Is Toronto Beautiful?

[Hipster Duck]

Hah no, I did not. You can hate the tall neo-modernist residential towers all you want and pretend they don't exist, but that doesn't make them less iconic in this city.

There's nothing like them in Europe, either. The community dynamic these giants produce is very different from what you find elsewhere. If you hate them and don't find any beauty in them you are entitled to that opinion, but to say they aren't a fairly unique phenomenon in their structure and setting here is pushing it. I also agree that sadly our design standards are often not up to European levels. Whenever you see similar developments in the US (like in Miami) the towers are usually built to accommodate drivers and not pedestrians.

Maybe it's because I'm not originally from North America and don't take things for granted, but I think each of the 4 big Canadian cities (Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal) are very unique and completely unmistakable from one another and from any other city in the world. They are NOTHING like the stuff south of the border. And I say this having lived in the US. I would argue they are all beautiful cities in their own right, too.

Genuinely ugly cities in my opinion are places like Mississauga, Buffalo, Ft. Lauderdale, Detroit, Tampa, Houston, etc. I've heard from dozens of people who've been to Calgary that they would NEVER go back if they can help it. Apparently LA is horrible, too. Outside of North America I know Lima (Peru) and La Paz (Bolivia) are terrible. Caracas (Venezuela) and Rio de Janeiro would be terrible but they are bailed out by some of the most spectacular natural settings anywhere. New cities in the Middle East and many in Asia are as neubilder would say 'crimes against humanity'.

RC8, you're entitled to your opinion and beauty is certainly one of the most subjective things that there is, but I still think you need to show your logic and consistency to get your point across.

How is Buffalo ugly but Ottawa beautiful? How is Houston or Detroit some mundane everyday city? Frankly, I can't think of two more unique cities in the world. There really isn't another Detroit anywhere (you know, birthplace of mass production and middle class automobility - and the resulting built form it produced) and Houston is so unique from an urban perspective that urbanists have written countless books on it. And LA is horrible? You haven't even been there!

How can you say that Toronto is beautiful and iconic yet Mississauga is not? They're part of the same contiguous metropolitan area and flow seamlessly into one another! Heck if you close your eyes at Dixie and Dundas and open them up again at Dixie and the East Mall, what has really changed except the street signs and bus shelters?

 

[pman]

I think Toronto is making big strides, and all the projects we've cited here (Queen's Quay, Bloor, Roncesvalles, etc) are evidence of that. I expect as the downtown core grows we'll see many more. But this 'project-based' approach is, to my mind, sort of the problem. In Toronto we get an attractive streetscape here and there because local businesses champion it, the local councillor gets on board, some funding is located, utilities are forced to co-ordinate, and the thing gets built eventually. This takes time, effort, and by definition happens only in the places where the stars align.

What's missing is an attractive public realm that's just sort of the default setting when anything gets done. I could be wrong, but Montreal's attractive lighting, paving, street furniture, and largely buried hydro wires have never seemed like they are part of 'projects' or 'revitalizations,' with the obvious exceptions of stuff like the recent Maisonneuve rebuild. They're simply the result of how the city's government and various agencies with a stake in the place operate. I see the same in New York, London, Vancouver, and other places that generally take better care of themselves than we do.

Too often in Toronto routine work seems like it's performed by people who couldn't care less about the attractiveness of the final product, and until that changes no number of 'projects' will really move the ball down the field.

This isn't to say flashy revitalization efforts shouldn't be encouraged. Obviously they should. My point is that getting from our current mixed-up state to something that's consistently attractive is as much about overall mindset as about executing grand schemes.

Absolutely right.

 

[RC8]

RC8, you're entitled to your opinion and beauty is certainly one of the most subjective things that there is, but I still think you need to show your logic and consistency to get your point across.

How is Buffalo ugly but Ottawa beautiful? How is Houston or Detroit some mundane everyday city? Frankly, I can't think of two more unique cities in the world. There really isn't another Detroit anywhere (you know, birthplace of mass production and middle class automobility - and the resulting built form it produced) and Houston is so unique from an urban perspective that urbanists have written countless books on it. And LA is horrible? You haven't even been there!

How can you say that Toronto is beautiful and iconic yet Mississauga is not? They're part of the same contiguous metropolitan area and flow seamlessly into one another! Heck if you close your eyes at Dixie and Dundas and open them up again at Dixie and the East Mall, what has really changed except the street signs and bus shelters?

I only think that The Old City of Toronto and its immediate periphery are beautiful. Dixie and the East Mall is up there with one of the ugliest places I've ever visited.

Fair enough for asking me for criteria - I admit it was lacking (explicitly) in my earlier posts.

I think beautiful spaces are those where people feel comfortable interacting and admiring their environment and each other. Cities I consider beautiful are those that allow people not only access to these spaces, but also a number of corridors that share their characteristics.

A beautiful ecosystem is a functioning one. Species need to harmoniously interact with one another and their physical environment to maintain stable populations with healthy individuals. I understand beautiful cities as those where the harmonious interaction of people from different backgrounds with each other, their natural environment, and their physical environment lead to relative health and happiness.

If you would feel uncomfortable walking between destinations, then that place is lacking. In a beautiful city, you should be able to move from one great space to another on foot while enjoying the journey. Likewise, if a city forces on to you a lifestyle that requires intensive natural resource extraction harmony between us and our natural environment is lacking. It isn't beautiful to see something built on the back of continuous seemingly never-ending destruction.

Houston has a dead downtown surrounded in all directions by hectares and hectares of this:

https://maps.google.ca/?ll=29.74414...noid=REDpdFrkwSXEAlsXz5ajLQ&cbp=12,36,,0,5.36

Would you feel comfortable making your girlfriend walk alone home from her downtown office through a place like that if you are busy and can't pick her up? Assume its a 40 minute walk. I know I wouldn't be. It feels like a terrible punishment.

Similar scenarios abound in the other cities I described. I walk places like that for fun, and yes I do discover beauty everywhere, but it's different to explore places every once in a while and find them cool and completely different to have to live with them on a daily basis. Cities should be judged by the latter, I believe.

Try the girlfriend scenario again with your girlfriend walking 40 minutes in any direction from the financial core in the cities like Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, or Vancouver, and it would be a much more pleasant eventful and even enjoyable experience depending on the route. I found central Ottawa to be perfectly connected to a number of neighbourhoods. It was very refreshing and beautiful in many ways.

The Old City of Toronto, where most detached homes are walking distance from retail, transit, parks, and employment, is very nice. The new towers mean that more and more people get to live close to where they want to be and walk through spaces they like on the way to where they need to be. If time weren't an issue I would always walk everywhere in this city - I always enjoy the journey a lot thanks to the things that other people are doing along the way. Even in the dead of the winter!

This is an example of another beautiful space from a recently revitalised boulevard in Caracas:

People will always have their artistically-impaired definitions of beauty. I think that places that attract people and manage to make them stick around interacting with each other and the environment in a positive manner should be our top priority. This is the basis for everything Gehl architects design, for example. Results rarely disappoint regardless of anyone's definition of beauty.

 

[Ladies Mile]

Basing one's criteria on whether or not some ostensible girlfriend would enjoy a 45 minute walk through the center of town seems like an odd way to quantify beauty.

You might omit places such as Naples, Italy and St. Petersburg, Russia on that basis due to crime, pollution, garbage and traffic alone. Doesn't mean that they aren't amazing urban environments however.

 

[Ladies Mile]

Downtown Houston is grossly underrated, if you like mid-century modern, that is. It is essentially the Miesian ideal - the city so elegant it is not even there.

 

[TrickyRicky]

neubilder, I don't think any of us know what we are talking about . But to me the only people who look foolish are those, and I say this with a smile on my face because I admire their efforts and determination, who believe that beauty is a property intrinsic to something that can be universally accepted and understood.

 

[RC8]

Basing one's criteria on whether or not some ostensible girlfriend would enjoy a 45 minute walk through the center of town seems like an odd way to quantify beauty.

You might omit places such as Naples, Italy and St. Petersburg, Russia on that basis due to crime, pollution, garbage and traffic alone. Doesn't mean that they aren't amazing urban environments however.

As odd as any other. Accepted definition of beauty is:
1. A combination of qualities, such as shape, color, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, esp. the sight.
2. A combination of qualities that pleases the intellect or moral sense.

Places that humans tend to find pleasant, peaceful, comforting, and worth spending time in, are thus beautiful places to me. The type of places that make you feel like sitting down to absorb your surroundings.

Who wouldn't enjoy a 45 minute walk through central Naples or St. Petersburg? I can't speak from experience unfortunately but I love streetviewing the hell out of them! Amazing and, yes, beautiful throughout. Buenos Aires (which I've explored quite a bit) is dirty, noisy, and somewhat unsafe, but it's an incredible beautiful metropolis.

I also think the likes of Houston and Detroit are absolutely fascinating. I just find them depressing to experience as a pedestrian - which rules them out according to my personal definition of beauty. I hate getting stuck on semantics, you can call what I call 'beauty' human-friendliness and that's fine too! It's an objective concept but understandably you may understand 'beauty' as being something completely different.

I still haven't heard an argument from anyone ever on how New York is a beautiful city and Toronto isn't that doesn't contradict itself over and over.

 

[Ladies Mile]

I still haven't heard an argument from anyone ever on how New York is a beautiful city and Toronto isn't that doesn't contradict itself over and over.

You won't hear one from me. New York is not beautiful, but its ugliness (if that's the word) is very different from the scruffiness of Toronto.

Perhaps the best way to define it is that New York, if often full of grand buildings and public spaces, has an oppressive, sinister quality that has something to do with scale (particularly with the older, more ornate buildings) and something to do with the intense sense that the city is continually under watch from every possible level - a kind of paranoia, like that in Hitchcock's Rear Window. This can still be visually dramatic, as certain cities like Rome and Moscow also are and for much the same reasons, but I find it unpleasant on a day-to-day level.

 

[Tewder]

Places that humans tend to find pleasant, peaceful, comforting, and worth spending time in, are thus beautiful places to me. The type of places that make you feel like sitting down to absorb your surroundings.

Working with your definition for the moment I just wouldn't find Toronto all that 'beautiful', quite frankly. The streetscapes, public spaces and parks just really aren't all that 'pleasant' or 'comfortable', imo... and don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting you can't find these things in Toronto, only that this isn't the average urban experience here... though I think it should be!!

 

[Lenser]

You won't hear one from me. New York is not beautiful, but its ugliness (if that's the word) is very different from the scruffiness of Toronto.

Perhaps the best way to define it is that New York, if often full of grand buildings and public spaces, has an oppressive, sinister quality that has something to do with scale (particularly with the older, more ornate buildings) and something to do with the intense sense that the city is continually under watch from every possible level - a kind of paranoia, like that in Hitchcock's Rear Window. This can still be visually dramatic, as certain cities like Rome and Moscow also are and for much the same reasons, but I find it unpleasant on a day-to-day level.

Interesting comment. Isn't the UK way heavier in this respect? I thought their cities have way more CCTV cameras keeping eye on property and people.

In any case, in Toronto's new clusters of vertical villages, the same kind of omnipresent spying/voyeurism is entirely possible. All those windows into all those living rooms and bedrooms.. in time, people come to accept it as a fact of urban life. Toronto's really no different from NYC in that respect. From one angle it's perhaps sinister, but from other angles it can be seen as something more positive. It speaks of our collective humanity and the very essence of urban culture - density, exposure to different things, the mesh of ethnicities and inclinations.

 

[vatche]

The problem with Toronto is that it does not flow. Yes it does have beautiful neighborhoods, such as yorkville, king and John, the waterfront, queen west, beaches, the distillery district (with no architectural wowness to them), however they're not connected. People talk about how beautiful Chicago is for example. They all refer to one big area and that is the magnificent mile which runs up to the river. The other neighborhoods in Chicago are not beautiful per say. In the same token, Montreal. U walk down st Catherine's and u have crescent st, peel, de la Montaigne, up to Sherbrooke with the museum area, heck , even mcgill university is there.. If u keep walking it gets a little shabby but then u get to st Denis or st urbain which take u down to the old port or to le plateau mont royal. U see? There's a flow. In Toronto, u don't. Getting to u of t is quite a hike. And theres not much on college st to see. Unless u really know ur way around and get there thru specific streets, which only a native would know. Not in Montreal. Furthermore there's a lot of nothingness between the neighborhoods in toronto which makes the walk boring. I did it last year when I took a friend there. And we ended up walking sometimes with not much to look at around us. And I know Toronto fairly well, cause I used to live in Hamilton. Can u imagine for a tourist??
Once yonge gets revitalized and beautified though like it should, I think it'll change a lot of things. It's the missing piece of the puzzle. It'll connect the dots.
Also don't forget that Toronto is a very very young city compared to ny, or Paris and London and even Montreal. So please don't go there. Paris was THE place to be in the late 1800's just like Vienna was before that. As Toronto grows and matures, it will come into its own. It already has and that's y it's garnering a lot more attention than it ever has. Guys we didn't even have a 5 star hotel in the city until recently...think about it......
Having said all that....my answer to the question....is it pretty??? Hmmm, I don't think so. Nobody would sit there and say that it's pretty. But it's getting more and more happening and has a buzz to it....an architectural digest magazine just called it a "capital of cool". Toronto was NEVER cool...

That's my two cents worth.

 

[Lenser]

Furthermore there's a lot of nothingness between the neighborhoods in toronto which makes the walk boring. I did it last year when I took a friend there. And we ended up walking sometimes with not much to look at around us. And I know Toronto fairly well, cause I used to live in Hamilton. Can u imagine for a tourist??

I was unaware that all these vacuums existed between neighbourhoods. How upsetting! Have the authorities been alerted? How did you manage to breathe as you traversed these treacherous voids?

I would respectfully suggest that all you need do is open your eyes. Perhaps you and your friend were simply not in the mood for a walk or for being observant. There's plenty of interesting things to see, provided you're willing to let it all soak into you.

Nor would I agree that Toronto lacks a connected feeling or a "flow." I don't even know what you mean by that term. Seems to me that any experience in any city has much to do with what you bring to the game. From what I can see, Montreal's various neighbourhoods are no more smoothly integrated than Toronto's - you can be jolted just as much there as you can here.

 

[Tewder]

The thing is, in answer to this question should we be considering the 'tourist' sites, postcard views, and private developments or should we be looking at the more day-to-day urban experiences that define a city?

Looking at the pictures posted by nstuch in the 'Shabby Realm' thread you can contrast some of these minor details:

feast your eyes on the recently completed traffic island at Bathurst and Lake Shore, complete with metal railing of the calibre that they install in sewage plants (already bent and broken by the way), compared to a random equivalent in London

... and though I understand that you can find places like the following in any city these photos (again by nstuch) are in very popular, central Toronto areas:

The reality is that these streetscapes are typical of Toronto, no matter where in the city you are. To my thinking they do not make the city a comfortable, engaging, or pleasant place... and certainly not beautiful.

*Disclaimer - I would emphasize that this doesn't mean that Toronto isn't engaging in other ways, or visually interesting in a 'messy urban' way, or however you want to describe it.

 

[vatche]

I was unaware that all these vacuums existed between neighbourhoods. How upsetting! Have the authorities been alerted? How did you manage to breathe as you traversed these treacherous voids?

I would respectfully suggest that all you need do is open your eyes. Perhaps you and your friend were simply not in the mood for a walk or for being observant. There's plenty of interesting things to see, provided you're willing to let it all soak into you.

Nor would I agree that Toronto lacks a connected feeling or a "flow." I don't even know what you mean by that term. Seems to me that any experience in any city has much to do with what you bring to the game. From what I can see, Montreal's various neighbourhoods are no more smoothly integrated than Toronto's - you can be jolted just as much there as you can here.

I managed somehow!!!! And the authorities have been alerted.
Thanks for ur concern.

 

[Lenser]

Why, you're welcome, vatche! Clearly you are an intrepid soul and you are well equipped to be a stellar urban explorer.