Imagination Required For Successful City Building – Experts suggest that the great cities of the world are those that have room for human imagination.

Cities exist as much in the imagination as they do in time and space. Indeed, some would argue that we can really only know cities in our minds.

A conference being held this week at McGill University in Montreal, "Challenging Cities in Canada," will delve into this relationship. The panel discussion, titled "The City and the Imagination," will be chaired by Edmonton historian Douglas Owram.

CHRISTOPHER HUME

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"It’ll be a pretty open-ended session," Owram says. "Basically it’ll look at how we shape cities and how cities shape us. In Canada, it seems that cities have been foreign to our self-identity. You get the sense that they are seen as drains on the country. As late as 1948-49, governments were spending money to keep young people on the farm. Cities represented temptation; they were places of evil and disease. Even now, that lingers with us."

The truth, of course, is that Canada is a thoroughly urban, post-modern nation where fully 80 per cent of the population lives in urban centres. Yet old myths die hard. Former premier Mike Harris made that clear when he won two elections by exploiting the 416/905 divide.

"Canada has failed to develop a metropolitan culture," Owram continues. "We’re beginning to talk about it, but just recently. Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal are starting to have a sense of themselves as international cities, but only tentatively."

Vancouver architect Bing Thom wants to talk about the growing importance of culture to a city’s self-identity as well as its economic success.

"One of the things we’ve forgotten is that cities are communities of people," Thom observes. "But what is the glue that holds them together? Common values. Common ideas. In recent years, it’s also the growing importance of culture. Our economic well-being is based on our ability to celebrate culture, and celebrate the true identity of our cities.

"In Vancouver, for example, we’re growing out of the idea that we’re a village by the sea. We’ve been discovered by the world and we’re becoming more self-confident. For architects, the question is how can they express the identity of a place. Each Canadian city has its own unique identity. We’ve become much more cosmopolitan than many European cities and certainly more than U.S. cities."

Because culture is so crucial to cities, Thom worries about Canada’s growing dependence on the United States. That dependence, he believes, is both cultural and economic. If we are not vigilant, he warns, it could change how Canadians view the very idea of urbanity. It could be seen as something bad, something to be avoided, as in the U.S., where the suburban ideal reigns supreme.

Respected Toronto architect and city planner Ken Greenberg, who has worked throughout the U.S. and Europe, laments the state of Canadian cities, especially this one.

"This is a really interesting time," Greenberg says. "Finally, after a long period of denial, Canadians are beginning to accept the fact that they are city dwellers. But when it comes to urban planning, we always talk about the things we can quantify — traffic counts, shadow studies, real-estate values — because everything else is considered too subjective. In the ’90s, we changed the rules so that the city is no longer allowed to talk about design. We restricted the discussion to numbers. We act as if anything else is just an opinion."

The great cities of the world, Greenberg insists, are those that have room for human imagination. Think of New York, which, he points out, appears in Woody Allen’s movies as a character in its own right.

By contrast, he adds, "we see Toronto in films all the time, but usually as a stand-in for somewhere else."

According to Greenberg, if Toronto is impoverished, it’s not only because the planning laws changed (under the Harris regime) but because we have ceased to imagine what this city could be.

"We have a huge amount of catching up and repair to do," he says. "We have such a culture of promises that aren’t kept, we have to rebuild our credibility."

In his work in Boston, for instance, the site of the Big Dig, Greenberg has dedicated himself, in his words, "to helping the city imagine what happens when you bury this huge elevated highway. How do you address it? Do you forget it? Do you commemorate it? Do you dramatize it?"

As he makes clear, the decision will be an act of the imagination. Urban culture, he notes, is like food culture. For decades people settled for culinary mediocrity — junk food, mashed potatoes and white bread — but now they demand more. Now we are aware of the endless possibilities of food, of how it enriches our lives, though it remains just food.

"Successful cities," says Montrealer Andy Nulman, president of Airborne Entertainment, "are the ones that have tapped into people’s head space. They’re the ones to which people feel a connection. I’m on the road all the time, but I still get a tingle when I get back to Montreal. What makes me feel this way? It’s all those intangible things. We complete the city through our imagination. The intangibles are more important than all that urban planning stuff."

It may be all in our minds, but cities that work are more than the sum of their parts; first we create them, then they create us.

Christopher Hume can be reached at [email protected].