As Toronto grows into a more mature, more compelling city, a new group of non-academic, street-smart urbanists has emerged to appreciate it – with-it young writers, architects and men and women about town who love big cities and see things in Toronto that most of us miss. Shawn Micallef is one of the sharpest of this sharp-eyed breed.
His biggest contribution may have been simply to put one foot in front of the other. For the past few years, he has been going on what he calls “psychogeographic walking tours” of Toronto. Psychogeography was a movement led by the Situationists, a revolutionary Marxist group in the 1950s and 1960s that did goofy things like explore Paris using a map of London. The idea was to break walkers out of their usual routines and ways of thinking, forcing them to see the urban landscape from new angles.
Mr. Micallef has never hurled a Molotov cocktail, but he does like to walk. When he migrated to Toronto from his car-dependent hometown of Windsor in 2000, he set off to explore his new city on foot, covering everywhere from Harbourfront in the south to Dundas Street in the west to the Finch Hydro Corridor in the north and Crescent Town in the east.
He took notes on what he discovered and turned them into columns for Eye Weekly and other publications. Mr. Micallef, 36, serves as managing editor of Yonge Street, the weekly online city magazine. He is also a long-time editor at Spacing, the urban-affairs journal that has become a sort of house organ of the new urbanism. Now he has collected his acute urban observations in Stroll, which features 32 walking tours of Toronto. The book is a kind of walker’s manifesto – you might even say a call to legs – that challenges Torontonians to get out of their cars and buses and hoof it.
Most people don’t think of Toronto as a great walking city like New York, Paris or London. Torontonians, Mr. Micallef says, are trained to be underwhelmed by their own city. He aims to wake them up. The way he sees it, psychogeography – the psychological reaction to geography – simply means “getting excited about place, paying attention to the places we go, just starting to think about these places we might pass through but that we take for granted.”
Toronto, he concedes, may not be the world’s most beautiful city. It may not have the skyscraper canyons of New York or the charming quartiers of Paris, but it has an urban style of its own: “A messy kind of urbanism, a jumble of styles, old and new, slammed up against each other.” In that sense, he says, the city’s look reflects the soft collision of cultures that is Toronto’s multicultural experience.
On one walk, he looks behind the bank on the northeast corner of Spadina and Dundas and sees an abandoned theatre that once put on Yiddish productions, then became the Victory Burlesque strip joint and ended its life showing Hong Kong films in Cantonese. Heading down an alley off Yonge Street near St. Clair, he explores hidden St. Michael’s cemetery, opened in 1855 when all around was countryside.
Visiting Thorncliffe Park, one of Canada’s largest rental districts with more than 30 low- and high-rise buildings, he finds that “the neighbourhood after sunset is a Manhattan-like experience, a sea of sparkling towers glowing from within. …You can hear the clinking of dishes and the laugh tracks of TV shows and you can smell food.”
For Mr. Micallef, even the sprawling suburbs have their charms. On his suburban walks, he comes to appreciate the dowdy strip malls with their mom-and-pop stores and ethnic businesses. “This Jane Jacobs cutesy urbanism we love to celebrate is actually playing out in the suburbs, because the rents are cheap there and anybody can start up a store with a minimum amount of money,” he says. “Maybe the next roti empire or pho empire is starting in a strip mall in Malvern, who knows?”
Picking up these cues is all a matter of looking around and paying attention, something you can only do properly with a walker’s pace and perspective. “I discovered Toronto’s magical bits – and sometimes its unmagical bits – on foot, and you can too,” he says. “You just have to walk.”
