Dundas Square, November 2004

Paper presented at the 2009 Anglo-American Conference of Historians “Cities” in London.
You can download the full paper with images here.

INTRODUCTION
What we will look at in the next twenty minutes is a study of three iconic projects in Toronto that were all planned and built between the years 1955 and 2005: City Hall and Nathan Phillips Square, the Eaton Centre, and Dundas Square. I argue that the three adjacent projects parallel a development in the design and representation of public space in the city starting with an idealised projection of the public realm and ending with its commodification and transformation into spectacle.

The research has focused primarily on the play between the official description of the projects by the authorities and their reception by the public as represented in the local and national media. The goal was to collect an “assembly” of participating voices in the dialogue surrounding the creation of each project and allow the argument to surface organically from the fragments. In parallel to this, each site was “read” through the theories of three different thinkers. City Hall and Nathan Phillips Square with Hannah Arendt, Eaton Centre with Jean Baudrillard and Dundas Square with Guy Debord. What I would like to present here are some of the themes that emerged during the process.

CITY HALL & NATHAN PHILLIPS SQUARE
On September 26th, 1958, Finnish architect Viljo Revell was announced as winner of the international competition to design the new Toronto City Hall. The competition attracted 530 entries from 42 different countries, making it the largest international competition ever held anywhere. Mayor Nathan Phillips had pushed the competition forward when a prior proposal, unveiled in 1955 and described as a “drab filing cabinet”, fell through for lack of public support. Significantly, the competition brief reserved half the allocated downtown land for a civic square.

Revell’s controversial design (for Canada in the 1950s) might be considered a very late (almost anachronistic) example of “heroic” modernism founded on explicit political ideals. The main building is divided into three parts, the twin towers, the circular council chamber and the podium. The civic square, marked primarily by a large reflecting pool, is framed by an elevated walkway devised to give the otherwise open space a sense of enclosure. The building was officially opened in September 1965.
A wish-image of idealised public space

What I would like to discuss here is the idea of Toronto City Hall as a symbol of civic authority and a wish-image of idealised public space. Reading from the competition brief: “In the eighteenth century, the cathedral and the town hall frequently dominated the urban scene both physically and spiritually. The City Hall in Toronto is largely overshadowed physically, but it still dominates by its presence.”

At the onset, designers are asked to design a symbol of civic authority that may still dominate the financial and commercial downtown. Not only a symbol of authority but one that draws on nostalgic references –turning Toronto City Hall, one can argue, into a representation of something “that it is not”.

As one critic put it, the project fits more in the realm of “architectural fiction” than the realm of architecture.  The project indeed finds its way quite quickly into popular science fiction lore –more often than not acting as the seat of a strange and possibly harmful alien power (Star Trek) or an evil pharmaceutical corporation (Resident Evil).

City Hall represents, to some extent, a form of heroic act of place making, the reification of a momentous political ideal in the history of the city. Yet, we may also argue, reading from Arendt, that the imposing City Hall, as a representation of the political realm, is in opposition to the larger realm of the social where such representation is inevitably problematic. The extensive and grand civic space of Toronto City Hall might be wishful thinking for a society where the public and private realms constantly flow into each other and “behaviour has replaced action as the foremost mode of human interaction.”

From its opening, the authorities are faced with the problem that incentives have to be put in place for people to use the building and Square at all. A Globe & Mail editorial of 1965 reads:
“We are delighted that the new City Council has so quickly grasped the lively possibilities of Nathan Phillips Square, as already demonstrated by the skaters who never seem to vacate the place. Art exhibits […] square dances, and Shakespeare programs are also under consideration by subcommittees of the Parks and Recreation Committee. This is splendid. Let us have them all, plus a hot-dog stand, flower barrows, chestnut wagons and someday, -not too far away- a sidewalk café.”

“Only the existence of a public realm and the world’s subsequent transformation into a community of things which gathers men together and relates them to each other depends entirely on permanence. If the world is to contain a public space, it cannot be erected for one generation and planned for the living only; it must transcend the life-span of mortal men.”

In 1998, when the City of Toronto and its surrounding wards amalgamated into the Greater Toronto Area, the new council, led by Mayor Mel Lastman, almost decided against retaining the building as its headquarters. Abandoning Revell’s building would have proven right some critics who thought that the “idea of a city hall as a physical symbol is ridiculous.”  One can only imagine the difficulty of re-interpreting and occupying a building built as its own symbolic representation and appropriated as such by the City.

But Arendt warns that this idea, the disregard for permanence, is present in the very rise of modern society, in which private property seems to be sacrificed (through expropriation, for example) whenever it comes into conflict with the accumulation of wealth.  A conflict that was soon played out over the fate of Toronto’s old city hall.

EATON CENTRE
Three days after the official inauguration of City Hall, the Eaton Company with the City of Toronto announced plans to build a large retail and business centre on the site adjacent to the new City Hall. The project aimed at bringing back some of the vitality to the downtown commercial core that had been sucked out by suburban shopping centres.

Although the 22-acre project called for the destruction of the old City Hall, the City gave the Eaton Company a green light (planning to sell the old city hall for $8-million). Mayor Philip Givens commented: “We would be stupid to reject the first overtures of such a gigantic proposal. I am certain any plan they present will exceed, if not rival, Rockefeller Centre.”  But public opinion and activism by John Sewell, future mayor of Toronto (1978-1980), the OAA, the AIA, and local historical societies helped stop the heritage building’s destruction. Eaton finally abandoned the plan as Toronto’s assessment commissioner mourned a “$14-million a year realty and business tax loss.”  The project was shelved for almost ten years until the early 1970s when a new developer, Cadillac Fairview, picked up the project hiring local architect Eb Zeidler as designer. Learning from Eaton’s mistakes, the developer kept the new design away from the eyes of the public.

Phase I of the Eaton Centre, encountering only mild opposition, opened in February 1977. It comprised the iconic galleria stretching 900ft between Queen Street and Dundas Street, and paralleling Yonge Street, Toronto’s main commercial artery. Without much exaggeration, the headlines clamoured that the opening was the “biggest game in town.” As an enthusiastic reporter wrote: “Lieutenant-Governor Pauline McGibbon came gracefully down one immobilized staircase. John Craig Eaton came down the one at her side, and the crowd cheered in time to the pipes. People made speeches about how wonderful it all was.”

This last scene goes a long way to justify the presence of the Eaton Centre in this study. Although the project never claimed to be public space, it nevertheless may well be a better reflexion or representation of actual public space. Here the boundary between public and private seems to become irrelevant, as is the case in Arendt’s description of the rise of the social. The transition into a society where, as Baudrillard argues, consumption has acquired the force of a common sense, should not come as a surprise.  The “common sense” is strong enough that, as opposed to Nathan Phillips Square, no other incentive is needed for the public to occupy the space of the Eaton Centre.

The Eaton Centre commodified public space into a controlled environment. It treated it as a marketable product to which qualities of exchange value and usefulness could be attributed. The fundamentally social and “collective” project of a shopping mall was thus presented as the inevitable and indispensable product of our society’s progress (think of the tax loss comment). As a Globe & Mail article attested: “What can be established, on the evidence from the section now in use, is that the idea of the centre as an enclosed village is both innovative and socially responsible.”

But once it is seen as a commodity, public space can be dangerously approached as a tempting perfection. It is redesigned, reconstructed, climatised, homogenized into a condensation of its socially acceptable qualities. The unacceptable usually remains, but elsewhere. The galleria of the Eaton Centre aggrandized the public space of the street into a fetish. It not only paralleled the main commercial street of Toronto, but perfected it. With time, the “perfection” worked too well. The galleria sucked the life from Yonge Street, slowly changing it into what Mayor Mel Lastman once described as an “eyesore”: a stretch of discount stores, run-down buildings and businesses of questionable reputation.

DUNDAS SQUARE
“This is going to be the first public space created in the new [amalgamated] city and it’s vitally important that we get it right. It will set the standard for all public space in the future.”

In 1996, the City of Toronto officially undertook the project of redeveloping the corner of Yonge and Dundas Street. The plan included as its major contribution a new open public square on the southeast corner of the intersection: the “largest creation of open, hard space in Toronto since the opening of nearby Nathan Phillips Square in 1965.”  The national competition for the square was officially opened in September 1998 announcing that the “design should reflect the metropolitan image, energy and excitement characteristic of such places in the great cities of the world.”  Following the expropriation of a series of shops along Yonge Street that cleared the way for the development, the empty site for the new square got to be described as the “most important piece of real-estate in Canada.”

In December of 1998, Browne & Storey Architects of Toronto were announced as winners. Architectural critics were enthusiastic and the project received design awards –before construction even started. A major reason for the project’s success at this stage was that it promised a relatively calm design in contrast to the chaotic intersection that was soon to be associated with places like Times Square and Piccadilly Circus.

While Dundas Square was presented by the authorities as the next model for public space in the city, the reality was far from being so clear. At its inception, the Square was imagined as a hybrid of private and public control. As opposed to more traditional open spaces, it falls under the category of a City owned building that may be leased to potential users for a profit. In the words of Kyle Rae, the councillor responsible for the project, “the Square is City property, not public property.”
In 2002, the City created the Yonge-Dundas Square Board of Management and approved an amendment to the Toronto Municipal Code that “allows for the maintenance, operation and control of the Square to be exercised by the Board and sets out the Board’s powers and duties regarding the operation and fiscal management of the Square. The by-law establishes the Board’s goal of achieving financial self-sufficiency for the Square by 2005 and allows the Board to establish booking policies for the Square, retain staff and consultants, issue permits for activities on the Square, and to enter into contracts for services as may be required in connection with its role of managing the Square.”

Even councillor Rae admits, in 2001, that although the Square will serve as both a commercial and a public space, it will be “used heavily for commercial events.”  Indeed, the rental schedule for the Square was set, in 2003, so that the City would retain only 70 days for not-for-profit events, leasing the space the rest of the time for a profit. Not being able to afford leaving the “most important piece of real estate in Canada” as non-revenue generating open space the City is forced to turn it into profitable real-estate. And here lies the paradox between people’s expectancy of the space and its reality: on the one hand the City presents the Square as public space while on the other it is forced to put mechanisms in place for its strict control.

As a 2002 City of Toronto staff report reads: “What takes place on the public sidewalk surrounding the Square will impact on the Square’s success in meeting its objective of becoming a vibrant, safe and active focal point and economic catalyst. The [Yonge-Dundas] Board has expressed concern respecting the possible impacts of activities such as sidewalk busking and vending, postering and sidewalk maintenance, and with security issues such as panhandling.” Most activities that are in a sense truly public are judged inadmissible at Dundas Square. The Square is monitored 24/7 by a third-party security firm and the City approved the use of CCTV cameras (something obviously not shocking for London, but very much so for Canada in 2003). Yet, and almost without a hint of irony, the director of the Board ends up lamenting that “people don’t seem to know what to do with the space.”  A view echoed in councillor Rae’s comments when he states: “We would like to see many more spontaneous things happen here at Dundas Square. There has been one anti-war rally and we want more things like that.” An optimistic view moderated, to say the least, by Toronto’s Chief of Police at the time when he reminds us: “A problem is now arising where portions of the public believe that Dundas Square is a public space. […] Anti-war demonstrators in the first quarter of 2003 utilized the square as a meeting point without proper authorization.”

Regardless of inherent contradictions, Dundas Square is presented as something enormously and unquestionably positive. It is then no wonder that the official City rhetoric about the “publicness” of the Square can be taken as a case in point example of spectacular discourse. A discourse that says, to paraphrase Debord, “that which appears is public space.”  It seems that under these conditions, the space of Dundas Square has indeed reached the “fragile perfection” of the spectacle.  Perfect, because it is presented as the positive, inevitable, and indisputable product of society’s progress, and fragile, because this perfected representation must be defended and closed to criticism, being indisputable.

CONCLUSION
The three discussed projects illustrate just how difficult, not to say impossible, any attempt at defining public space in the city may be. Inherent to all three is the representation of a form of authority (civic, commercial, hybrid) that constitutes the basis of the designed “projection”. The people pushing these representations forward (whether politicians, businessmen, or even architects) seem to react to a fragmented public realm by wanting to project an idealised and homogeneous vision. In juxtaposing the official representation of the projects with their actual reception in the public realm, this study has attempted to show that these idealised projections, when confronted to the heterogeneity of the everyday public realm, inevitably face their own spectacular state as “fragile perfections”.

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