Urban Renaissance Institute

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
April 16, 2005

Great industrial cities have historically hosted world’s fairs and world’s fairs have augmented these cities’ greatness. The first true world’s fair, London’s Great Exposition of 1851, created the Crystal Palace and attracted six million visitors. The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 brought us Ferris’s Wheel, the 1889 Paris World’s Fair Eiffel’s Tower. The Chicago World’s Fair of 1934 and the New York World’s Fair of 1939, were also landmark, iconic events. Toronto, which decided this week to host the World’s Fair of 2015 in its largely undeveloped waterfront, should not be faulted for wanting to follow in the footsteps of the great industrial centres of the world.

It should be faulted for not noticing that great industrial cities have abandoned world’s fairs. In recent decades, world’s fairs haven’t been held in metropolises such as London, New York and Paris, they’ve been held chiefly in places such as Knoxville, Tenn., Daejeon, South Korea, and Spokane, Wash. If Toronto’s city council aspires for Toronto to join the Industrial Big Leagues, rather than strive to be a Knoxville North, it had best back out quickly, its pride and its pocketbook intact, and focus its energies on the substance, not the symbolism, of great industrial cities.

One of the last world’s fairs worthy of the name was Expo ’67 in Montreal, my hometown. I remember it well and fondly. I visited it 24 times, agape at the world of choice on offer. For the first time, I could peek behind the Iron Curtain to see the wares on display from the U.S.S.R. and other communist countries. For the first time, the traditional cultures of dozens of countries were readily accessible. For the first time, I drank real Czech beer, from Pilsen, the legendary beer centre; I sampled the cuisine from dozens of countries around the world; I gaped at new technologies being introduced to the global marketplace.

Then came airplane deregulation, lowering the cost of travel to these faraway places and providing the general public with the opportunity to obtain their own, authentic experiences. Then came telephone deregulation, allowing for the freer flow of information, and shipping deregulation, allowing for a freer flow of goods. Not only did trade open up, the Iron Curtain came down, giving the West access to direct knowledge of the workings of these formerly closed societies. Then came the Internet, perhaps the most profound of the globalizing technologies, allowing services as well as goods to criss-cross the globe more easily than they once crossed town.

We don’t need a world’s fair, anymore, to expose us to Czech beer or to anything else. The world has moved on. Great industrial fairs are no more. They are obsolete, even if some governments do not yet realize it.

London’s Great Exposition of 1851 created the institution of world’s fairs because it met a commercial need. Through the world’s fairs that soon spread to the capitals of the civilized world, the civilized peoples of the world had a forum in which they could compare each others’ industrial arts and learn from each other. It was here that America’s prowess first became evident to the world, to everyone’s surprise winning large numbers of awards. These were won not because American machinery was more elegant than others – Europeans bested Americans here – but, as remarked at the time, “owing to their skillful, direct, and admirable adaptation to the great wants they were intended to supply, . . . convert[ing] the elements and natural forces to the commonest uses, multiplying results and diminishing toil.”

World’s fairs brought new products to market. The 1893 Chicago World’s Fair gave us the zipper, pay toilets, souvenir postcards, and beef bouillon. Milton Hershey, impressed by Walter Lowney’s invention of the chocolate bar, went home to Pennsylvania and made his chocolate fortune. Other entrepreneurs, seeing the popularity of the Ferris Wheel, went home to create the modern amusement park.

As world’s fairs lost their commercial raison d’etre, they lost their way. Some tried environmental themes, some social. Most failed, some spectacularly so. Louisiana’s World Fair of 1984 set a first – the only world’s fair to declare bankruptcy while still operating.

Toronto city council’s rationales for hosting a world fair are even worse. In part, the councillors are embarrassed that Toronto has failed to develop its waterfront as other major cities have – a failure that extends the better part of two centuries. By placing the world’s fair at Toronto’s waterfront, they hope to muster the momentum needed to overcome their own inertia. In part, they seek a world’s fair as a consolation prize, having been spurned in previous bids to land an Olympics. It would be a booby prize.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute.; www.urban.probeinternational.org

A reader’s response

Re: Hardly world-class, Lawrence Solomon, April 16

If Expo 2015 World Fair was awarded to Toronto it would be a cure for many ills, and not as Lawrence Solomon describes, a “booby prize.” In fact, Mr. Solomon, in his column: “Hardly world-class;” has missed the point and is mistaken about the motivations behind the Expo 2015 World Fair bid.

Mr. Solomon states, “… they seek a world’s fair as a consolation prize, having been spurned in previous bids to land an Olympics. It would be a booby prize.”

Look deeper into Toronto’s needs and you will find the necessary motivation behind Mayor David Miller’s and city council’s bid to land the World Fair.

The Toronto Port Lands were slated for a massive film studio complex. That fell through. There are renewed attempts to try it again but the film industry in Toronto is underemployed. Suddenly, developing the Port Lands into a studio complex isn’t such a hot idea for investors.

Originally, the Port Lands were to be developed with the Olympic bid for 2008 – but lost it when it should have got it. Leverage went to the economic changes led by outsourcing: “Big Business Fortune 500 companies, outsourcing to China.”

Now, a World Fair will be a perfect cover to get those darn brownfields fixed up in Toronto’s Port Lands. This is why Toronto needs the Expo 2015 World Fair. Afterwards, redevelopment by businesses, and condos, which are heavily built on Toronto’s west-end waterfront, could continue construction and revitalization of the east-end Port Lands.

Current companies, such as Home Depot, own a huge swath of land just sitting barren. It was home to the infamous Tent City, a homeless city built with pieces of debris. City enforcement disbanded this settlement. The land sits undeveloped.

(Jack Layton, then a Toronto city councilor and now the federal NDP leader, used the homeless situation in Tent City to stand on their backs, to better his own political prospects. Worked for him, I guess.)

Toronto will profit. It may not appear in the immediate ledger. The city investment, for a break-even or lose-a-bit result, is fine for the price it needs to pay, to scoop out the brownfields and make it livable, and working land for purchase and development after the Expo 2015 World Fair is gone.

That’s all the soul Toronto has to offer for the pursuit of the World Fair. On the shiny side, Toronto is the most culturally diverse city planet Earth has ever seen! Toronto’s modern diversity history in the making, is the backbone of a potentially fantastic Expo 2015 World’s Fair.

“What I like about the world’s fair is we have the world in Toronto, and it’s time to show Toronto to the world,” Mayor David Miller said.

It really is a win-win bid for Toronto and for the Expo World Fair. Hands down it may be one of the best events of the year, worldwide, for visitors and residents to participate in . . . and Toronto can finally recover from it’s nasty Port Land’s toxic open sore with a cure-all for good!

Great call by Mayor Miller to embrace this opportunity.

Patrick Reilly, Toronto, published by the National Post, May 2, 2005

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
April 9, 2005

Toronto is a drab city. Its residents make it so. Frank Gehry is among the world’s best architects, certainly he is the world’s most celebrated, following his soaring success in building Spain’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. But he’s not good enough for many at the Grange, the Toronto neighbourhood in which he grew up and site of a $200-million Art Gallery of Ontario renovation.

“It’s the poor who are being screwed in terms of the impact on the park,” Ceta Ramkhalawansingh, a local resident and leader of the Grange Park Preservation Association told the press before Christmas, in explaining that users of the public park adjoining the AGO property should not be forced to endure a Gehry design. “There are 1,000 units of public housing in this area and the people who live in them depend on the park for sanctuary. Unlike the property owners of the area, they do not have their own private gardens.”

To spare the downtrodden the discomfort of gazing on his edifice, Gehry and the AGO made numerous design concessions to appease the neighbourhood zealots. But they didn’t make enough. After the zealots failed to convince Toronto City Council to stop the project, they took their case to the Ontario Municipal Board, an independent regulatory body that has the authority to delay or even kill projects. Had the protesters succeeded (they subsequently backed down), visitors to the AGO would not only have been denied the experience of entering a Gehry building, they would have been thwarted in seeing the extraordinary new art collection that the Gehry building will house – a $300-million, 2,000-work collection, donated by Ken Thomson, that includes such masterpieces as Rubens’s recently rediscovered early-17th century masterpiece, The Massacre of the Innocents.

The AGO, now housed in a lacklustre, unfinished building on a major Toronto thoroughfare, has been through this before. In the 1980s, the same Ceta Ramkhalawansingh led a battle to save the neighbourhood from Barton Myers, another internationally renowned architect. Following a delay that cost two years and scarce funds, much of Meyers’ original concept – including a sculptured outdoor terrace, a canopy, and his choice of size and colour of brick – went by the boards. The dollar-store critics living in the Grange won their design preferences, everyone else lost.

Neighbourhood opposition groups do not vent their rage against showcase projects alone. They can diminish virtually any development that attempts anything out of the ordinary because Toronto’s planning rules enshrine indiscriminate public participation, giving neighbours outsized opportunities to object on any number of grounds – social equity, architecture, privacy, safety, sunlight, disruption during construction, increases in property values, setbacks, or simply the satisfaction of settling an old score with a disliked neighbour. Opponents will often seize on grand-sounding causes, such as “protecting public spaces” or “maintaining the integrity of a neighbourhood,” when they are really looking out for their personal interests.

Ceta, for example, fears that the Gehry addition will attract “weddings and noisy social events,” disrupting the tranquillity she prizes. Others might object because the project could raise property values, and thus the property taxes that they must pay. Others still object to the disruption that accompanies any construction project. But Toronto already has laws that prohibit unreasonable noise at unreasonable times, and society is generally welcoming to newlyweds who want to seal their vows in splendid public places. Objectors abuse the regulatory process when they impede a project, claiming planning grounds, when their underlying motives involve frivolities that cannot be legally adjudicated.

In truth, such neighbourhood activists often betray a hatred for downtown living, opposing all manner of developments that might disturb their leisure, whether sidewalk cafes, neighbourhood schools, or entertainment complexes. The most common objection to new projects, evident in upwards of 90% of cases, involve parking and traffic: Residents resent additional traffic on local streets that may impede their own vehicles, even for a minute at a time, and they resent outsiders using the free street parking available in most city neighbourhoods. The concessions that they generally foist on developments – even small infill projects involving a handful of townhouses or condominium units – almost always substitute asphalt for green space. To spare themselves some inconvenience, neighbours demand that developers put in more parking spots, wider driveways, more internal roads, in effect trying to bring suburban auto standards to the city, despite the cost to urban design.

Toronto is not all drab – a metropolis approaching Chicago in size can’t help but have some outstanding districts, some outstanding architecture. But Toronto architecture does not belong on the same map as a Chicago or New York. The city’s pandering to squeaky wheels has been a force for uglification – architects know not to even try to show verve when accepting a commission in the city. The AGO project shows Gehry at his most restrained, and his most resigned. As he told The New York Times, “It’s a little bit much to assume that I will remodel a building that has already been remodelled before and that will change Toronto.” The building may yet shine – Gehry, even restrained and in Toronto, will stand out. Particularly when judged against other compromised architecture that has passed muster with opposition groups.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute; www.urban.probeinternational.org.