Turning the post-industrial city into the cultural city: The case of Toronto’s waterfront

Abstract

From films and Hollywood to paintings and Montmartre, the link between place and culture is well established in the popular imagination and in scholarly research (Lloyd 2004; Molotch 2003). The culture we consume often contains the trace of its geographic origins, which can be a valued part of the experience. Likewise, places are heavily shaped by the kinds of culture they produce. Just as Los Angeles makes films, the film industry “makes” Los Angeles by giving it an identity, contributing to the local economy, and drawing international attention to the city. The Louvre and the Musee d’Orsay do the same for Paris. In the post-industrial era, regional policymakers have frequently turned to culturalproduction and consumption in order to create places that are economically and socially viable (Miles and Paddison 2005; Zukin 1995). Unique architecture and urban design (Julier 2005; Evans 2005), new museums (Shoval and Strom 2009), and arts districts (Mommaas 2004) are just some of the strategies that policymakers hope will create more vibrant, liveable, and productive cities. It is a perspective popularized in books such as Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class (2002) and Charles Landry’s The Creative City (2000). However, cultural policies are far from an obvious choice. Their popularity is arelatively recent phenomenon, and it is still not clear how well they achieve their intended goals (e.g. Gomez 1998; Evans 2005; Markusen 2006). Additionally, critics have charged that such policies divert attention and money from more important social problems such as poverty and inequality (Peck 2005). Given these issues, how do we explain the rise and continued popularity of cultural policies? In this chapter we address this question by examining the role of culture in theredevelopment of Toronto’s central waterfront. Not traditionally known as an international centre of cultural production like Los Angeles or Paris, by the late-1990s Toronto’s municipal government had embraced cultural policies with particular zeal.The first decade of the 21st century saw a host of culture-related projects throughout the city from “starchitecture” (Patterson 2012), to “creative districts” (Catungal, Leslie, and Hii 2009), to arts festivals (Grundy and Boudreau 2008). Even Richard Florida relocated to Toronto to head a government-funded research institution. As a relative latecomer to the culture scene, Toronto offers an especially illuminating case for understanding the uptake of cultural urbanization strategies. How did Toronto come to stake so much on cultural policy? We argue that thecollapse of the industrial economy and other significant social changes in the late-20th century plunged Toronto into an “identity crisis.” As old development policies and existing infrastructure appeared increasingly obsolete, policymakers were forced to grapple with the question of what kind of city Toronto should be in the 21st century. Amid this crisis, members of the cultural sector provided a convenient solution in the notion of the “cultural city.” Steeped in “creative class” discourse (Florida 2002), this new urban planning model offered a vivid depiction of the urban good life characterized by artists’ studios, public sculptures, and sidewalk cafes. It was also an image that resonated with a growing group of cultural organizations, knowledge workers, and downtown residents who had the capacity to put this vision into practice and codify it in municipal policy – a group that we call the “cultural city consensus.” Despite the success of this group, the cultural city has not received universal supportor gone unchallenged. For others in the city, particularly those in the surrounding suburbs, different notions of the good life prevail. Thus, the rise of cultural policy is also a political phenomenon dependent not only on its appeal, but also on the support of actors with the power to implement it even against opposition stemming from alternative models. These factors – the identity crisis, the cultural city model, and the consensusbehind it – are particularly evident in the decades-long redevelopment of Toronto’s central waterfront. Originally planned as an industrial port, by the 1990s the waterfront sat largely vacant. Today it is currently undergoing a dramatic transformation that has seen the rise of condominiums, office buildings serving the knowledge and “creative” economy, theatres, galleries, and even the largest soundstage in North America. Along the way, successive planning regimes cast about for ideas to revitalize the area, often without success or a clear notion of what revitalization would mean. Starting in the late-1990s, “culture” gained momentum as a potential answer, providing a legitimizing concept that could appeal to respected international authorities and forging effective links to some of the city’s most dynamic organizations and influential actors. The story of culture’s arrival on Toronto’s waterfront provides a lens not only into the rise of cultural policy in Toronto more generally, but also into how post-industrial cities around the world are attempting to transform themselves into cultural cities.