The Ever-Expanding City

In The Limits of Boundaries: Why City-Regions Cannot Be Self-Governing, Andrew Sancton has written a clear, short, well-researched and logical book. He concludes that, despite becoming increasingly important as the sources of innovation and wealth in our society, “cities in Western liberal democracies will not and cannot be self-governing. Self-government requires that there be a territory delimited by official boundaries. For cities, the boundaries will never be static, will never be acceptable to all, and will always be contested. Boundaries fatally limit the capacity of cities to be self-governing.”

So that’s it for the “cities movement”—the argument is over? We are condemned forever to a governmental geography hopelessly at odds with the country’s social and economic realities? Not so fast, for three reasons: because boundaries, while important, are not the most significant aspect of a city’s powers; because regardless of the difficulties, finding an effective form of government for the most important economic and population groupings in our country is a challenge that is not going away; and because, in a post-crash world, Canada’s best route to economic recovery lies in its cities.

Any debate on these questions presents a number of tricky definitional issues that need attention. What is a city? What does self-governing mean? Sancton does a scholar’s service to define these terms. Cities are not the municipalities of Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver; he sees them most usefully defined in terms of their extended areas of settlement and influence, established in population terms by Statistics Canada or functionally by commuting, economic or social activity patterns. Each measure has, however, a different geography, making Sancton’s point about the very practical difficulties of putting a single line on a map. Even conventional urban government functions, such as water supply, garbage collection or transit, do not comfortably align. On the margins it is not at all clear who’s in or who’s out—is Kitchener/Waterloo part of the greater Toronto region or not?

And Sancton finds further difficulty as these dynamic and unruly cities just keep growing, one generation’s boundary too small for the next. Indeed, the best delimiter of the modern global city might be that space within an hour’s travel time of its international airport. Or further still: Richard Florida would have his city-regions made up of a constellation of adjacent cities, sometimes in different countries. And maybe there are city-regions of the spirit, as important as more utilitarian constructions. Perhaps Canada should dispense with the census and poll the urban lines within which a majority would vote for gun control. Will there ever come a day when the hapless territory of Leaf Nation will rise again? How big would that be?

These very real imperfections do not, however, negate the need for a boundary. In the largest working definition of the Toronto region, urban services are currently provided by 110 local and regional municipalities with defined boundaries and by a plethora of agencies and special purpose bodies with only approximately coincident geography. There’s the GTAA (Greater Toronto Airports Authority), the GTMA (Greater Toronto Marketing Alliance), the GTTA (Greater Toronto Transportation Authority, now Metrolinx), the TRCA (Toronto and Region Conservation Authority), the TRRA (Toronto Region Research Alliance) and TRIEC (Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council); and the Greater Golden Horseshoe encompasses regional planning. I could go on, and this death by acronyms is replicated in every major Canadian city. What they collectively demonstrate is a virtual government providing essential functions at a regional scale that is aching for an agreed territory, within which to cure the democratic deficit that plagues its effectiveness at present.

It is easy to cite cases where city boundaries do not fit the function, or where power is shared within a boundary, and Sancton has a book full of examples. Indeed, he can only find one—Madrid, “the exception which proves the rule,” where form, function and autonomy harmoniously coincide. Undoubtedly, it is hard to define the regional city, but it is not impossible. The Golden Commission on the Greater Toronto Area in the late 1990s found a “good enough” boundary and separated civic functions into “good enough” upper-and lower-tier clusters. Anne Golden showed the way to getting the answer about 85 percent right, which is about as good as it gets for any governance issue. And, yes, cities will keep on sprawling—partly, it has to be said, as a consequence of the absence of strong city-regional government—but that can be fixed when the need for a fix becomes overwhelming. I differ from Sancton in his view of the rigidity of boundaries. Cities seem to me to have remarkable capacity for annexation whenever they work up sufficient appetite.

As Sancton notes, the Golden commission recommendations were ignored; indeed, almost their opposite was created after Ontario’s Harris government forced amalgamations. Two conclusions can be drawn: Sancton is correct in finding that the balkanization of local government creates almost irresolvable political problems for anyone trying to redraw boundaries or reallocate responsibilities. Too many entrenched interests—all politics is local. But a second finding is also evident: that a sufficiently motivated provincial government can change that geography and functional allocation on a whim, regardless of stripe. In March of this year, the McGuinty government chopped off the heads of all its local politicians with respect to regional transit responsibility and established an all-powerful agency. All it lacks—and it is a critical lack—is a democratically elected regional government to be in charge.

Why is such a government necessary? Why can’t the imperfect, if colourful, quilt of local, regional and provincial bodies, some elected, some not, fill the functional and political space? Why can’t, as Sancton gruesomely suggests, local governments get smaller, not bigger, and leave everything else to benign provincial and federal responsibility? Simply put, because they don’t do it very well, because the gritty sand of localism and the heavy hand of top-down authority seize up the machinery of effective performance far worse than the seemingly impossible foundational politics of a city-region. Elected two-tier regional government served the citizens of Metropolitan Toronto and Greater London very well, such that in both cases their powers had to be put back together after their assassinations, London with a far more impressive version of its former self and Toronto with its own new act, a patch job still waiting for effective reform.

Regional government serves the lucky residents of Vancouver, Hamburg, Madrid and even New York City pretty well today for all their boundary and functional confusions. Anyone who reads the history of their creation and operation can agree how messy and imperfect they were and are—something seemingly characteristic of the half-formed political culture of cities—but they do get the big region-wide jobs of transit, water and sewers done in a way almost impossible for unmandated city-regions. And now a pressing new national agenda is emerging, of successful immigrant settlement, sustainable development and poverty reduction, of maintaining civil peace and promoting post-manufacturing economic development, all of which city-regions are likely best equipped to implement. Of course, they will not do it without a strong national and provincial taxation and regulatory context, but a lot of the doing of national business should best devolve to city regions if we are to have an effective federation for the 21st century. And those regions will need representational legitimacy.

Sancton rightly points out that no city-region can be absolute master of its geography. But then, as we have soberingly learned in the post-crash era, nor can any country. Big questions of urban taxing powers and responsibilities do have to be resolved for mature city-regions to evolve in Canada although there are none for which precedents do not exist elsewhere in the urban world. Some initiatives, such as the economically and environmentally essential need for regional road pricing and integrated transit operation, can probably only be introduced by an elected regional government. For many city-regions, a referendum on whether to tax themselves for urban infrastructure could be the defining act of big-city sovereignty.

Is what we are talking about a city-state? Is it a province? Put those questions in the attic, along with the other irresolvables of the Canadian constitution, like what you would do with the “rest of the province” after city-regions had taken over more powers, a question more readily solvable in practice than in theory. Sancton dislikes the vague slipperiness of debate on these issues, but just as Quebec’s increasing role has thrived on ambiguity, so too can the cities. City-regions are and will be what they are, only more so. Will the big cities end up at federal-provincial conferences? In some undefined capacity in the near future, quite likely. Paul Martin promised as much in his brief tenure. But please, no declarations of independence, no secession; that’s all antique 20th-century political language anyway. Certainly no currency, ambassadors or seats at the United Nations; Sancton is right there. Although, fascinatingly, it could be argued that Canada’s major cities, with their increasing number of bilateral exchanges and memberships of other world city associations, have far more formal and semi-formal foreign relations than do most provinces. Add to that the remarkable international significance of urban immigrant networks and of their remittances and you find a virtual foreign policy almost as important as Canada’s official international stance.

Toronto is variously the 10th to 13th most significant city in the world according to recognized international rankings. In the same, somewhat accidental way that Canada’s post-crash banks have become global exemplars of financial probity, so Canada’s cities are increasingly recognized as the most successful places on earth—not something the rest of Canada likes to dwell upon, although it is way past time to get over that mean-spiritedness. The major cities are the healthiest bits of social and economic equipment the country has. How they are best governed, how our colonial governance geography evolves to see them and the nation prosper, is not a parochial issue but our best path to national success and relevance in the 21st century. The political expression of the underlying social and economic imperatives toward urbanization and the increasing centrality of big city government in the lives of their citizens will not stop just because you can’t draw a perfect line around them.

Sancton apologizes for being an academic and for living in London, Ontario, both of which he suspects may make him less than a full supporter of the cities agenda. He should not, for he has written a book that forces anyone advancing the role of cities to think hard about what they are doing. He knows a lot about a lot of cities and has produced a book I know is solidly founded because I found myself spending so much time trying to demonstrate the opposite. It is also wonderfully well written, building blocks of argument set in sparse, tight prose, no word too many.

Sancton indicates his book was inspired by the work and thinking of Alan Broadbent, whose recent book on the role of cities in Canada, Urban Nation: Why We Need to Give Power Back to the Cities to Make Canada Strong, sets out a compelling, provocative vision for a Canada organized according to its future, not its past. Indeed, The Limits of Boundaries reads almost as an apologia to the author’s being unable to support Broadbent’s initiatives. Broadbent also has a presence in the second book on cities covered in this review, The Shape of the Suburbs: Understanding Toronto’s Sprawl, John Sewell’s history of the past century in the shape of that city.

John Sewell, a former mayor of Toronto, has been a central figure in the debate over its role and governance and a strong voice for the distinct form and culture of the central city. The Shape of the Suburbs is, however, no polemic—indeed, he suppresses his own significant role in the amalgamation wars into the third person—but an attempt to understand the history of Toronto’s dynamic growth and in particular of the suburban sprawl so visible in the past half century. His careful research into the decisions behind that sprawl—the politics of sewers, annexation, freeways and transit investment and the remarkable personalities involved—adds to a growing academic interest in how our contemporary cities came to be the way they are. He tells the depressing story of declining suburban densities, lost agricultural land and the relentless subversion of any plans for doing better. The book documents the eternal tension between local and regional functions in city government, demonstrating both the truth and the shortcomings of Sancton’s argument of the limits of boundaries.

Sewell’s thesis is that the forces of suburban expansion have always trumped the values and qualities of a more urban life— that suburban politicians, and their allies in the province and the development industry, were always able to set aside any plan for more efficient and compact growth. He posits, sometimes to the point of caricature, a set of urban values in continuing conflict with suburban culture, and always overcome.

No urban planner should sleep easy given the past half century of planning, but I share neither this easy city/suburb dualism nor Sewell’s prelapsarian view of the central city. The cherished neighbourhoods of that central city were suburbs once, and Toronto has arguably done a better job of integrating successive waves of development into a larger urban vision than almost any other North American city. Its sprawl has been wasteful, inefficient and ugly, but less so than most places, and it is much more fixable. It was the free choice of too many to be simply dismissed as misguided or malevolent. Indeed, such disdain for the suburbs has hindered the emergence of a regional city consensus. The inner-city Bloc Toronto just gets up people’s noses, no less than their Québécois counterparts, leaving the exploiting of city/suburb divisions easy pickings for provincial and federal governments and local scoundrels.

There is much more to Sewell’s book than such conclusions, however. As a compilation of the historical record, it is invaluable. All the plans are there, from the creation of Metro Toronto in the 1950s to today’s “Places to Grow” regional plan. So are their professional and political authors, from Lorne Cumming to David Caplan, and the key players in between, providing an essential read on how decisions about urban form are made in real time. And although it is probably too early to write the history of the mid-1990s battles between the Harris government and the City of Toronto, Sewell’s documentary account will form an important part of the historical record.

Sancton’s crisp challenge to the cities agenda and Sewell’s detailed documentation of the real-politik of sprawl provide solid information and strong conclusions in the debate about the role and form of cities in Canada, an issue far less local than Sancton would have us think and far more regional than Sewell would have us believe.