Shape-shifter In the City
Shape-shifter, Canadian Art, Winter 2008, pp. 88-89
The August morning is sunny and bright and around the tables of the Starbucks patio, business is being done. A man double-parks his BMW on Yonge Street, indifferent to the traffic. The driver behind him leans on his horn. A bicycle courier yells an obscenity as she cycles past. Around the corner, on a residential street a construction crew is pouring cement and the sonorous bass din of the truck’s rotating drum mixes with the screech of worn metal parts. We are in the city and Richard Florida, its eloquent narrator, is wearing sunglasses as he leans back in his chair and basks in its polyphonous splendour.
“James Rojas, the Los Angeles urban planner, came to Toronto and wrote about its ‘messy urbanism,’” says Florida. He laughs, “Man, I wish I’d come up with that phrase.” Toronto, despite the sombre intent of the city’s official plans, is a wily, spirited and surprising place, its energy not easily contained. It is a place where businesses, as much as the residents, now reinvent themselves in its nooks and crannies. Or, as the Ontario College of Art and Design has done with the Sharp Centre for Design—Will Alsop’s justly celebrated brick of a building suspended on multicoloured stilts—in the space above the street.
“I wish we had a dozen OCADs,” says Florida. “Toronto is never going to capture the biggest buildings, but there are aspects particular to this city that display to the world how you can be big, and messy, but also sustainable. Not in some granola way, but imaginatively. That’s very good for Toronto, because design problems are enormous in the world and thinking about design penetrates just about everything Torontonians do.”
Rojas’s “messy urbanism” and OCAD’s iconic building are proof of Florida’s argument that cities are the hubs of today’s “creative class,” which is propelling a new economy that prospers by virtue of its urban aggregation. “You can’t build a creative industry,” says Florida.
“You have to build a creative society. Industry will follow.”
Florida’s fascination with cities is the result of the urban environment having provided him with a way out of a working-class New Jersey boyhood. Early on he realized that the city was the draw—a concatenation of creative people needing to invent jobs, solutions and lives in the absence of the mining, agricultural or even manufacturing work that would otherwise reliably allow them to prosper. And he realized that this aggregation fostered its own advantages—that cities were nuclei around which the economies of nations could reorganize themselves.
“Ninety per cent of university graduates enter the creative class, but less than 50 per cent of the creative class have a degree,” says Florida, ruminating openly. “Did you know that?”
In Toronto, now home—Florida joined the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management in July, 2007—his ideas have had a particular appeal. Perhaps this is because in Canada our cities are young, so the decisions that people arrive at in them actually make a difference. Or perhaps it is because, according to the astonishing demographic inversion of the last few decades, more than 80 per cent of Canadians now live in cities and not the rural areas that shaped the country’s destiny and politics for two centuries—as well as, arguably, the objectives of a Conservative government rumoured to be sending Canadians to the polls at the time we spoke.
“If a party can espouse an anti-urban political platform and get elected, then it will slow economic growth and there’ll be trouble,” Florida said. “And I worry about that, because the divide between the cities and the countryside is actually a tension between the resource and creative economies, and in America that divide has become quite explicit and ugly. Canada has managed it much more efficiently.”
Sitting with Florida, his enthusiasm infectious, it was evident that even behind the sunglasses he was not ceasing to notice, scrutinize and assess the city around him.
“You can have really shitty governments for ten years and still do well because economies are not top-down anymore,” suggested Florida. “You have this group of incredibly talented people operating at the level of the city—Mayor Bloomberg, in New York, and Ken Livingstone for years in London, David Miller here. In politics, the force in the world today is no longer the federal state but the city.”
Florida might easily have added Sara Diamond to that list. Diamond was raised in Toronto, taught at Emily Carr in Vancouver and was Artistic Director of Media and Visual Art and Director of Research at the Banff Centre, where she also created the Banff New Media Institute, before she was appointed, in July, 2005, as the twenty-first president of the Ontario College of Art and Design. In her inaugural address to the school, the following year, the school’s new director made it quite clear that she had a plan—and that Richard Florida’s ideas about “deep clustering,” and the advantages her school might bring to the creative economy, were among her guiding lights. Diamond describes herself as “a real internationalist and in a big way—a Londoner, a Los Angelena and a Buenos Aires girl.” She has had big ambitions for OCAD from the start. “In Canada,” said Diamond when, the following morning, we met in her OCAD office on McCaul Street, “we don’t appreciate our arts institutions in the way that, say, the English do, but you have a creative and an intellectual class in the country that’s leading in its knowledge and understands the instrumental role that culture plays. My sense of mission is for ours to be a school that is in the top tier of art and design and media post-secondary institutions in the world.”
OCAD, which at its inception observed staid Toronto from the city’s placid western reaches, is now a part of the city proper—bounded by Spadina to the west, the University of Toronto’s campus to the north, busy University Avenue to the east and Queen Street and the CN Tower to the south. While the school is rooted in the venerable tradition of the Group of Seven, it is seizing, under Diamond’s leadership, an altogether different destiny—an image and a sense of itself that are a reflection of the changing city as well as very much shaped by it. In only a couple of years, Diamond has thrust OCAD into the vanguard. She has made a veritable manifesto out of Florida’s ideas about cross-pollination, promoted ties with business and community leaders in the city and launched a Digital Futures Initiative and an Aboriginal Visual Culture Program covering art, media and design—just a couple of the offerings that the school, a university since 2002, is developing. As someone who relishes the challenge of negotiating with other business leaders and hobnobbing with government, Diamond clearly wants the school to become an integral city player, both leading and inspiring the new economy. In her address, Diamond proclaimed that
In this new Age of Imagination, excellent, successful products, services and processes make use of sophisticated art and design skills. Art and design engage our values, each in different ways—in the ways we imagine our lives, in the balance of pleasure and functionality. Artists and designers sniff the zeitgeist, and, having sensed the future, they have the disciplined imaginations that can blend emotion and form. Artists and designers are enablers, facilitating collaboration across a wide array of fields, shaping excellence and “experience” products in every field of human endeavour.
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“OCAD,” says Diamond, “made an incredibly bold decision when it decided to go ahead with Will Alsop’s building and, at the time, it was condemned for doing so. But when it became a reality, people in Toronto had their socks blown off. It fuelled an architectural renaissance in the city and, concomitantly, the school had to ask, ‘Where are the gaps?’ ‘How can we rise to the occasion in a city that likes us?’ The changes that are happening here are not about abandoning the school’s 133-year legacy but about drawing from that history and asking what the school can do in this new world, in the city that is the research capital of Canada.”
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