares developers, but I believe that the benefits of openness greatly outweigh the negatives. 

Full disclosure: I’m a big fan of architect Bjarke Ingels. I’m openly jealous that Vancouver could be getting one of his designs before Toronto does.