Is Toronto Beautiful? The beginning of my journey in urban design and hidden appeal of Canada's most controversial city

I was born in Toronto but spent most of life living elsewhere. However Toronto has always somehow felt like home. It was where my grandparents were, my cousins were, my childhood friends were. Despite living in all sorts of different places, Toronto is where I spent Christmas and where I visited every summer. I grew up with a very strong emotional attachment to the city and looked back on my time there was romantic nostalgia.

To me Toronto was Saturday's spent in Bloor West, talking to the butcher, the baker and the greengrocer. It was hearing five languages on my walk to school ( a walk I could have done as unsupervised at age eight seeing as school was three blocks away). Toronto was taking the subway to field trips to the ROM, summers in High Park and reading club at the public library.  In short Toronto to me always represented diversity, community and freedom. And yeah, it meant long hours at work for my parents and not being able to freely play on the street but that was a small price to pay for being walking distance to all everything you could need and having an entire city as a play ground. 

Being a part from Toronto reinforced this view in many ways- nothing else could ever compare so it created this idea in my mind that Toronto really was the best city. No matter how many people told me that Toronto was just another gross, crowded city with bad traffic and stuck up people I could never believe them. But when I went to university I realized there was a stark difference between those from Toronto who loved the city and those not from Toronto who hated on it. I begun to wonder if all of us with some sort of emotional attachment to the city just couldn't see clearly.

One of the more common critiques I heard really stuck and that was the constant " my god it is such as ugly city, it has nothing on {insert quote about the mountains in Vancouver or Calgary or the ocean in Halifax}". I had never really thought of that one. Yeah everyone agreed traffic sucked, housing prices were ridiculous and public transit needed work but was it really an ugly city? I certainly didn't think so, neither did anyone who called the city home. But I realized that maybe we were letting our emotional attachment of what Toronto meant to us overshadow the objective reality that maybe it wasn't an aesthetically pleasing city. But then again what makes a city beautiful? And can one really be objective about that statement? 

This above question is exactly what I was pondering as I wandered around Toronto these past months when I stumbled on the article and video linked below. 

Alain de Botton argues that cities can in fact, be considered beautiful or ugly and the classification is a lot more objective than you would think. 

He lays out 6 principles that make a city beautiful: 

1. Order (buildings should be uniform in appearance and layout—to a degree);
2. Visible life (it's nice to see people walking the streets and working in shop windows);
3. Compactness (don't sprawl);
4. Orientation and mystery (a balance of large and small streets should allow for efficient travel... and for getting lost, on occasion);
5. Scale (a building should be five stories max, unless what it stands for is really worth more air space);
6. A sense of the local (Melbourne should look a little different from Barcelona, because its cultural and geographic qualities are different). ( CityLab) 

So I begun wondering where Toronto fell on these principles. Objectively, my head was telling me not too well, but my heart was saying don't count this city out yet. And thus begins my study into the aesthetic beauty of Toronto. 

I wanted to find out a) could this city be considered beautiful based on the above principles b) if so, what parts and c) what factors influenced the aesthetically pleasing ( or lack thereof) development of the city. 

As an economist ( lol, I only studied it in school but one can pretend) I obvious needed to define the parameters of my study and so they are as follows: 

1) I am looking at exteriors- buildings, roads, parks etcs... not interiors or human factors

2) This must consider a range of neighborhoods- low rise, high rise, residential and commercial

3) And lastly, because this is a huge city with 40 some Wards I admit this will a study of "my Toronto" aka the areas I live, work and play in. I will make an effort to explore new areas via this project but I am in no way planning or pretending to cover the entire city. 

My hypothesis is that the city will rank well on principles 2) and 6) and will fall short on principle 1). My hope is that I will find that not only is Toronto currently beautiful but it has the potential to grow more beautiful and accessible with the correct policy and planning. 


I am in no way a city policy or architecture expert so I have no idea how this will go but let's see what makes Toronto beautiful!