Published: buildingondowntown in EcoWebTown

Mark Sterling’s article on recent development in downtown Toronto –  “buildingondowntown”- is published in the University of Pescara, Italy’s “EcoWebTown” as part of “Xtreme Makeover: Toronto” edited by Lorenzo Pignatti and Ryszard Sliwka.

The City of Toronto today and downtown Toronto in particular, has evolved into something akin to an “open source” metropolis.

As a result of the combination of a number of phenomena Toronto has become a city whose character and trajectory of growth is more difficult to ascertain than those of the more singular or iconic North American metropolises – New York and Chicago come to mind. It is free of the symbolic and mythical burdens and the attendant genius loci that characterizes those places and in some ways makes many of their potential lessons in urbanism difficult to emulate.

The openness to reinterpretation that the urban structure of Toronto has exhibited over time regularly renders paradoxical efforts to “plan” for change in that urban structure. In recent decades in Toronto, the ability of such plans to direct – and perhaps more importantly – to predict where and how change will occur has come into question.

Overall publication website: http://ecowebtown.eu/n_7/

The article: http://ecowebtown.eu/n_7/pdf/07_06.pdf