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Toronto isn't pretty. It would be more accurately described as plain, rather than fair. In these design-minded times, however, this simple, if unpleasant, truth has our civic leaders and design types in a twist.

After years of just letting everything go, the forces that be in the Greater Toronto Area are reacting like middle-aged couch potatoes who have suddenly taken up Ironman triathlons. Millions have been raised, and then spent frantically snazzing up the façades of our museums and attractions (never mind that, once inside these shined-up edifices, there's still very little to see) and embarking on a series of what the office of Mayor David Miller, who swept to office on a broom, terms "Clean and Beautiful" projects to "elevate the quality of Toronto's public spaces."

The latest of these best intentions, revealed in prototypes this week at City Hall, is a co-ordinated redesign of the city's "street furniture" of garbage cans, transit shelters and public benches. (To see images, go to the City of Toronto website, http://www.toronto.ca.) The unfortunate outcome is that, over the next 20 years, a firm called Astral Media - based in much prettier Montreal - has been contracted to supply civic accessories that, much as they are needed, say absolutely nothing about the city we live in.

Cool, modern and essentially unobjectionable, the new street furniture bears no distinctive style or identifying signature. Its bland, international design language of transparent glass and "titanium" could place it anywhere. The best of it looks like the kind of thing one comes across in the lobby of a "loft-style" condo building or at the entrance of a fashion chain geared to aspirational twentysomethings.

But for its stubby armrest, the stripped-down wood-slatted bench would be at home in front of Club Monaco. Slick and futuristic, its computer-aided designed curviness is more suggestive of an Umbra product or Atra razor than any civic or municipal benevolence. Perversely, its spare modernity reminds me of the park benches I once saw in Havana, Cuba, which had been picked clean by the city's desperate residents for building supplies.

The worst of it, such as the chubby litter/recycling receptacle that looks like a Rubbermaid version of E.T., or the title character of Disney's soon-to-be-released Wall-E (complete with baseball cap), has "personality" all right, but the wrong kind.

In contrast, the automated washrooms, which resemble the elevator entrance to an underground parkade, or perhaps a core sample taken from the entire washroom area of a Tim Hortons (that way everybody will know what they're there for?), proudly bear almost no identifying characteristics.

The horribly ungainly "information columns" with their visor-like canopies and germy touch-screens look ready to topple over with the weight of the advertising they will bear (a guaranteed $428-million) to finance the initiative.

And then there's the remarkably faceless "multi-publication structure" meant to soothe the visual confusion of chained and separate news boxes on street corners. As if the newspaper business wasn't facing enough of a challenge lately. Now the structures are going to house up to 12 different publications, as if it were a home for nesting purple martins, all under one bulky and magnificently bland and gormless roof. What this manages to express of this city's particular chaotic and jumbled charm, other than that we're desperately trying to get our act together, is hard to read.

To my mind, the simple bike lock-up rings, with their attempt at some kind of iconography, are the best of the lot. At least they have the self-respect to look municipal.

The real problem is that we cannot exploit this opportunity to make a branding statement about the city because we don't know who we are. Once upon a time, sure, we weren't pretty, even then, but we were at least clean and just. Now, the real street furniture (aside from the giant recycling bins overwhelming the sidewalks) is the swelling ranks of the homeless we've become used to stepping over like garbage.

No matter whether it's pretty or plain, dated or glass and steel, without any civic conviction behind it, public design will always have nothing to say.