The role of Yonge & Dundas Square

Listen.

I'm not pointing this out to confirm a widespread belief that I can find something to be negative about regardless of the circumstances. Amidst all the hooping and hollering of this evening's revelry downtown, however, I noticed an interesting phenomenon and felt I should at least bumble through a word or two about it.

This is Yonge-Dundas Square, a plaza opened in downtown Toronto back in late 2002. It is a public-private partnership, and exists largely due to the efforts of outgoing city councillor Kyle Rae. The square was intended to be the city's new central meeting place; its Times Square; its Piccadilly Circus. Yes, I'm ripping this word-for-word from the Wikipedia page. I'm le tired.

This photo was also taken during what will probably be remembered as the largest impromptu gathering of people on Yonge Street in decades: the celebration of Canada's gold medal in Men's Hockey, and a more general celebration of our Olympic successes.

Notice anything strange about the crowd? About where they chose to celebrate? The Square is dark, barren, unused and ignored, while tens of thousands of people dance and sing in the middle of the street.

There are good reasons for this, and you'll find many of them made clear either directly or incidentally in this book.

I'm not sure if Jane Jacobs ever commented publicly on Y-D Square and the "revitalization" of Yonge Street, but I have a feeling she could have predicted the phenomenon I photographed above. A city's streets are its veins, and its life, and the confluence of a city's most important and most travelled routes becomes the very heart of a city: more so than its financial district, and more so than its shopping strips. This is not, however, an effect that can be manufactured (and as I say this, thousands of SimCity players around the globe grimly nod in unison), and Y-D Square was a distinct attempt to manufacture the heart of our city.

The Square always seemed to me like a really crass attempt at selling a bit of ad space: an exploitation of Yonge Street's role as the heart of our city. Some of the events organized there over the past eight years bear this out, while others seem like genuinely interesting and positive uses of the space (though, probably not surprisingly, much of the latter has been organized not by city staff but by the populace itself: see Newmindspace, et al). This is probably consistent with the idea of a public/private partnership, and I suppose as long as the private sector plays a role in defining our public spaces there will always be events whose primary purpose is to provide a large number of eyeballs in one place.

Any and all cynicism aside, I still find it interesting that when a party of this magnitude occurs -- the celebration of the century so far, easily besting the impromptu party after the Leafs' second-round playoff victory in 2002 -- the square that was built specifically to contain it is left empty. Somewhere out there, a Toronto city planner is still misunderstanding how cities work. And if Jane Jacobs could witness this, I feel she wouldn't be surprised at all.