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Theorizing Toronto Theorizing Toronto Ioan Davies The spectres drift across the square in rows. How empire permeates! And we sit down in Nathan Phillips square, among the sun, as if our lives were real. Lacunae. Parking lots. Regenerations. Newsstand euphorics and Revell’s1 sign, that not one countryman has learned, that men and women live that they make that life worth dying. Living. Hey, the dead ones! Gentlemen, generations of acquiescent spectres gawk at the chrome on American cars on Queen St, gawk and slump and retreat. And over the square where I sit, congregating above the Archer they crowd in a dense baffled throng and the sun does not shine through (Lee 1972: 36) Thus wrote the Toronto poet Dennis Lee in the early 1970s, contemplating the new Toronto City Hall and the installation of Henry Moore’s statue The Archer, which had caused a major civic upheaval when it was unveiled.2 It marked the moment when the city began to think seriously about its space, as the introduction of new forms of architecture took over from the old: the futuristic City Hall itself (commanding a space beside the red sandstone of the old gothic City Hall), Mies van der Rohe’s Toronto-Dominion Bank on Wellington street (a mass black-and-glass block replacing older, inter-war stone and brick offices), and the freeing of the old harbour and the railway lands beside Lake Ontario for commercial and public development. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the debates over the physical form of the future city centred on which older parts should be preserved, and for what use; where and for whom the new developments should take place; and what would be the pattern of transportation (expressways? public transport?). One of the great ravines (the Don Valley) had already been savaged by running an expressway down it, and another expressway blocked the city off from the lake: would more follow? Rapid growth in population (fueled mainly by immigration) and commerce was pushing the city further to the North and to the East and West: issues of governance, social class, ethnicity, gender, land use, architecture, technology and civility were major features of all discussions about the emerging character of the growing city of Toronto. 34 Ioan Davies 1. Viljo Revell was the Central features of these debates involved the exploration of notions of Finnish architect who culture, communication and the ‘character’ of the city, issues which have designed New City Hall. It was built it the become common to all cities in process of transformation, but perhaps more early1960s. Revell died strikingly pertinent in the case of Toronto because of the national discus- almost as soon as the sions within Canada of bilingualism and multiculturalism, of federalism and building was completed. provincialism, that took on a major dimension precisely during the same 2. Canadian composer, period. During the 1960s and 1970s, Montreal played host both to Expo and musician and theorist to the Olympic Games, and saw the ‘apprehended revolution’ of the Front de Glenn Gould Liberation Quebec in 1970, as well as the first separatist Parti Quebecois (Toronto: 410-11) wrote of this government. That Montreal might appear to be the focus for the image of controversy: Toronto, Canada in the world was surely not lost on the politicians, businessmen and at that time, was not urban planners who debated the future shape of Toronto, the largest non- exactly a hospitable French-speaking city in Canada.3 place for contempo- rary art of any sort, and the decision to None of this took place in a vacuum. Like most cities, Toronto was a set situate a large of palimpsests of cultures which settled on top of each other, from the sculpture of Henry earliest Indian settlements, the first French colonizers through to the Scottish Moore in front of the New City Hall was the and English who established the contours of the present city in the late straw that broke the nineteenth century. In parts of the old city the visual traces of earlier inhabit- political camel’s back. ants remained, as Rosemary Donegan and Rick Salutin (1985) showed in In fact, it was largely their book on Spadina Avenue, that road by which immigrants entered the responsible for the electoral defeat of the city from the ships or the trains, and established shops, factories, churches, mayor who supported synagogues, restaurants, theatres. What was noticeably the Jewish section of its purchase. His chief the inter-war years, with the garment trade, a street market, various syna- opponent proclaimed gogues and temples, is now Chinatown, though the Chinese community that ‘Torontonians do not want abstract art centre still has Hebrew inscriptions on its walls honouring the Jewish dead; shoved down their and Grossman’s pub, the centre of jazz and poetry readings decades ago still throats,’ and of holds its own between Vietnamese and Cantonese restaurants. course, won the subsequent election handily. Perhaps one But of course, where much of the contemporary city now stands, there indication of the were no such buildings; rather open fields and small hamlets, and wild remarkable change in ravines. And thus the sense of what to build, what to recover or preserve, Toronto’s outlook and what to destroy is built up of a set of conflicting notions of what is during the last decade is that we now possess significant and alive. I would like to argue that to understand the evolving the largest collection pattern of the city it is important to trace the ideas of culture and communi- of sculptures by Henry cation that have been generated both by an intellectual debate around it and Moore in the Western by the practices of the various people who inhabit it. To do that, I want to Hemisphere; oddly enough, in view of the preserve the notion of space (physically, kinetically, culturally) and of earlier fuss, the communication as an important part of our sense of community, and thus to collection was talk about the habitable city — both in the imagination and the everyday. initiated by a gift from This means for me, taking the imagined city as significant to our understand- the sculptor himself. ing as the ‘real’ city, and exploring the connection between them. Thus the Anti-Methods Theorizing Toronto 35 Spectres of Lee’s poem must necessarily contend with the physical spectacle 3. ‘Non-French’ — commodified or otherwise. because by the early 1970s, the influx of immigrants - from The notion of theorizing that I wish to employ in understanding Toronto Italy, Central and — and indeed any city — does not involve providing a total vision of the Eastern Europe, India, city as a definable unit, nor indeed a set of hypotheses to be tested against China - had created a new city of people ‘facts,’ but rather as a series of probing interpretations into aspects of city many of whose first life and culture which provide clues to making sense of the connections language was not which (possibly) add up to an understanding of the city’s biography. In this I English. think I am one with Italo Calvino who, in Invisible Cities (1974), provides a ‘reading’ of Venice which is based on partial views of the city, but which ultimately provide clues for reading more than Venice. And yet, by discon- necting his various versions of Venice from each other, Calvino leaves us asking ‘So what is your Venice? Why is it important?’ I hope to lay the grounds for doing that in Toronto. This, it will be noted, is rather different from Walter Benjamin’s initial approach in his Paris - Capital of the Nine- teenth Century, which was written precisely to show why Paris was the Modern city par-excellence. I make no such claims for Toronto, and it would be futile to try to do so. More modestly, I hope, is to argue how thinking about various theorists helps us to understand Toronto and in understanding that process, how we learn more about ourselves. But like Benjamin, it seemed important to refer to those who had written in and around Toronto — whose worlds were galvanized by the city, even if they had wider con- cerns and influences — and weave their thinking into the great phenomenol- ogy, epistemology and semiology of being in the city. In what follows, I discuss two aspects of writing from and about Toronto. Although I might also have discussed ways in which art has been theorized by, say, The Group of Seven, or the manner in which thinkers George Grant and Northrop Frye conceived of the idea of Canada through the conflicts between nature, technology and empire, or how political theorist C. B. Macpherson and sociologist Dorothy Smith thought about Toronto through the idea of a bourgeois Civic Culture, I have opted on these two aspects by way of an introduction to the difficulties of imagining Toronto. The first aspect I will explore is the theorization of technology, communication and performance in Toronto through the writings of Harold Innis, an Economic Geographer, noted Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan, and writer, composer and musician Glenn Gould. My second focus will be on the ways that Toronto has been imagined by poet bp nichol and other writers writing from and about Toronto who view the city as it is lived in and lived through. Space and Culture 6 36 Ioan Davies 4. The city within The Wired City: Technology, Communication and Performance which Innis wrote is now a monument to As someone who has subsequently spent much time trying to devise and shape commerce, banking programmes for TV I am grateful for the way in which McLuhan alerted me to the odd and the satellite of a properties of the medium itself.
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