Archive for March 31, 2010

What will make Toronto better

March 31, 2010 / Wendy Waters / 5 comments

As discussed in my previous post, I find Toronto fascinating and enjoy visiting.  But it’s also a city with some immediate challenges that are perhaps holding the city back.

So what changes will improve Toronto and help it evolve faster into a global, international knowledge-economy hub?

#1.  Better transit.  The metro system hasn’t been upgraded since 1967, apparently.  Certainly feels that way to ride it.   The entire system needs an overhaul.  The stations each need a facelift and the network needs to go more places like Pearson Airport, “downtown Mississauga” (Square One) and York University.  This will help get people out of their cars and prolong the life of the existing freeway system.  If oil returns to $170/barrel, or more, I worry about how the automobile-centred suburban ring around Toronto will function.

#2 Simultaneous with better transit, the city needs to deal with certain freeway bottlenecks like the Gardiner Expressway exit by Union Station into downtown.  New condo and office towers opening and pending in the area will surely generate more traffic.  It’s insane now. I hope the city has a plan to deal with this.  Maybe congestion pricing? electronic tolls?

#3 Better recognition within the business and political community that Toronto’s future economic growth may need to be less centred on the financial services and traditional manufacturing sectors, and more based upon knowledge-economy production, including information technology, business services, or new media.

For people who live in Toronto, there is probably a list that might involve parks or schools.  But I can’t comment on that (however, feel free to do so in the comments if you live there).  This is the outsider’s perspective of what seems to be holding the city back–and it’s a list that would apply to many cities that also need better transit, solutions to automotive gridlock and a broader recognition of new economic growth possibilities.

Category: economic development, urban history, urban lifestyles, urban technologies /

Toronto needs a boost

March 30, 2010 / Wendy Waters / 2 comments

This is the first of two posts on Toronto.  First, before anyone accuses me of being a self-centered Torontonian (which tends to happen when I say nice things about Toronto), let me say that I’m not from there.  I was born and largely raised in Vancouver and after stints elsewhere have chosen to make Vancouver my home once again. 

No city is 100% unique.  In fact, many of the things I like about Toronto are also great in other cities, but Toronto does have its own unique blend of messy urban spaces and realities.  Those of you less familiar with Toronto will hopefully be able to see aspects of your own city in these thoughts.

Why I like Toronto:

  • Downtown Toronto offers a history of central North American residential and office architecture all squished together.  You can see 100 year old Edwardian brick houses, next to a 70 year old office building with the new RBC Dexia glass office tower in the background along with new glass condominium towers.
  • Toronto has so many cool, interesting walkable streets (too bad the weather isn’t always conducive to appreciating them), built in the day when automotive transport did not rule. Kensington Market, Bloor & Spadina area, Queen Street, for example, offer food, sounds and goods from around the world.
  • Toronto has this messy, interconnected international urbanism where people, sounds and foods mix.  If you haven’t watched K-Naan perform live with his Toronto band, check this clip from before he became the famous 2010-World-Cup-Theme composer and singer.  I love the look of the whole group – so reflective of the new Toronto that is over 45% foreign born.

What else is exciting about Toronto

  • Toronto is evolving into a 21st century knowledge economy hub. Manufacturing has been in a long term decline and although still important to the region’s economy, the job growth over the past 15 years has been in financial services. In fact over 11% work in financial services in Toronto, the highest percentage of any city in North America.  Yet, Toronto is not all about banking.
  • Toronto is where so much of Canada’s media is based.  It’s where people interpret national and world events for the entire country; so many TV shows are filmed there.  Yes, this can create a Toronto-centric perspective in the media, but it also makes it a cooler place to visit (in a similar way that New York and Los Angeles are fun to visit because US media emerges from these poles). 

To be sure, Toronto has challenges.  See my next post.  But it’s also becoming–or is already– a cool, fascinating, international city to watch.

What puzzles me is how pessimistic so many people in Toronto seem about the city in its current form, and prospects for prosperity over the next few years.  Feeling an ambivalence among the locals last week made me think that the city needs a boost, and inspired this post.

Category: economic development, public spaces /

Does a city (or a country) need corporate head offices

March 11, 2010 / Wendy Waters / 3 comments

Three years ago I pondered whether all the fretting about Vancouver losing corporate head offices had merit — and concluded that it did not:

If we look at the causes of head office decline in Vancouver, we see that it comes from a position of corporate success — not failure. Successful companies have been acquired by the global players who want their product or service. The MacMillian Bloedel – Weyerheuser merger is an example from the forestry sector. Flickr’s acquisition by Yahoo! offers a smaller yet equally valid situation. Local entrepreneurs created a successful product and company that a global player wanted badly enough to buy the company at a high price.

Another cause of head office decline has been the mergers of BC-based businesses. … Driving these mergers has been the need to compete on the global stage — to improve corporate efficiencies and cut costs. No government policy will change this.

Many entrepreneurial creative or knowledge economy companies also do well in Vancouver and once purchased, receive large boosts of funding from the new parent company, creating more creative jobs. [For example] Radical Entertainment [was] bought by Vivendi and now expanding rapidly.

This week, Stephen Gordon at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative shared statistical evidence that indeed it does not matter where in the world the CFO sits:

Just what is the problem with foreign ownership, anyway? The usual stories about low productivity and R&D being done elsewhere are hopelessly out of date. A 2005 StatsCan study (pdf) found that “foreign-controlled plants are more productive than domestic-controlled plants” and “are also more innovative, more R&D intensive and use more advanced technologies.” Their presence also has spillover effects, forcing domestic rivals to increase their productivity as well. What’s not to like?

Given what we know about the knowledge economy, it makes sense that foreign acquisitions of local companies make them better.  After all, they bring new ideas to an already successful business (if it wasn’t successful, or otherwise have incredible potential, it would not have be purchased).

We therefore need to stop measuring cities by the number of corporate head offices, and focus even more on creating the  environment in which talented people can think and thrive.  This will foment successful startups — that could get bought by a bigger player, with fresh new ideas and the money to make those dreams a reality — as well as attract global players to locate new facilities nearby.

Maybe in the future cities will be measured by the number of Fortune 500 firms with locations there.

Category: clusters, economic development /

Worldwide, cities are good for women

March 9, 2010 / Wendy Waters / 2 comments

In honour of International Women’s Day this week, I offer the following argument:

The global shift toward cities and more urban based economies has benefited women — and the status of women — in at least three ways.

First, urban women and girls typically need to spend fewer hours doing household chores, including ensuring basic survival, than their rural counterparts.  For example, spending half a day hauling water, is not required — even in poorer cities or neighbourhoods where not all homes have running water, a pump is usually close to home.  Doing laundry is another chore that urban women can leave to a machine (even if she cannot afford her own, the laundry mat makes this task much easier and faster).

Additionally, as I’ve previously argued apartment and condominium living close to one’s work also benefits women and families with dual careers, removing tasks like commuting from the suburbs.  Higher density living also provides a wider audience of potential customers for often small scale female entrepreneurship. Whether making and selling choco-bananas from the house in Quito or teaching fitness classes.

Second, in part by reducing time spent on household chores, living in cities allow more girls and women to attend school (boys also benefit here too).  Moreover, cities often offer a woman a wide range of choices to utilize her education from “traditional female paths” like nursing or teaching to the new common female occupations such as accounting.

Third, city life for families and women is removing the economic bias in favor of sons, which world wide may be responsible for many fewer women being born — what the Economist called the missing 100 million women in the world’s population today due to abortion and infantside of female offspring (or gendercide as they call it).  Although the historical cultural bias remains in many countries, urban women have the opportunities to earn as good of a living as men.  Urban jobs tend to not favor brute strength as some rural occupations.  Moreover, land inheritances are less of an issue if one purchases food at the supermarket with money earned as a computer programmer, rather than needs to grow it for oneself.  Give the world’s population a generation to adjust to urban living, and baby girls may achieve equal status with their brothers in many more cultures.

To be clear, I’m not arguing that cities are perfect or some sort of heaven for the world’s women.  Violence and exploitation takes place in cities just as it does in rural areas (although one could argue that an urban oppressed women may have more resources and options to escape the abuse).   My argument is that on balance, the growth of cities and of more urban based, knowledge and service economies has been a step forward for the status and well being of the planet’s female population.

Your thoughts?  Are there other ways cities benefit women?  Or feel free to argue these points.

Category: poverty, urban families, urban history /

Maybe meeting expectations makes “cities” happy

March 2, 2010 / Wendy Waters / 4 comments

Richard Florida has a new thought provoking piece on what makes cities happy.  Since cities are inanimate and cannot really be happy or sad, he seems to be referring to the aggregate mood of the people.

He and his colleagues look at the positive correlations between happiness and such things as income and having higher education levels.  And they note the negative correlation to lower education levels.

This made me think about political revolution theory.  More specifically the theory that societies are most prone to revolution when rising expectations fail to meet reality.  (This is the J-Curve model.)  The reverse also generally holds: revolutions are least likely when reality is matching rising expectations — because people are happy if their expectations for life are being met, or exceeded.

So, therefore, if a city is able to meet the rising expectations of people who live there, the citizens will appear to be happy by most measures.  I think this partially fits with Florida’s observations.

For example, he found that cities with high numbers of citizens with advanced education levels tend to be happier.  We could assume that these individuals have higher expectations for themselves, and also tend to meet them.  But we should probably watch out for situations in which those with higher education are not succeeding.

Florida also notes the lower levels of happiness among metro areas associated with the working class — their expectations for life have likely been dashed.
For political leaders a key issue may be to manage expectations.  For those of us just trying to understand cities, we may need to look beyond comparing such things as housing prices, average wages, and even education levels across cities.  For example, it may not matter to happiness if one city’s citizens have a lower living standard because of high costs; it matters more whether they expect something different.

Category: resident attitudes /