Toronto Notes

David Pecaut: Torontopia's suit

by: Shawn Micallef
December 15, 2009 1:00 PM
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Last week an email circulated around the city, eventually making its way into newspaper articles and onto blogs. It was from David Pecaut and it was his love letter to Toronto. He died of cancer on Monday. It was a shock to many because the letter gave no hint of anything so frightfully terminal, simply some casual regret for having been out of sight for a while due to his illness.

That positive view was typical of Pecaut, who moved to Toronto in 1981 from the States and eventually ran the Toronto branch of the Boston Consulting Group, a global business strategy firm. Yet in this city that’s a footnote to his other work. In 2002 he founded the Toronto City Summit Alliance, a coalition of civic leaders from across the GTA (Pecaut’s Toronto blurred 416 with 905). What was and is remarkable about the Alliance is its positive enthusiasm about Toronto while tackling a wide range of issues like greening the city, diversity, immigrant employment and affordable housing. In 2007, its most high-profile endeavor, the Luminato festival, was launched.

Civic enthusiasm seems easy but if you think back to the state of Toronto up to 2002, pessimism was everywhere. The city was still in the doldrums of the post-amalgamation mess and years of Mel Lastman’s scattershot boosterism that left the city’s soul rather empty. Out of this rose what came to be known as the “Torontopia” movement: artists were making stuff, galleries were popping up in various neighbourhoods, the city’s music scene could hardly be contained and a new generation of civic activists — inspired by the 1970s Jane Jacobs adherents — were digging into Toronto and not letting go. David Miller’s election in 2003 didn’t hurt either and people were coming around to the idea that Toronto was, indeed, good.

Yet great cities aren’t built on indie-rock alone. Pecaut was very much a part of Torontopia, even if he’s not (yet) celebrated as such. His work represented the more formal business side of Torontopia — that is, the “establishment” — and if the two scenes initially sound incompatible, he too was a Jane Jacobs fan (remember she wrote about the economy of the city as much as its sidewalk atmosphere) and his reach was great.

Pecaut's last missive to Toronto spoke of what this city does well: it’s wide open and its civil society has the potential to influence the world. What we do here, how we live, how we mix — and his City Summit Alliance had Toronto’s demographics mixing as they ought to — is what we can do better than anybody else. As Pecaut wrote, “Toronto’s gift to the world could be this unique and powerful model of city building that comes from collective leadership.” He will be collectively missed because we need people like him to remind of Toronto's good, relentlessly, and it’s a rare person who can be that relentlessly in love with Toronto and convince other people to feel it and then do something with that love.

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