It seemed like a good idea: Take a picture of Gary Wright, Toronto's new chief planner, in Yonge-Dundas Square, a project he planned in 1996. But as soon as the National Post photographer began to work, a security guard appeared with Sara Peel, the square's "event co-ordinator," and told us to stop."Anybody who is doing anything needs a permit," the guard said, adding the folks from Dr. Oetker were soon to start handing out free pizza.Told the story, Councillor Adam Vaughan
(Trinity-Spadina), who sits on council's planning committee, jokes, "He is a victim of his own planning."
It wasn't supposed to be like this; Mr. Wright intended to create a new public square. As he told me, while sitting in the square, "We're not a city known for squares or public spaces. It's a very commercial downtown in Toronto. There's not a culture of public squares." What we have is a private square, run by a board of management that rents it for corporate events.
The planner chased from his own square; it's a perfect metaphor for the challenges facing fast-growing Toronto. While developers erect condo towers, some five times higher than zoning permits, where are the improvements in the public realm? Sidewalks are too narrow for all the new pedestrians, passengers squeeze into overcrowded buses, subways and streetcars, and new parks downtown are rare.
James McKellar, a professor of real property at York University's Schulich School of Business, argues that great cities are judged not by new private buildings but by public development, of such things as parks, transit, sidewalks and public schools. In building the public realm, he says, "Toronto has no idea of what it is doing."Of particular concern, in this context, is the announcement that Mr. Wright will only stay as chief planner for two years, until his retirement in 2010. "The man will have no power," Mr. McKellar says. "He's a lame duck."
On the plus side, Mr. Wright is a nice guy. A friendly, bearded father-figure, he has spent 33 years in Toronto's planning department. He takes over from Ted Tyndorf, the chief planner who died of cancer in February. Mr. Tyndorf held the job for four years.Mr. Wright, who lives in the Beach, notes that he has a busy job. The city gets 600 to 700 applications for rezonings, official plan amendments and site plan approvals each year, on top of about 3,200 applications to the committee of adjustment. To handle this, Mr. Wright has a staff of 346.It sounds like a lot of people, but according to Mr. Vaughan's count, Toronto today has fewer planning staff for a city of 2.6 million than it did before amalgamation for a city of about 650,000. "It's as if we jettisoned the whole planning departments of Scarborough, East York, York and Etobicoke," he says.
"Our planning sucks by all accounts. The planners are demoralized. Our reputation for great planning is something that we built in the 1970s, coasted on in the 1980s, and destroyed in the 1990s." Mr. Wright is more upbeat, citing community activists as inspiring him, including Active 18, a Queen Street West group wanting to control development across from the Drake Hotel. ''We didn't always have a successful working relationship, but it got better at the end. We look forward to working with communities like that." He is also keen on new design review panels that will review projects near St. Lawrence Market, at Humber Bay Shores, in North York and in Scarborough.
But Howard Cohen, a former Toronto planner who now builds condos with his firm, Context Developments, told a panel at the University of Toronto last week (according to a report in the city newsmagazine Novae Res Urbis): "We have a planning department that is dispirited, demoralized and totally intimidated by community groups and council."A number of people describe Toronto's planning department as a troubled place, whose senior planners, feeling disempowered, have left, leaving juniors who have little experience. Meanwhile, empowered councillors cut random deals with developers, forcing them to hand out transit passes with new condos or give money to local picnics. Mr. McKellar suggests that, to clean up the mess, Toronto needs a global search for a new head of plannning, someone on the scale of Vancouver's Larry Beasley, who became a household name while bringing planning innovation to that city. That's not what Toronto is going to get. "If we wish to maintain the status quo in the planning department," says Councillor Karen Stintz (Eglinton Lawrence), "then Gary Wright will be very good in that role."
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