"The customer is always right" means jack shit when you have a monopoly. And when you've just been awarded a 20-year exclusive contract for all street-level advertising in Toronto — a city your brochure touts as having "the largest concentration of consumers in the country!" — you can apparently also afford to appear controlling, paranoid, and contemptuous of the very people whom you're about to ply with free alcohol in an effort to win their trust.

Wednesday night at the Toronto Film Studios, Astral Media Outdoor held a special "cocktail party" open house for Business Improvement Areas (BIAs) from across Toronto to show off full-scale prototypes of the new street furniture elements  — bus shelters, public washrooms, that kind of thing — they will soon be rolling out. As the contract allows the city, and by extension BIAs, to install and maintain their own (advertising-free) street furniture items outside of the scope of the program, and grants city councillors a de facto veto on the placement of any particular items within their wards, getting the business community onside is crucial; Astral's brochure advises advertisers that they "target residents of Toronto right where the action is, where they work, play and shop."

But the purpose of a BIA is to establish a unique local brand or identity, something to distinguish one neighbourhood from another, to add particular sparks or flourishes that, in their own ways, enhance the interstitial spaces of a community. This would seem antithetical to the prospect of adopting transit shelters, garbage bins, benches, multi-publication news boxes, information pillars, postering kiosks, public washrooms and bike racks that are identical to those found throughout the city; once you factor in the national and international advertising campaigns that adorn certain items, your Business Improvement Area may as well be in any neighbourhood in any city in the country or the English-speaking world. An acquiescence of selfhood is not a proposition to be taken lightly.

Which is why the Old Cabbagetown BIA brought me along. I'm a campaigner with the Toronto Public Space Committee (TPSC); I advocate for public space at City Hall, with a particular focus on out-of-home advertising and street furniture. The Cabbagetown BIA has its own Public Space Committee, a microcosmic version of the TPSC, dedicated to tackling the challenges of elevating Cabbagetown's public realm towards the ideals of sustainability and inclusivity. Its founder and chair, Maggie O'Connor, had a few months earlier brought me in as a sort of advisor, to offer feedback and recommendations regarding what sorts of street furniture might or might not be appropriate for the area.

Along with BIA Chair Paul Dineen and Coordinator Doug Fisher [EDITOR'S NOTE: Mr. Fisher responds to this article in the comments section below], Maggie and I took a cab down to Eastern and Pape from the BIA's Carlton-and-Parliament offices. When we arrived, we were directed inside Studio 1, where we were greeted by the (now glass-encased)  models previously on display at City Hall and a table staffed by three chipper young women, outfitted in identical yellow shirts as part of Astral's nonsensical "Follow the yellow brick road to a new Toronto" theme.

The girls were unable to find the BIA on the list (perhaps they were looking under "Cabbagetown" rather than "Old Cabbagetown"), but no matter. There were four of us attending with the BIA, and that was cool. We picked up copies of the aforementioned intended-for-advertisers brochure and checked our coats. The woman signing in behind us identified herself as being with the Yonge Lawrence Village BIA, and I congratulated her on the little miracles for which they were recently responsible.

As we were about to cross the curtained threshold into the showroom we were abruptly stopped by a bespectacled French-Canadian, like a taller and more intense Stéphane Dion. His nametag read "Luc Beaulieu."  He is the vice-president of Astral Media Outdoor for development and operations in Ontario. I recognized him. As was immediately evident, the converse was also true.

"Who are you with?" he asked.

"The Cabbagetown BIA."

This did not console him.  He darted over to the sign-in table.

"What is your name?" he demanded of me.

"Jonathan."

"Jonathan...?"

"Jonathan."  I clued in he was fishing for a last name.  "Goldsbie. Jonathan Goldsbie."

All of a sudden we were under intense scrutiny. O'Connor, Dineen and Fisher insisted I was legitimately there as a representative of the BIA.

Beaulieu would not accept their word.  "Did you RSVP?"

"Yes, we did," replied Fisher.

"For how many?"

"We RSVP'd for three, but we have four."

Now Beaulieu had something to latch onto. All of a sudden, space within the studio (which I later was told had only between one or two dozen people inside) was a precious commodity, and accomodating an additional person was out of the question.

I volunteered, "I won't eat or drink anything." Beaulieu looked at me, unsure as I was whether I was joking.

"You're looking at three people who are on the list telling you in good faith that the fourth person is with them," offered Fisher. Good enough for Elections Canada, but not for Astral Media. Eventually, Fisher offered that the three people would be O'Connor, Dineen and myself. So Beaulieu changed the issue to being about whose names were on the list.

Of course, by all accounts other than Beaulieu's, there were no names on the list. At least not those of my companions. And certainly other people had no trouble getting in regardless of their inclusion on the list.

"Look at this logically," said Fisher. "We're customers." Did they want to treat customers like this?  Beaulieu then fell back on a mantra of, "I'm sorry, sir, but it's our policy" and "It's an invite-only, private event."

It became clear that Beaulieu would sooner alienate the Cabbagetown BIA than allow me inside. So O'Connor, Fisher and Dineen went in, while I waited outside for them to finish their browsing.

I sat down on the floor next to the entrance, scribbling notes. A councillor's constituency assistant with whom I'm friends came in. She noticed me on the floor and said hello and asked how I was. We chatted briefly about what had happened, and then she (also not on the list) went in.

Shortly after, one of the Cabbagetown BIAers brought me a glass of wine and asked "Are you getting people to sign things or speaking to them as they come in?  These people are very paranoid." Of course I wasn't, but my chat with my constit assistant friend had made Astral anxious.

Meeting up at Jet Fuel later to debrief, O'Connor says that in light of her committee's goals of inclusivity and sustainability, she "couldn't find any value in the [Coordinated Street Furniture] program. The aesthetics of these objects don't enhance or embrace any of those things. They're sterile and could be anywhere."

On the info pillars: Taking up approximately 10 square feet, there's no space for them on the sidewalks of Cabbagetown.

On the bike racks: They're "no better than the current ones," albeit "sparkly." (Each one does, however, appear to be a single fused piece.)

On the postering kiosks: The Old Cabbagetown BIA already has three elegant postering kiosks (at Winchester and Parliament, Carlton and Parliament, and Carlton and Sackville) they purchased themselves, and "Astral's aesthetic is nothing compared to ours."

On the washrooms (which bear scrolling ads):  They have to be accessible to all residents, which should mean not charging a fee for use, however "nominal," though fee-for-service fluid evacuation is the current plan. When she asked Beaulieu about energy usage and efficiency, he was unable to provide an answer.

On the transit shelters: "They seemed very big, and both designs seemed as wide as our sidewalk." The decision as to whether or not a particular site will host an electricity-grid-connected ad-adorned shelter or a solar-powered ad-free shelter, she learned, will depend upon the "exposure" of the location to consumer eyeballs. Which is really too bad, because safety and visibility, not just for motorists, cyclists and pedestrians, but for the people who use the shelters, should be the overriding factor. "People don't go into shelters around here," O'Connor observes. They're dark spaces, not well lit at night, and she's confident that they'd be "used more if they didn't have ads" creating an opaque wall on one side. Furthermore, all ad panels mechanically scroll through three to five different advertisements.

"Why are we replacing perfectly well-functioning bus shelters when the city's supposed to be going green?  Even designing them is a waste," O'Connor says. Many parts of the city have older-style shelters that are going to be disposed of to make way for the new shelters, which are no more functional, just of a newer design that, according to O'Connor is "overstylized" to the point of being plastic-looking and "beyond generic."

BIAs, she says, have to realize that they have a certain amount of freedom to opt out, that just because this is what the city wants doesn't mean that something is right for a particular neighbourhood, and that they have leeway to undertake their own projects that, in varying ways, allow the community a measure of self-definition.

"After my encounter with [Luc Beaulieu], I can tell you this: he is certainly not someone I would choose to be responsible for the design of a significant portion of my community."

 [NOTE: When it was first published, this story incorrectly reported the name and job title of the Astral media representative. We regret the error.]

Jonathan Goldsbie, a campaigner with the Toronto Public Space Committee, will write on politics and public space for Toronto Notes every week. Email Jonathan@publicspace.ca.

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