Loving/Hating the City
• long history of this
• audio clip: Three dead trolls in a baggie …
• audio clip: The Vestibules
Café Diplomatico
• First sidewalk café in Toronto
• Frequented by the intelligensia, Mop & Pail journalists etc.,
• Symbol of Toronto’s urbanity?
Cities in cultural myth
• Hated/feared:– Sodom & Gomorrah– Babylon
• Loved/admired:– Jerusalem– Benares
“Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.”
— Mayor Marion Barry, Washington, D.C.
“The streets are safe in Philadelphia. It’s only the people who make them unsafe.”
— Frank Rizzo (ex-police chief and mayor of Philadelphia)
"Hollywood is the only place where you can wake up in the morning and hear the birds coughing in the trees."
-- Joe Frisco
Difficult to Rate Cities
• Environment?
• Jobs?
• Restaurants?
• Impossible to characterise a place definitively
Demographics
• People have left/are leaving urban areas in North America– for the suburbs, exurbs, edge cities
Cottaging
• Toronto cottage owners often think of the cottage as their “real” home– they just work in the city, live there during the
week– endure 3-hour tailbacks at Gravenhurst to “get
away from it all”
Selling the City
• Capital (and tourism) is globally mobile
• Ethos of competition– fighting in a global marketplace for tourist and
investor’s dollars
Selling Toronto
• Social phenomena play a key role in Toronto’s place marketing strategy:– Multiculturalism, cosmopolitianism– The Neighbourhood– The safe city
“Gateway to the West” Slogan
• St Louis MO, Pittsburgh PA, San Jose CA, Achison TX
• Winnipeg MB
• Hong Kong
• Kilrush, Connemara and Ballinasloe in Ireland
• Harley-Davidson Motorcycles
“Hub of the North” Slogan
• Hay River NWT, Engelhart ON, Kirkland Lake ON, Thompson MB
• Chester UK, Aberdeen UK, Derry
• Kaikohe NZ
City as playground
• Festivals to promote a city, enhance its appeal
• Festival districts, sites– often anchor gentrification
Political Cities
• Politics: derives from classical Greek polis– the matters of the city
• Arenas for political activity
• Sites of government, control points
• Political use of the street, urban crowd
First World War
• Outbreak of war aided by good summer weather– enabled urban crowds to gather to demand war
from their political leaders