ABSTRACT
It has become one of the most widely used statements that this century is the urban century, where a majority of people lives in cities. With all this population growth one needs to remember that this demands also a good number of new dwellings. But how to accommodate all this growth? And where? In very few places planners are the ones that actually make these decisions. And it is usually not the public, but the market, or self-help, or a combination of both, which invests capital into particular places in order to build housing and shelter for people. The public plays a role usually, but not always, as a provider for the bare bones of infrastructure. Therefore, planning’s role more often than not is focused on where the growth should happen, by developing a policy framework that steers growth into certain areas while hindering it at others (Lehrer & Wieditz 2009). The development and implementation of these growth policies have become a key area for planners of today, and land use planning, together with infrastructure planning, are at the center of all this. The problematic relationship of planning towards the physical aspects of planning, of course, is not something new. Already 30 years ago Allan Jacobs and Donald Appleyard proclaimed that: “City planning is too immersed in the administration and survival of housing, environmental, and energy programs and in responding to budget cuts and community demands to have any clear sense of direction with regards to city form” (1987, p.114). But the fundamental question of planning remains: How can we build a
society that is fair, just and inclusive? How can planners of today plan for
cities of tomorrow in order to guarantee a built environment that does not stand in the way of such an ideal society, but rather provides a socio-spatial context that nurtures differences and inclusivity? How can we, as Friedmann is urging us in light of the population growth in cities worldwide, create images of the Good City (2000, p.464)? Friedmann’s work reminds us of the necessity of utopian thinking as part of the planning profession, where the ideal is often miles apart from the reality, but that should not stop us from engaging with and pushing forward questions of justice and equality, addressed in the context of what he calls radical practice, or insurgency. Friedmann’s utopia is one of social relations and less of built environments-“this is not my domain” (2000, p.471). The history of planning isn’t one with a path paved by lots of successes,
and the few that exist occur only within a particular framework, and more often than not, these successes become failures over time due to their inability to adapt to new conditions. Most cities in North America and Europe have examples of social housing complexes that were based on a utopian vision of the Good City. They were built at the height of the modernist period as a response to the ills of the overcrowded 19th-century city, with the promise to guarantee “light, air, opening” to everybody (Giedion 1929) and with that to establish a new and better society, one that would be democratic and just, only to become neglected-socially, politically and financially-over time and to fall into disarray. This chapter is not about the failure of planning. It’s not even about
planning per se. It rather poses some questions in the context of Toronto’s condominium boom: How can we form, as John Friedmann’s life work has asked for, a Good Society (or Good City) that is based on mutual respect, on dialogical relations in a non-hierarchical structure? How can we create a city that is just, fair and inclusive when we build concrete structures that disallow a wider engagement of the public? These questions are asked in the context of Toronto’s condominium boom. By engaging John Friedmann’s concept of the Good Society, which he proposed in the 1970s, I will discuss the condominium boom and its relation to public space in two ways: internalizing amenities on the one hand and encroachment into public space during construction periods on the other.
