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Toronto lacks clarity -- on what is sacred and significant -- on what can and cannot be demolished -- on who gets to call the shots -- on who has the moral authority to decide what is right for the city and its citizens.

This remarkable city of unparalleled difference and tolerance is incapable of producing a new neighbourhood designed to celebrate difference and tolerance. This city of great public libraries and public schools struggles with the making of great public space. This city of the New World has a long record of demolishing the architectural icons that define its short, significant urban history.

This city is unclear -- about where very tall buildings can go -- about how to create a genuine Toronto waterfront experience that startles and seduces rather than looking like a rehashed version of the 1970s St. Lawrence neighbourhood or a gussied-up American idea of grandiose. Missing in action on both of these fronts is Mayor David Miller. He needs to defend and protect this city.

Toronto is under attack. The city's official plan is soft and malleable, so that a beleaguered planning department deals with most development applications, including the most preposterous ones, on a site-by-site basis. Towers are now being erected in the front yards of the city's cathedrals or designed to run helter-skelter through the city's most revered neighbourhoods.

What does a power vacuum look like? It looks like the dispiriting bunker under construction in Yorkville as an 18-unit luxury residence. It looks like the condo proposal for the Hummingbird Centre, one of the city's most declarative modernist icons, with a skyscraper gone insane at its base like Medusa's hair. Most recently, we have been treated to the absurd proposal for a 190-metre luxury tower to replace the McLaughlin Planetarium to the south of the Royal Ontario Museum. In this case, the ROM's director, William Thorsell, has abandoned his usual sang-froid to lead a desperate campaign: an attempted $20-million money grab to allow for the efficient completion of the museum's massive redevelopment by architect Daniel Libeskind.

At a public consultation meeting on Tuesday night, Thorsell found himself in the unfortunate position of defending the idea of ROM South, a 46-storey tower he'd like to erect on Queen's Park road in one of Toronto's most sacred civic precincts. The tower is designed to house only about 150 very rich people. This in a city that receives 100,000 newcomers every year, at a site surrounded on three sides by young, brilliant and mostly dirt-poor students at the University of Toronto.

In this city of unclear ideas, it only follows that the scheme is mired in a lack of logic. The blue-glass tower was described, in one instance, as so light and ethereal as to be invisible. On the other hand, the tower is intended to be an architectural icon. So, as one member of the crowd asked at the public consultation: What does an invisible icon look like? Thorsell's architect, Brian Brisbin, likened the 46-storey tower to a campanile, such as, I suppose, the eight-storey Leaning Tower of Pisa?

A crowd of more than 500 people -- smart, educated and articulate -- lashed back: that it was wrong to sell off land held in the public trust for a luxury private condominium; that it was wrong to upset the scale and genteel promenade of Queen's Park road; that it was wrong to shut down the planetarium -- a place that allowed all of us to dream about the sky. They heckled Thorsell regularly whenever he spoke.

Finally, something happened at the public gathering -- the moral right to the site was decided. Suddenly it was clear it didn't belong to the whims of one individual or even one institution but to the clear-headed citizens of Toronto. In this case, logic seems to have prevailed.

"I recognize that the university and many others are violently opposed," said Thorsell. "And if the community and the planners and the city are completely opposed to it, then it won't get built." To which, wild applause.

Toronto has never formalized what matters most to the integrity of the city. If it's the dozens of ravines that run wild through the city, why don't we at least give them beautiful signposts to identify them? If it's the neighbourhoods with their idiosyncratic brick Victorian homes and networks of intimate streets, why don't we designate them the way that New York has designated 80 of its neighbourhoods over the last 30 years? And, if this is a city of artists and designers, why do we continually beat up on our heritage architecture, whether it be 100 or 50 years old? Other cities don't have to go into panic mode and call public rallies every time a developer puts in a proposal. In Tokyo, for instance, a recently approved list of 100 modern works of architecture means those buildings are safe from additions and demolition.

In Toronto, what distinguishes us most of all is treated as a dark secret. We're still learning to be a lake city. This isn't about unrequited love -- we barely know how to get our toes wet. So, perhaps we shouldn't be surprised by the schemes being cooked up by architects (U.S. firms who were selected not during a design competition but as part of an RFP (request for proposals) from the client, the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corp. (TWRC), for two major precincts of land along the waterfront: the East Bayfront, which approximates the size of Battery Park City in New York or Canary Wharf in London, and the West Donlands, located north of the Gardiner Expressway and directly west of the Don Valley Expressway.

The East Bayfront scheme, as approved by the board of the TWRC last week, is a competent exercise in accommodating densities. It is a politically correct composition, a mixed-use development that comes nowhere near to embodying the open, transparent society that Toronto is acclaimed for around the world. The insertion of a big green space, dumbed down by the uninspired apartments that surround it, doesn't offset how ordinary the plan appears to be.

In the current TWRC scenario, the enclosed Winter Garden is sited next to a 40-storey tower, an idea that recalls the way things are organized in New York at Battery Park, a major private development in Lower Manhattan. It's an idea cribbed from another city and another context, and it would appear to be an arbitrary gesture. Clarity was missing from last week's board meeting. As Mayor Miller said himself: "The 40-storey tower at the foot of Jarvis is meant to pay for the Winter Garden. It [the tower] was in [the plan] for one part of the meeting, and out for another."

That the plan, by Koetter Kim & Associates, is now being prepared for approval at city council without ever having been seen by the Waterfront Design Review Panel, a stellar group of architects and landscape architects led by Bruce Kuwabara, is not only wrong, it's unthinkable.

Like the East Bayfront plan, the West Donlands proposal, prepared by Urban Design Associates of Pittsburgh, also appears to have been dropped in from elsewhere. A grand sweeping crescent, which takes its cue from Park Crescent in Regent's Park, London, defines the new Don River Park, behind which is a series of bulky residential buildings that ring private courtyards.

Clarity about who we are is absent in both schemes.

There are moments when certain leaders rise beyond what their office officially requires of them. When the 1963 earthquake hit Skopje, Macedonia, the Minister of the Interior set up a desk and established headquarters in a public park to orchestrate rescue and relief work 20 minutes after the devastating shock. New York's then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani was all over his city and its people immediately following the 9/11 disaster. Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley Jr. has spearheaded the greening of his city and pushed hard for the controversial and costly Millennium Park. Nobody asked him, he simply invented the role for himself. Toronto needs a master in the house. Perhaps Mayor Miller would consider setting up a temporary desk under the trees in Queen's Park.

lrochon@globeandmail.ca