Is Toronto Beautiful?

[balenciaga]

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.

yeah, why do we pretend North American countries didn't do equally horrible things?
The US has probably invaded more countries than any other European ones. Besides the treatment of black slaves and indians, it even first handedly broke up Panama from Colombia just to get what it wanted - build the Panama Canal, during the construction of which thousands of west Indians lost their lives because of poor safety measure. It is simply atrocious.
Canada has its own share of evil past as well. Don't pretend for a second we are morally superior to imperial Brtain, France and Spain.

 

[Ladies Mile]

yeah, why do we pretend North American countries didn't do equally horrible things?
The US has probably invaded more countries than any other European ones. Besides the treatment of black slaves and indians, it even first handedly broke up Panama from Colombia just to get what it wanted - build the Panama Canal, during the construction of which thousands of west Indians lost their lives because of poor safety measure. It is simply atrocious.
Canada has its own share of evil past as well. Don't pretend for a second we are morally superior to imperial Britain, France and Spain.

That is balderdash.

The imperial UK ruled over two fifths of the land surface of the planet.

The US are pikers in comparison and Canada is a flea on a piker.

 

[M.R.Victor]

That is balderdash.

The imperial UK ruled over two fifths of the land surface of the planet.

The US are pikers in comparison and Canada is a flea on a piker.

This argument is getting quite silly, especially in the implication that European cities are beautiful simply because they were built on the backs of empires, while North American cities are not because American imperialism doesn't quite stack up to European imperialism. The fact that nations as wealthy as those present in North America produce cities as ugly as those present in North America is clearly at least partially driven by cultural attitudes towards beauty urban life. To argue to the contrary is simply silly, specifically because of a multitute of cities present in countries with far less reach (both historically and in the present) in terms of political and economic power that are nonetheless far more beautiful (in the classical sense) than cities found in North America.

 

[diminutive]

I don't think it's so much an argument over whether European cities were or weren't built on the backs of empire/genocide/autocracy, but more one of why European cities develop the way they do and why our cities developed differently.

Take the case of Budapest. It's actually younger than Toronto, but between 1870-1914 the Hungarian government did everything it could to make it look like the capital of a major European power. Despite the rest of the country still being relatively underdeveloped, Budapest was completely worked over. It was meant to be a grandiose, imperial status symbol.

Another example could be the tradition of French Presidents leaving some kind of 'gift' to Paris. Even in Britain, let alone N. America, any PM who tried something like that would become a pariah.

Yes, many European cities (not all...) were consciously developed to be status symbols of Imperial prestige, much to the ignorance of smaller provincial centers, the countryside and (increasingly) their own suburbs.

 

[TrickyRicky]

I was not making any statement criticing European morality. That would be to miss my point. I was criticizing the idea presented of why European cities were able to achieve uniformity and high levels of investment in their major city centres in the past.

My suggestion is that absolute power and harvesting of global resources has more to do with it than I feel many here are willing to admit. Even if we were to attempt to dublicate this in modern Toronto to establish some kind of greater uniformity, the results would be different. We could replace absolute power of a ruler or religious order or council of elite, with a design panel of experts; however, that design panel would be highly limited in their scope and likely hated by the middle-class majority and eventually marginalized to the point of irrelevence. Regional building precedent automatically generates a level of standardization. This standardization is limited though to each individual building boom as times and practices change.

The new global mega-cities of our era are even messier and uglier than Toronto. This springs forth from the world we have created. You can still get pockets of uniformity based on repetition of local building practices from past eras, or where absolute power still reigns such as in the Middle-East or China. You cannot repeate the conditions that created major European cities. Infact major european cities are more likely to be ripped apart and start resembling Toronto than the other way around.

 

[joey_122@hotmail.com]

Ya i think what toronto needs is less ugly bland run of the mill highrises the ones with unique designs by all means approve l tower, monde, massy toer... but the design revview pannel defenitely needs to have some stricter policies regarding what they approve. It would be much nicer to see more mid rise 6-10 story neighborhoods being built similarily to what they do in europe for instance. How come mid-rise building such as these are not being built in toronto?
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=504403&page=23

 

[joey_122@hotmail.com]

 

[vatche]

I totally agree, they keep building glass towers as if there's no other style out there. We need some diversity with our new buildings going up. They really all look the same. Don't they see it???