World Class Cities: Can Canada Play?

Peter Martin, of Peter Martin & Associates, is the founding publisher of
the Canadian Book Review Annual.

It’s not easy to create a useful, readable book from papers presented
at a conference, even a themed one. If the theme is too narrow, the
book’s chapters will seem repetitious; if the theme is too broad, the
result will be incoherence. The latter is the case here.

There are 20 papers—13 in English and 7 in French. Most are
interesting, but few directly address the subtitle’s question (“Can
Canada Play?”). The style and calibre of the presentations vary
widely.

Tahar Ledraa challenges conventional wisdom when, using mid-sized
Constantine City, Algeria, as his lab, he argues that the barrios
created by the developing world’s rural–urban migrations, are almost
a self-solving problem, and that the migrants will not become a
permanent underclass. Marc V. Levine compares waterfront redevelopments
in Baltimore and Montreal. The Canadian city has done it well, Levine
argues, integrating new attractions (casino, planetarium, etc.) with
older residential and commercial/institutional facilities, while
Baltimore’s shoreline redevelopment is a “bubble,” isolated from
the proximate desperate slums of the older city.

Jeanne Demers writes engagingly in French about urban (Montreal)
graffiti. Much more than defacements by vandals, they can be seen as a
part of urban discourse. Paul Drewe writes from a Dutch/European
perspective on the relation between traditional spatial planning and the
new information technologies. Unfortunately, his paper’s ideas are
tiny needles in a jargonstack. R.J. Morris makes a fascinating
comparison of responses to socio-religious contention in 19th-century
Belfast and (again!) Montreal. The parallels are surprising, the
responses heartening.

And so it goes. All sorts of good ideas and data, but content more
tantalizing than satisfying. Our attention is rarely called to the
subject of “world class cities,” let alone Canadian candidates for
that status.

Well, that last is not quite true. Beth Moore Milroy et al. demonstrate
conclusively in “Who Says Toronto Is a ‘Good’ City?” that
Toronto is neither good nor world class.