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This is the second in a series of articles in which The Globe and Mail visits an iconic Toronto neighbourhood or event with Richard Florida. Dr. Florida is a professor at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management and academic director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School. He is the founder of the Creative Class Group (creativeclass.com) in Washington, D.C., which develops strategies for business, government and community competitiveness, and author of the bestselling books The Rise of the Creative Class and The Flight of the Creative Class. He also writes a new monthly column in the Focus section; the next one will be published on Dec. 29.
You've got to hand it to Richard Florida: He sees the good in things.
He's standing in the middle of Yonge-Dundas Square, the controversial downtown plaza that some consider a nefarious plot to turn public space into just one more way of getting eyeballs onto advertising.
Loud rock music — karaoke! — is being emitted from the stage in the southeast corner. Children are making Christmas crafts in rented blue tents as part of a free "Kidzfest" sponsored by a clothing retailer. There's a grubby inflatable mini-playground in bad need of a hose-down in front of the T.O. Tix kiosk. Children bundled in ski jackets are lined up with their parents on a cold Saturday morning to ride a miniature train in a circle through the square, the engine's clanging bell apparently calibrated, decibel-wise, to drown out the karaoke singer, who, tragically, is only moments away from singing a Bon Jovi song. A Salvation Army band does its lonesome best to be heard above the din on the square's outer edge.
And surrounding it all is advertising — massive, glaring, blinking, bubbling, animated billboards for cellphones, televisions, chewing gum, casinos and airlines.
But what does Dr. Florida see? Not Times Square commercialism, not a dubious urban experiment, not concrete and karaoke.
He zeroes in on the people. People of all colours and classes in a village green that happens to be grey.
"What I think is good about this space, even though it's not my aesthetic, is that it's being used," he says. "There's a concert going on, there's these little booths where children are hanging out doing their thing. … It looks a little imposed on the landscape to me, and certainly it celebrates mass consumerism and brand, but, you know, something for everybody."
It's an open-minded optimism that Dr. Florida would carry with him later to the square's big sister, the Eaton Centre, which he loved. And it's a counterpoint to Torontonians' grumpy tendency to see the city in parts and not as a whole.
"One thing I've learned from my time in Toronto is everything is controversial," he says. "Its development model has changed so fundamentally in the past 20 years from a city that was mainly low-rise, for better or worse was sleepy, that was mainly an Anglo city, to this incredible kaleidoscope of people and building styles. Some of it's great and some of it's not so great."
In the square, which was planned and built by the city and opened in 2002, he isquick to notice that the vast majority of the people enjoying Kidzfest are members of Toronto's ever-expanding visible-minority communities. In some ways, that makes sense to him.
"Maybe when a Canadian or American thinks of a city, they think of Victorian houses and parks and so on, but maybe when an immigrant thinks of a city they think of tall buildings, neon signs and so on," he says.
The same, he adds, applies to tourists and shoppers from small Canadian and American towns looking for the big-city experience.
