What makes a city great? In the past five weeks, it would have been painfully masochistic for Torontonians to have contemplated that immodest question. Great? They'd have settled for merely maggot-free.
Once the last detritus of a 39-day garbage strike is cleared from Toronto's streets and vacant lots, however, its citizens will resume the business of assuring their burg's estimable place in the hotly contested global city sweeps. Worry not. Despite all that seems to be going wrong with the place – from the city's budget crunch and leadership vacuum to its infrastructure woes and the current stalling of the Ontario economy it motors – the decay in Toronto is mostly just organic.
It is inconceivable to imagine a city, in this day and age, being great without being global. As hubs where individuals in commerce, the arts and academe meet, and where linkages between national and world economies are cemented, global cities are exciting experiments on any number of levels. According to Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a history professor at the University of California, Irvine: “They are the kind of cities people look to as portents of things to come. When you're in one, you feel connected to the world, and when you look at one from afar, you feel you're seeing into the future.”
Canada has only one really global city. In spite of the parochialism of its politicians, and woe-is-me-ism of its overtaxed, underserviced citizens, it is only Toronto that gets flagged by leading thinkers as being a contender on this score. With a metropolitan population that is poised to surpass six million by 2012, nearly half of whom will be foreign-born, Toronto is uniquely equipped for the 21st century. If it plays its cards right, its best is yet to come.
Already, two recent rankings, both of which are backed by the work of the urban theorist who is the inventor of the “global city” concept, Saskia Sassen, place Toronto in esteemed company. Toronto is 10th on Foreign Policy magazine's latest Global Cities Index, which measures “the 60 cities that shape our lives most.” Toronto is 13th – and third in North America – on the MasterCard Worldwide Centers of Commerce (COC) Index, which defines global cities as the “critical links in a network that directs commerce and finance around the globe.”
Lest Toronto's rankings sound second-rate, Ms. Sassen, a sociology professor at Columbia University in New York, reminds us that they're anything but. “There is no perfect global city, hence, being ranked anywhere in the top 20 is the top,” she said in e-mail exchange this week.
This belies the results of a Conference Board of Canada study commissioned by the Toronto Board of Trade, and published earlier this year, that bemoans Toronto's mediocrity and places Calgary at the summit of global cities based on its recent economic showing and labour attractiveness. The study, titled Toronto as a Global City: Scorecard on Performance, relies on prerecession, strictly quantitative data that are far too narrow to properly capture what makes a global city what it is: a cauldron where ideas and individuals clash to create the economy of the future. Not to knock Calgary, but it is absurd to suggest it could outperform New York, Paris, London – or even Toronto – in this regard.
A BRUTAL TRIAGE
