Lessons for urban living

Toronto is not a beautiful city. It industrialised in a hurry and now it's striving to be a 'world class city' as soon as possible. Building the City Beautiful gets somehow lost between the cracks but it is working hard to be a liveable city and I think that there are some lessons to be learnt from their efforts.

1. Make recycling part of every day practice. This is big here. The city collects compostable waste, dry recyclables and trash. There are bins for the separate waste streams on city streets and in all publicly accessible buildings. They manage 42% recycling compared with 16% in Lambeth

2. Fund cheap, efficient and integrated public transport. Toronto Transit Corp (TTC) runs trams, buses and a subway - called the Rocket - apparently for it's red livery as it's not notable for its speed. The transport modes are both physically connected (through trams that roll underground and subways with the bus stops set out logically at the exit) and operating under a single ticketing system so that you can transfer between modes using a paper transfer slip, available from drivers or stations. A single journey costs around £1, and at weekends for £4.50 a family of 2 adults and 4 kids or alternatively just 2 adults have unlimited travel. Much better way than Ken's policy of free parking at weekends to bring families into the centre. Women too are catered for. Any lone female between 9pm and 5 am can ask to be dropped off anywhere along the route. And there is a plan to install bike cages on the front of buses to allow longer distance mixed mode commuting.

3. De-clutter the streetscape and save money too. In the UK campaigners have worked to sensitise us to the accumulation of street signs, notices, utility miscellania. There have been some successes eg at High St Kensington. Here the streets are not pretty. Pavements tend to be made of dirty beige 1.5 by 1.5 metre squared concrete slabs roughly laid. The curb lines are weak and often crumbling. The building footprints are large, presenting monotonous unarticulated facades and electric wires are strewn all over at about 2nd storey height. Part of this infrastructure is for the trams but they are omnipresent even where they don't run. Not sure why. Perhaps it's to facilitate maintenance during the long months when the ground is frozen. Any ideas? The one thing they do do is the mount their bus stop signs as large oblong stickers on telegraph poles. So the amounts of metal-ware on the pavement is cut dramatically.

4. Making cycling normal by ensuring it is high profile and easy to use. Although the roads appear quite hostile, biking is big here. No skyscraper however glitzy is too smart for bikes and well-used racks are arrayed by entrances to all major buildings. The city has also minted its own bike stands - an embossed ring mounted on a bike height pillar. http://www.toronto.ca/cycling/postandring.htm

5. Delight and stimulate your citizens with street art. Cities have sought to adorn their public spaces for centuries. Toronto goes one step further by replicating contemporary art works on the public recycling bins. If one of art's purposes is to reveal the unexpected within us then putting art in unexpected places must be a double whammy.

So that's the good things, but nobody's poirfeckt so here's some tips for the mayor about what could be improved.

1. Pedestrians are not the problem. Pedestrians can only cross and intersections so little me with no carbon emissions (can't say the same thing about methane) has to detour to give preference to cars. When I do get to a crossing. I had better look sharp. It's all stop/go men and 12 seconds before the torrent of traffic is unleashed, they start counting you down so you don't clutter up the road when it's not the pedestrian phase. They're doing a bit of positive reinforcement in favour of public transport slapping up posters encouraging us to be "Rocketeers" and "Clean Air Heroes" but brothers and sisters, this is tinkering.

2. Look to character not branding to preserve identity. Toronto is trying hard to stave off the donut effect of many N American cities ie the hollowing out of the centres when the factories close and plots are left vacant and inner cities empty as out of town malls suck shoppers away. They've had some success in holding onto the old and they're trying to knit back the urban fabric through re-zoning for residential build or constructing parks when gaps do occur. Another initiative is to brand districts to make them exciting and unique: the entertainment district, the discovery district etc. However in the meantime much of their heritage buildings - the victorian stock appears to be crumbling away. The roofs are dilapidated, the paintwork flaking and re pointing is needed. The city never had much architectural merit in the first place. It looks like the shabbier parts of Cardiff but with canary wharf stuck in the middle; buildings look like they were put up in a hurry with what materials they had to hand - so much of the decoration - the fancy brickwork or earthenware frills are actually painted wood. But why not give grants to shore up the real heritage rather than relying on a bit of cosmetic overlay.

3. You got the TTC, make them use it. Linked to 1 above, the car is king and so providing somewhere to put it is a preoccupation. The city got onto it early knocking down part of one of their finest historic frontages in the 1930's for a car park. Now vacant plots are used as car parks and one of the main methodist churches has converted their graveyard into a pay-per-use car park. Guys the usuers are in the temple. Time to turn the tables. If you provide spaces they will come.