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This is the third in a series of articles in which The Globe and Mail visits an iconic Toronto neighbourhood 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. His next book, Who's Your City?, is scheduled for publication in March. He also writes a monthly column in the Focus section; the next one will be published on Jan. 26.
In any recital of Things Torontonians Take For Granted About Their City, the University of Toronto and its pastoral setting has to get main billing.
One of the world's top universities, it occupies 68 hectares in the heart of downtown Toronto – a healthy accumulation of neo-Gothic heritage buildings, a neo-hideous library and some more recent and lovelier additions (the Terrence Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research stands out), all densely packed into a quilting of parks and sporting fields and interlaced by walking paths that teem with backpack-toting students.
It is bounded by four major arteries and bisected by a fifth. It counts nine Nobel laureates among its alumni and faculty, past and present. It is a powerhouse of research in countless fields. Its degrees are held by John Kenneth Galbraith, Norman Bethune, Peter Munk, Lorne Michaels and Margaret Atwood, plus 19 Supreme Court judges, four prime ministers, a steady stream of lieutenant-governors, and the inventor of the alkaline battery. Its endowment is counted in the billions of dollars.
And yet, despite its size and its status as an elite university, it is neither overbearing nor elitist, instead blending into the city in a way that is described by virtually anyone who has ever thought about it as “seamlessly.”
“You have an urban university a couple of kilometres from the main financial city core, accessible on foot, by subway, by mass transit, in a real neighbourhood with functioning shops and residences where people live, work, learn and play,” Richard Florida says as he crosses University Avenue at College Street.
“If you asked me to name the most unique thing about Toronto's spatial structure, its geography, its regional urban character, it's this. It's the fact that it has a world-class university that is a seamless part of its geography. There are very few cities and universities in the world that can say that.”
Dr. Florida is new to Toronto, having moved here last fall, but he's not new to urban university campuses.
He has studied and worked at a number of American ones and none matches what he has found in his adopted city.
“Strange as it may seem, there are very few [universities situated like this]. The University of Chicago is in an area that for all intents and purposes until recently was a terrible, underclass ghetto. Columbia University, where I did my graduate studies, is literally on the edge of Harlem. Even [at] NYU, which is in the Village, the modus operandi of those universities has been to conquer the community, to expand their buildings, to push out their boundaries, to buy up stuff.”
Not that the University of Toronto hasn't had run-ins with the city and the people living in and around the campus.
Adam Vaughan, the councillor for Trinity-Spadina, the ward in which the campus is located, said last week that he inherited a “very suspicious” relationship between City Hall and U of T when he was first elected in 2006.
The university's expansion in the 1960s, 70s and 80s resulted in numerous “town-gown” clashes, typified perhaps by the construction, at St. George and Harbord, of the oversized spy bunker known officially as the Robarts Library but referred to unaffectionately as Fort Book.
Detente was achieved in 1996 with a deal that allowed the university to build on 26 sites in exchange for a freeze on development in the campus's historic core.
For Dr. Florida, the campus is an “organic match” for the city.
Part of that is due to the fact that it is provincially funded, meaning tuition fees don't come close to the stratospheric heights attained by those for elite American schools.
“The fact that this is a university where children of first-generation immigrants can come and get an education [has] contributed to its sense as a public good, not just a good that the elite can access,” he points out.
He even ponders whether the university, by being so accessible and located in the heart of the city, didn't contribute to Toronto's easygoing attitudes about multiculturalism.
Universities attract talent and advance technology, Dr. Florida says, but there is a third T that is often overlooked: tolerance.
“I wonder,” he says, standing in front of the main gates leading into King's College Road, “if having the University of Toronto here in the centre of the city, creating a kind of meritocratic, open-minded, pluralistic mentality, didn't have something to do with Toronto's emergence as one of the most tolerant, open-minded, accepting and inclusive cities in the world.”
See Dr. Florida's blog at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/blogs/creativeclass.
Richard Florida Visits will reappear in February.
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