At the 2010 CIP Conference in Montréal, planners asked keynote speaker Jan Gehl how Canadian cities fared under the scrutiny of his analysis of successful city spaces and why New York and Melbourne dominate his precedent slides of cities ‘doing it right’ as opposed to Vancouver or Montréal, or more specifically Toronto? His response was that Canadian cities were either not leaders in this regard or perhaps not doing a good enough job of promoting their worthy efforts.
Skimming through Gehl’s Cities for People (2010), there some prominent photos from Vancouver and Montréal, highlighting positive urban design qualities of these cities, with a few paragraphs devoted to Vancouver’s Granville Island. Coincidentally, there were at least four photos almost certainly of Toronto (pp. 76, 154, 181, 228, ) that were not attributed to the city in either the caption or the index. In fact, one that is clearly Toronto (image above: note the ubiquitous Toronto ‘ashtray’ treeboxes, Yonge Street address, and ‘416’ area code on the signage) is attributed to New York.
