The pitch on Toronto: A City Becoming, at least to those of us in the alt-media, is that it’s “uTOpia for grown-ups.” That is, in the wake of the staggering (by small press standards) success of Coach House Books’ three collections of essays about the renaissance of creative and civic energy in our city, Key Porter Books has recruited grey-haired CanLit icon David Macfarlane to do it up right. You know, lush photography, oversized format, writers whose names “ring a bell” (something an essay in this collection notes uTOpia mostly lacked) ruminating on transformative-era T.O.
What doesn’t work here is merely kind of dull: David Crombie, the Tiny Perfect MayorTM, probably needed to be included, for example. But anyone who’s followed him on a walking tour knows he’s a great raconteur and historian of the city, so why does he write in faceless generalizations like “the concept of community has persisted as an expansive one”? A similar penchant for windy platitudes shows up in various other essays — Meric Gertler has an interesting take on how planning interacts with neighbourhood creativity, but his experience as a writer of government reports is evident; Creative Class poster-boy Richard Florida (see profile, page 8) loves him some babble about city-regions and some banality about Toronto’s humility and fairness; reliable class warrior Linda McQuaig notices that Tiffany’s sells diamond-studded tennis bracelets and cranks up the income inequality stat-o-matic. There’s much wondering about our self-evident inferiority complex, surface plainness and protestant roots. A couple times, old white establishment men get weepy with pride at the sight of gay people! And minorities! Right here in Toronto!
The essays that really connect do so because they use a magnifying glass, not a panoramic lens. National Post columnist (and EYE WEEKLY alum) Peter Kuitenbrouwer serves an ace with his rambling search through the power malls of Vaughan for a bicycle basket, dissecting the politics and problems of sprawl along the way. Globe columnist John Barber starts out cranky about multiculturalism before proceeding into a much-needed hagiography of Robert Baldwin. David Hayes recycles a Toronto Life piece to give us an intimate glimpse into the life of a repentant gang-banger.

What the bureaucrats and academics tell, the best writers show: that Toronto is a city best seen up close and personal (maybe even, as Ian Pearson points out in his charming essay, from a stool at the Communist’s Daughter).

And this is literally evident in the photography that graces the high-gloss pages. If you balk at the $50 price tag, consider the cost of the startling full-colour photo essays and black-and-white archival shots of life in Toronto.

If you expect it to be any sort of answer to uTOpia’s youthful boosterism, this is pretty weak stuff. But as a gorgeous object for your coffee table, it contains, amid the predictable, a few surprising and powerful observations about where Toronto has been and on what it might yet become.