uTOpia: Towards a New Toronto
by Jason McBride and Alana Wilcox, editors
Coach House Books
Toronto has experienced a wave of civic pride and enthusiasm not felt in decades. Visions of a truly workable, liveable and world-class city are once again dancing in citizens' heads. In the past two years, this spirit has, directly or indirectly, manifested itself in multifarious forms: in writer Sheila Heti's sui generis lecture series, Trampoline Hall; in the transformation of derelict hotels such as the Drake and the Gladstone into cultural hotspots; in renewed interest in waterfront revitalization and public transportation; in exciting, controversial architectural developments such as the OCAD building, the expansion of the ROM and the AGO; in the [murmur] project, which catalogues stories about Toronto neighbourhoods and broadcasts them to people's cell phones; in the explosion of the local independent music scene.
uTOpia: Towards a New Toronto is an anthology that aims to capture and chronicle this wave of civic pride. A compendium of pie-in-the-sky speculations and pragmatic suggestions by thirty-four different journalists, artists, thinkers, architects and activists, the book profiles Torontonians like the Zeidler family, a pair of Queen Street gallery owners and a self-proclaimed 'infrastructure geek' obsessed with sidewalk stamps, and considers fifties-style strip malls, the TTC, gentrification, crumbling sidewalks, why Toronto is better than Paris and the perils of a car-free Kensington Market. Playful, erudite and accessible, this book lauds, lambastes and leads the charge for change in Canada's biggest metropolis.
Jason McBride
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Jason McBride is an editor at Toronto Life magazine. The former managing editor of Coach House Books, he is also a filmmaker and freelance journalist, who has contributed to Lola, the Village Voice, Cinema Scope, the National Post and The Believer. He is the editor of From the Atelier Tovar: Writings by Guy Maddin and Everybody Loves Nothing by Steve Reinke. - Photo credit: Attit Patel |
Alana Wilcox
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Alana Wilcox is the senior editor of Coach House Books. She is also the author of a novel, A Grammar of Endings, published by the Mercury Press. - Photo credit: Lorne Bridgman |
Excerpt from uTOpia: Towards a New Toronto
inTrOducTiOn
Neither of us were born in Toronto, but we have, both of us, lived in the city for over fifteen years. It is, for better or worse, home. And, in the fifteen years we have lived here, we have never felt about Toronto like we do now. We adore the city. Even while recognizing Toronto's many limitations and inadequacies, we appreciate how much it has to offer - culturally, economically, socially. It now seems a city of extraordinary possibility.
It is easy to recognize the problems of a city, and Toronto has its fair share. Our roads are in disrepair. Violent crime seems to have escalated. Affordable housing and an inefficient public-transit system remain constant obstacles. But in compiling this anthology, we asked our contributors to focus on the positive aspects of the city, what it had done and was doing right, and how that activity could lay the groundwork for an even better city. We encouraged optimism. We insisted on imagination. The pieces in this anthology could be called essays in a broad sense, but they could also be described variously as reportage, memoir, art installation, manifesto, rant, battleplan, lecture, musings. They are all illustrative of just how important and exciting this moment in the city's history is.
We have no illusions that uTOpia is a comprehensive portrait of Toronto in 2005. It is necessarily just a small cross-section of the city's inhabitants, and just a small cross-section of the things our city needs to think about. These are a few ideas. We know that there are thousands of other ideas about the city's future, and we hope that this might be, as Bert Archer urges, a way of getting the conversation started. We hope to see many more uTOpias, many more books and maps and CDs and conversations in print and in coffeeshops. To quote the American writer Matthew Stadler, this book is a tool for the future, which is here. You can use it. The language of the future is more beautiful than we know.
From uTOpia: Towards a New Toronto by Jason McBride and Alana Wilcox, editors. Published by Coach House Books. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Read the Committee's comments on this book.
2006 short list:
