Is Toronto Beautiful?

[waltthizzney]

I hate the word world class... who says we are, who says we are not.... such a dumb way to "rate a city"... World class in unaffordable housing? world class bed bugs? world class useless political systems?

Is toronto beautiful? no its disgusting and smells like garbage. Instead of embracing the amazing nature, lakes and valleys in city we have filled and destroyed them with highways and ugly buildings.... Speaking of buildings why does everything is this city look like ugly brown crap? Then when we try to solve anything some idiots from the burbs get upset because they dont want to pay anymore tax in their mind numbing duplex beside a wall of a highway

 

[Tewder]

I hate the word world class... who says we are, who says we are not.... such a dumb way to "rate a city"... World class in unaffordable housing? world class bed bugs? world class useless political systems?

Is toronto beautiful? no its disgusting and smells like garbage. Instead of embracing the amazing nature, lakes and valleys in city we have filled and destroyed them with highways and ugly buildings.... Speaking of buildings why does everything is this city look like ugly brown crap? Then when we try to solve anything some idiots from the burbs get upset because they dont want to pay anymore tax in their mind numbing duplex beside a wall of a highway

Right! When they could be overpaying for a mind numbing condo beside a wall of a highway in Toronto instead!

 

[M.R.Victor]

Bah, those are such painful generalizations. Even if they weren't, who cares if people live beside the wall of a highway, be it in a condo or duplex..

Toronto isn't currently beautiful, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have it's charms or that I will always be ugly. The Queen's Quay makeover is going to be a step towards making Toronto beautiful, as is the 3 million dollar revamp of College Park, just to name the 2 most recent improvements cited by Urban Toronto. Change doesn't take place overnight, and I bet some of the pessimism can simply be attributed to the current political climate at the municipal level.

 

[yaz16]

Toronto is a bland looking city and easily forgettable. All buildings look the same. Cookie cutter style. 90 percent of condo's look the same. Not enough design, trees/plants/flowers and no random monuments.

Look at montreal, always in construction , traffic painfully slow but there are no shortcuts in effort to make the city look nice.

Some parts of Toronto/gta are nice/interesting. Like the St Lawrence Market area, bathurst and bloor area, downtown oakville. But overall it is hurting and forgettable

Quick and cost efficient solution would be change the generic cookie cutter street lamps with old school or futurist ones. Maybe ones you could change the top half to keep the city looking fresh every few years or so. Add more trees/plants/flowers in metro areas. Definitely will increase city spending but in the long run could bring in more tourists.

 

[Jaye101]

Beauty is subjective. A truly balanced person can find beauty in anything.

 

[pman]

Beauty is subjective. A truly balanced person can find beauty in anything.

If everything is beautiful then I guess so is Toronto. And I agree you can certainly find beauty in unlikely places, like Burtynsky's photographs of piles of densified oil filters. But while the photos have a Riopelle-like beauty, the original junkyard couldn't possibly considered beautiful.

If everything is beautiful then by definition the word has lost all meaning.

 

[M.R.Victor]

Beauty is subjective. A truly balanced person can find beauty in anything.

So can a person on MDMA

Back on topic, I think Toronto can be beautiful, if one learns to enjoy the "frontier-town-on-steroids" look that Toronto so charmingly exudes. Even your picture, beautiful in it's own right, exemplifies the Toronto aesthetic: mediocre, mish-mash residential architecture in the foreground, electricity wires strung on wooden poles, gentrifying leafy neighbourhoods in the mid-ground and a fairly impressive skyline in the background, exemplifying Toronto's growing influence in the world economy.

 

[pman]

So can a person on MDMA

Back on topic, I think Toronto can be beautiful, if one learns to enjoy the "frontier-town-on-steroids" look that Toronto so charmingly exudes. Even your picture, beautiful in it's own right, exemplifies the Toronto aesthetic: mediocre, mish-mash residential architecture in the foreground, electricity wires strung on wooden poles, gentrifying leafy neighbourhoods in the mid-ground and a fairly impressive skyline in the background, exemplifying Toronto's growing influence in the world economy.

"Frontier-town-on-steriods" describes Toronto perfectly.

 

[vatche]

A friend of mine sent me this. Thought I'd share it with you. I totally see it and agree with it.

In Europe, design gets you elected, here, it is for sale"- Michael Max Raynaud reminds us that North American cities are different to European cities: "In the past, European cities were political cities - they were built to positively represent whoever was in power at the time, to reflect their strength. They were like business cards for a country's government, and, generally, for the municipal government too. The importance that was awarded to these constructions has remained an intrinsic part of European culture, which is still so very proud of its monuments,"he explains. "In America, the city is commercial. It was designed with economic prerogatives in mind. The relationship with its development therefore, is very different; it's more functional."

 

[balenciaga]

A friend of mine sent me this. Thought I'd share it with you. I totally see it and agree with it.

In Europe, design gets you elected, here, it is for sale"- Michael Max Raynaud reminds us that North American cities are different to European cities: "In the past, European cities were political cities - they were built to positively represent whoever was in power at the time, to reflect their strength. They were like business cards for a country's government, and, generally, for the municipal government too. The importance that was awarded to these constructions has remained an intrinsic part of European culture, which is still so very proud of its monuments,"he explains. "In America, the city is commercial. It was designed with economic prerogatives in mind. The relationship with its development therefore, is very different; it's more functional."

It is a different matter: is being beautiful important?
This topic is about whether Toronto is beautiful (in the traditional sense, not in the "every city is beautiful in its own way" kind of sense). Trying to convince ourselves beauty is not important to rationalize that Toronto is not beautiful is kind of sad. Then maybe we should stop making Toronto more appealing, and consider function sufficient and put design completely aside?

 

[Lenser]

I guess we'd all have to agree on a shared definition of "beauty-" good luck with that.

Instead, we're bound to get a bunch of opinions espousing a concept of beauty that, taken together, is utterly relative. But I'm fine with that. Trying to attain some kind of universal stamp of beauty is a mug's game.

I live in this city and I find its myriad vibes alternate like a pendulum; it can be, by turns, brutally banal and vividly lovely. Much depends on fleeting things like the mood I'm in, the people I encounter on my way around town, the vagaries of weather. And that's as it should be. Toronto is not Emerald City; agonizing over that will hardly solve much.

But I admit it can make for a good thread.

 

[TrickyRicky]

"In the past, European cities were political cities - they were built to positively represent whoever was in power at the time, to reflect their strength"

Were those strengths the wisdom, humanity and freedom stuff, or the conquest, tyranny, oppression, and genocide stuff?

 

[RC8]

A friend of mine sent me this. Thought I'd share it with you. I totally see it and agree with it.

In Europe, design gets you elected, here, it is for sale"- Michael Max Raynaud reminds us that North American cities are different to European cities: "In the past, European cities were political cities - they were built to positively represent whoever was in power at the time, to reflect their strength. They were like business cards for a country's government, and, generally, for the municipal government too. The importance that was awarded to these constructions has remained an intrinsic part of European culture, which is still so very proud of its monuments,"he explains. "In America, the city is commercial. It was designed with economic prerogatives in mind. The relationship with its development therefore, is very different; it's more functional."

Washington DC is as political a city as there is anywhere, and yes, it is much more refined and beautiful than most American cities. However, its beauty extends only as far as its pre-war grid does. Take on its suburbs and you may as well be in Pittsburgh.

As I've stated before in this thread, beauty at the urban level is almost interchangeable with human-scaled human-sensitive designs. European cities due to a large variety of reasons have built many more spaces geared towards people than cities elsewhere.

In Toronto and other North American cities we face the financial complication of having to pay for car-infrastructure in low density areas - which means we are left with little funding to revamp our pedestrian spaces.

 

[Hipster Duck]

"In the past, European cities were political cities - they were built to positively represent whoever was in power at the time, to reflect their strength"

Were those strengths the wisdom, humanity and freedom stuff, or the conquest, tyranny, oppression, and genocide stuff?

Who cares? European cities look good.

Seriously, no civilization has been free of those downsides you've mentioned above. Of course the Europeans - or, the West, more generally - had it in larger doses because it has been powerful in the modern era when we can remember and document these atrocities. Nobody remembers if African or Native American tribes raped, pillaged and sold their victims into slavery in brutal wars of conquest, but this happened too.

Also, the West is one of the few civilizations on earth that permits its citizens and even outsiders to critique it.

 

[Hipster Duck]

A friend of mine sent me this. Thought I'd share it with you. I totally see it and agree with it.

In Europe, design gets you elected, here, it is for sale"- Michael Max Raynaud reminds us that North American cities are different to European cities: "In the past, European cities were political cities - they were built to positively represent whoever was in power at the time, to reflect their strength. They were like business cards for a country's government, and, generally, for the municipal government too. The importance that was awarded to these constructions has remained an intrinsic part of European culture, which is still so very proud of its monuments,"he explains. "In America, the city is commercial. It was designed with economic prerogatives in mind. The relationship with its development therefore, is very different; it's more functional."

I kind of disagree with your European friend.

There are some very fine examples of North American cities that were clearly planned to be works of art from the get go. Savannah, Georgia is a good example; Washington DC is another. Yes, it has ugly sprawl on the outskirts but so does Toronto. So does Paris. So does Venice. At the same time, most European cities that are considered beautiful were designed with economic prerogatives in mind - they just happen to be charming today. Central Amsterdam is a bunch of dry goods warehouses with cranes sticking out at the top along the most economically efficient transportation arteries of their day.

I would also disagree that Toronto was an ugly city in its past. When I look at those photos from around 1900, I see genteel boulevards like Jarvis, University, Spadina and even Bay with wrought iron fencing, ample vegetation, uniform and delicate street fixtures, and stately houses, etc. There were many gestures to the City Beautiful: Queen's Park, the Spadina Circle with Knox College in the centre. Most of these would be sacrificed from the 1920s onward.