PROSPECTS FOR REFORM John Sewell Research Paper 180 The City in the 1990s Series Lecture 2 Lecture delivered in the series The City in the 1990s: Livable for Whom? sponsored by The Centre for Urban and Community Studies Fall, 1989 Centre for Urban and Community Studies University of Toronto January 1991 ISSN: 0316-0068 ISBN: 0-7727-1354-5 $4.75 i THE OTY 1N THE 1990s: UVABLE FOR WHOM? Six lectures were given by internationally known scholars and experts in the Fall of 1989, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the founding in 1964 of the Centre for Urban and Community Studies. These are now being published as Centre Research Papers, in a series entitled The City in the 1990s. Peter Hall: Reinventing the City (Lecture 1) John Sewell: Prospects for Reform (Lecture 2) Forthcoming: •Manuel Castells: The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban-Regional Process •Jorge Hardoy: Building and Managing Cities in a State of Permanent Economic Crisis • Birgit Krantz: Increasing the Livability of Urban Architecture: Advances from Swedish Experience •Charles Tilly: Immigrants and Cities in North America ii PROSPECTS FOR REFORM THE AliTHOR Born in Toronto in 1940, an alumnus of Victoria College and the University of Toronto's Faculty of Law, John Sewell has spent his adult life striving to change this city. He worked as a community organizer in downtown urban renewal areas from 1966 to 1969. Elected as a City Alderman in 1969, he led the fight against developer-dominated decision-making, and as a member of Council until 1984-­ and Mayor from 1978-80-has an intimate connection to recent Toronto political history. John Sewell wrote The Globe and Mail's urban affairs column from 1984-86. He was then appointed Chair of the Metro Toronto Housing Authority, a position from which he was removed with great publicity two years later. He has taught in law and social science at York University, and writes for NOW magazine. ABSTRACT Several factors influence prospects for another era of local government reform. We have new understanding about government's interests which often have little to do with policy resolution; the role of local politicians is different now that they are full-time and well funded; neighbourhood participation has been "hijacked" and used to exclude differences rather than to improve the quality of decisions. Urban dissatisfaction seems to be increasing, and with it a sense of helplessness. The big problems of the past-transportation and development-are no longer localized, and housing, air and water quality, waste disposal, income distribution, have moved inescapably onto the agenda. Reform will have to involve new groupings, and the reformers will be those arguing for a smaller but tougher public sector. Will they be able to produce anything of lasting value, resistant to takeover by private interests? iii PREFACE Political reform has always been an enigma. The definition of "reform" in the Oxford English Dictionary seems straightforward enough: "to amend or improve by some change of form, arrangement or composition; to free from previous faults or imperfections." The problem with reform, however, is not so much what it means, but what it involves. "Reformers" are generally distinguished from "revolutionaries" by their commitment to change without the overthrow of the system or the shedding of blood. Much of the reform movement in both Canada and the United States has involved eradicating corruption and inefficiency in municipal politics, leading a New York mayor to characterize a reformer as "a guy who rides through a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat." More generally, the philosopher George Santayana said, "A thousand reforms have left the world as corrupt as ever, for each successful reform has founded a new institution, and this institution has bred its new and congenial abuses" (quoted in Safire 1978, 604). Thus, either reformers do not really get to the bottom of things; or the changes they eventually institute become targets for reformers of another era. Typical intellectual criticisms of reforms are that they do not go far enough, and that reformers rarely stay the course in local politics. But in the end, profound structural change is not a realistic objective for local political activists in Canadian (or American) urban settings; and the (sometimes) meteoric quality of reform politicians serves an important function in the political system by bringing new enthusiasm into politics and by creating a different discourse about what is possible locally. iv This article by John Sewell (originally delivered as a lecture), which deals with urban political reform in Canada, is important in two respects. In the first place, it is written by a former reform politician who himself made a major contribution to the second "wave" of reform politics which he discusses in the text. John Sewell began his political career in Toronto as a successful community organizer in the Trefann Court urban renewal area, from 1966 to 1969. Wishing to extend his influence to City Hall in order to strengthen citizens' participation and democratize political decision-making, Sewell ran for alderman and was elected in the fall of 1969. His philosophy as a community organizer and some of his experiences as an alderman are recounted in a lively book entitled Up Against City Hall, which was published at the end of 1972. Some of the chapter headings reflect the intense moral passion which Sewell, as the quintessential reformer, brought to local politics: "Metro Centre: The railway swindle", "The Grys affair: A finger in the pie", and "South of St. Jamestown: The fist of Meridian". Most of this material concerns his personal battles with developers and their representatives on the Council-battles which largely defined the moral universe of the reformers during the "second reform wave" of the late 1960s through the early 1970s. Sewell remained as alderman on the Toronto City Council until 1978, when he was elected Mayor of Toronto. He was defeated as Mayor in 1980 by Art Eggleton, who is still Mayor in 1991 as this is written. During the 1980s Sewell has been the chairman of the Metro Toronto Housing Authority, has written regular columns on Toronto politics for The Globe and Mail and the weekly magazine NOW, and has taught law and social science at York University. The second reason why this paper is important is that it attempts to deal directly with the whole question of government and private sector involvement in local politics. This has been a major area of concern during the 1980s, as senior v levels of goverrunent in Canada have reduced their support for municipal activities on the one hand, and as community-based groups and the private sector have (for diHerent reasons) taken more initiatives. Sewell sees the next reform wave in the conjunction of conununity and private interests jockeying for influence over issues such as waste management, pollution, tax reform, urban poverty, and housing. Traditional reliance on government with its burgeoning and insensitive bureaucracy is weakening; a new vision of what is possible to the political reformer is in the process of formation. This paper articulates one approach to such a reform vision, through the eyes of a thoughtful former politician whose sense of reform is still lively. Richard Stren January, 1991 PROSPECTS FOR REFORM Reform is one of those words which seems particularly apt for city politics. Reform is non-partisan, accurately capturing the lack of formal political parties at the local level. It suggests improvement in a reasoned practical way, accurately reflecting the city's lack of access to levers that control the economy, levers that can influence wide-ranging change. And it suggests agreement of a widespread constituency, something of the odour of community action and implementation of an agreed-upon agenda. No wonder the word is so frequently relied on by those who wish to bring change to the city. While cities are in a constant state of change--growing, shrinking, bunching up or evening out, bulging and pushing and decaying-most of that change is the normal city dynamic. Reform, however, is a certain kind of change attempted on the city to gain a new sense of direction. It goes beyond reorganizing to do things better, and pushes into new directions to pursue new goals. Two Eras of Urban Reform in Canada There have only been two periods in the life of North American cities when those changes were organized enough to be called reform eras. In both cases, there seemed to be a fairly distinct start, a flowering, then a decline. Looking briefly at these eras reveals a conjunction of events that will help us predict the shape of the next reform era. The first period of urban reform in Canada began near the end of the 19th century and continued for more than a decade into the 20th century. It brought a great unleashing of energies and ideas, such that "one astonished observer decided that people had been seized by some inexplicable urge to save mankind" (Rutherford, 1974: xi). The movement lashed out in all directions. Some reformers wanted services that had become necessary for city life-transit, electricity, and gas are three examples-to be removed from the private sector and firmly ensconced in the safety of the public sector. As we know, success came soon for believers in 2 public power. Transit systems, by contrast, were not to be taken over by the public sector until after the Great War, and in several Canadian cities not until after the Second World War. Some reformers pushed hard for new ways to plan cities. Ebenezer Howard's influential book Garden Cities of Tomorraw was published in England in 1898, and his disciples quickly crossed the ocean and began designing Canadian cities.