Star: Where is Toronto at UN World Urban Form (Hume)

[AlvinofDiaspar]

From the Star, by Hume:

Where is Toronto at forum on cities?
Absence is `appalling,'
says David Crombie
Jun. 20, 2006. 01:00 AM
CHRISTOPHER HUME

VANCOUVER—The world has come here to talk about cities, but Toronto is nowhere to be seen.

More than 5,000 delegates from 160 countries have gathered in Vancouver for the third United Nations World Urban Forum. Vancouver is represented, as are Victoria and Montreal, and cities from as far away as Tanzania and Afghanistan. So where is Toronto? As far as visitors here are concerned, it might as well not exist.

"It's worse than appalling," says former Toronto mayor David Crombie, in a rare display of anger. "Toronto is self-absorbed. It doesn't think it has to try. The issue is not the mayor (David Miller), but there is no sense that we're a part of the rest of the planet."

Crombie is chair of the Canadian Urban Institute, which has a booth at the Vancouver Convention Centre, along with a number of cities and countries from around the globe. He is one of a handful of prominent Torontonians who have made the trip to the west coast to join in the discussion.

Even Prime Minister Stephen Harper showed up yesterday at the opening ceremony to extol the virtues of his government and underline his dedication to the urban agenda. Though his tone was defensive, he spoke about his commitment to everything from the environment to fighting crime. But even Harper had to admit that Canada's cities remain "a work in progress."

No one here would disagree with that, but compared to the situation in other parts of the world, our problems don't seem so grave. Indeed, the backdrop to the forum is the unprecedented, even terrifying, speed of global urbanization. According to UN figures, some time this year or next, more than half of the world's population will inhabit cities rather than rural areas. To make matters worse, many of these new urban dwellers are desperately poor.

Eduardo Moreno, of the UN-Habitat Human Settlements Program, told reporters that one billion people now live in slums and he said that number is expected to double within a decade. The greatest rates of urbanization are not in the West or the rich North, but in the developing world, especially sub-Saharan Africa, which if current trends continue, will be the location of some of the most populous cities on earth by 2020. Lagos alone could have more than 20 million inhabitants.

The phrase of the day, heard here over and over again, is "the urbanization of poverty."

As one conference official put it, "The developing world is going through its 19th century now."

Anna Tibaijuka, the executive director of UN-Habitat, called the situation "an affront to human dignity." She described slums so bad that 300 residents are forced to share a single toilet.

Slum dwellers, she said, die younger, and are more likely to be victims of crime.

"Poverty," she noted bitterly, "is the biggest polluter."

But as delegates wandered through the convention centre, eating, drinking, chatting and admiring the view of snow-capped mountains on the far side of Vancouver's harbour, the forum took on an almost festive air. Musicians, dancers and acrobats on stilts entertained the crowds while the warm west coast sun brought smiles to their faces.

This conference is intended to bring together people from different corners of the planet to share ideas, experiences and best practices. No policy directives will be released, no statements issued; this forum is dedicated to roundtables, networking sessions and lots of talk. Mayors of cities such as Kabul, Nairobi and Nanjing are participating, along with a gaggle of government ministers. They are here, they say, to listen and learn. Which brings us back to Toronto, where, says former chief planner and delegate Paul Bedford, we live in a "culture of poverty." He's right, but then everything is relative. But by the standards of much of the world, Bedford notes, Toronto is rich beyond people's wildest expectations.

In any case, the only city councillor on hand for the World Urban Forum is Pam McConnell, here as a member of UNICEF. There are a couple of senior city bureaucrats here as delegates as well, as are several members of the Toronto Youth Cabinet.

Miller is booked to attend a meeting of mayors from cities around the Great Lakes in Parry Sound later this week, a spokesperson told the Star's John Spears.

Premier Dalton McGuinty says he wasn't invited, though the provincial Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing does have a booth.

The forum continues until Friday.
_________________________________________________

As regrettable as it is, the said paper never said a word about the Metropolis conference held in Toronto last week.

AoD

 

[alklay]

I am still left wondering why we need to be at this particular conference (as opposed to the many many others and as opposed to spending time and money on known issues here in the city).

 

[GregWTravels]

While I am all for learning from other cities, I do think that the mayors time is better spent with our local counterparts in the Great Lakes. We share a lot more in common with, and have a lot more common concerns with other great lakes cities than we do with Dar Es Saalam.

 

[AlchemisTO]

As an urbanophile, a lover of diverse social systems and a Torontonian this article makes me wince. Here are some of the biggest stinkers:

No one here would disagree with that, but compared to the situation in other parts of the world, our problems don't seem so grave. Indeed, the backdrop to the forum is the unprecedented, even terrifying, speed of global urbanization. According to UN figures, some time this year or next, more than half of the world's population will inhabit cities rather than rural areas. To make matters worse, many of these new urban dwellers are desperately poor...As one conference official put it, "The developing world is going through its 19th century now."

This is the best news to happen to the world, from a socio-economic perspective. Living in a city opens educational doors, permits people to compete for their skills, gives women more freedom; it enriches lives. Rural communities are plagued by the worst in small-town cronyism, nepotism, narrow-mindedness and conservatism. It's a place where a woman gets raped and nobody makes a peep; she has nowhere to run to, no support systems in place. It's a place where opportunities go to a select few based on lineage, rather than ability or even wealth. It's a place where almost feudal-style landowners work peasants to the bone. If Christopher Hume is going to be have the audacity to say that the developing world is going through the 19th century, he should at least call a spade a spade and say that the rural life migrants leave behind is at least mired in the 14th.

As for environmental impacts? What's worse: 300,000 Brazilians migrating to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, or that same 300,000 slashing and burning the Amazon rainforest? You decide.


How are the slums of Nairobi any different from the slums of London and Manchester in the 19th century, the Lower East Side, Toronto's 'Ward'? People don't live in abject filth and poverty because they're listless; everybody wants to better their lot in life. Every slum eventually unslums itself, provided that it is left to its own devices and isn't negatively impacted by top-down governmental decisions. It's interesting to note that nearly all the slums created in the developed world after the Second World War were centrally-planned.

Mayors of cities such as Kabul, Nairobi and Nanjing are participating, along with a gaggle of government ministers. They are here, they say, to listen and learn. Which brings us back to Toronto, where, says former chief planner and delegate Paul Bedford, we live in a "culture of poverty." He's right, but then everything is relative. But by the standards of much of the world, Bedford notes, Toronto is rich beyond people's wildest expectations.

What is a culture of poverty? The term itself is an oxy-moron. Toronto is one of the most interesting social experiments in city living in the world right now. We have a majority foreign born-population infusing our oddly-scaled metropolis with their home-spun culture living in beehive neighbourhoods. Maybe Hume and Bedford would prefer to leave the metropolitan hustle of Toronto and decamp to some moribund place like, I don't know, Copenhagen or Helsinki where high-tech trams and deconstructionist art galleries on floating pontoons proliferate, but Muslims can't open stores. This kind of platitude reminds me of those people who think that Los Angeles is a cultural wasteland because everything is done in a car, while Venice is probably an enriching city because everything is so intimately scaled and "you can walk everywhere!". Cities are highly complex beings; they have to be because they're composed of millions of individual people, which form an almost sub-molecular framework for the great metropoli which they run. We should probably stop attending these useless forums where we can navel gaze, pretending to understand how they work, and just let them sort themselves out on their own.