Building Blocks

For most of Canada’s first hundred years, “neighbourhood” wasn’t commonly used to describe the urban places where people lived. Instead, impersonal, technical terms like “residential districts” and “residential areas” prevailed in newspapers and government reports.

“Neighbourhood,” which puts the focus on people as opposed to land divisions, only got popular in the 1970s, as the increasingly high proportion of homeowners in various areas started mobilizing to block intrusions: Freeways, for instance. Grandiose slum-clearance plans. Industrial plants. It was also adopted by local groups previously known as “ratepayer associations” to establish a new image for their activities, including efforts to keep out certain people, perhaps especially low-income renters who didn’t speak English.

That language change is one of the telling details in Richard Harris’s latest rigorous examination of the life of cities, The Rise of the Neighbourhood in Canada, 1880s–2020s. Harris, a professor emeritus of urban geography at McMaster University, has spent his career pondering the role cities play in shaping daily life, the dynamics of the suburbs, and the rise of the home improvement industry, among many other things. His writing has been a guide for me in my thirty years of reporting on cities, mostly Vancouver, as he constantly provides reminders that people forge their own paths, separate from what official policies and conventional advice might try to force them into, when it comes to choosing where and how to make their homes.

Harris’s book curates a huge range of past academic research, mostly from Canada and the United States, along with memoirs, novels, and short stories in an attempt to suss out how neighbourhoods really work. Do they affect the futures of the children who grow up in them? (Yes.) Do they provide a site for deep social connections? (Sometimes, but not always.) Are they rigidly segregated by income? (Only at the two extremes of very rich and very poor, at least in Canada.)

This methodology provides an ideal complement to Messy Cities: Why We Can’t Plan Everything. Using a completely different approach, this book’s forty-two short essays, written by an eclectic group of activists, planners, academics, and well-known urban-issues writers, focus mostly on personal, organic, on-the-ground descriptions of the ways neighbourhoods work in Toronto: How one created a “gorgeous landlocked oasis” out of a vacant lot at the start of the COVID‑19 pandemic. The veggie grannies of West Chinatown. The banquet halls, primarily serving the South Asian community but not exclusively, that have become important cultural conduits even though they’re usually bland buildings in the middle of suburban industrial areas.

Both these books are useful sources for the legions of us (there are legions, right?) who are fascinated, angered, and excited by Canadian cities — while worried yet optimistic about how they are evolving and what the solutions might be to make them better, as more and more people call them home. And both prompt reflection about our neighbourhoods, however we define them.

Harris says we typically form attachments most intensely on our block because, although there’s no guarantee it will happen, we’re more likely to engage with those just down the street than with others around the corner. We’re less intimately linked to the larger “residential area,” the institutional unit, or the district that city planners and policy makers often use to identify neighbourhoods. While that’s not especially surprising, it would have been interesting to learn (from either book) about any research or commentary on why some streets seem to see more neighbourly connections than others. Is it just chance? The product of a couple of active people with inspiring energy? Or are there particular conditions that prompt more social exchanges?

I’ve wondered about this when it comes to my own block — a jumble of old Edwardians, new duplexes, Vancouver specials, and a few architecturally undefinable habitations that look as if they were built by people who’d never designed or possibly even seen a house before. One guy keeps chickens. A place filled with young, constantly changing renters has maintained a Little Free Library for more than a decade. An artist constructs dioramas with plastic action figurines in her front yard. On my block, Halloween is a giant hours-long party, and I enjoy chatting with people from elsewhere who appear at my front door. But the next street over is much quieter, with fewer visible connections.

It’s a sign of the times that I so often think about such things, Harris would probably argue. But I believe that caring about your “neighbourhood” is more than just some liberal boomer obsession. Harris cites many studies showing that neighbourhoods impact everything from health to jobs to schools. Those places where people have strong links to their neighbours — whether that happens because the area is dominated by an ethnic group with lots of bonds or for some other reason — reap benefits. “Enclaves illustrate a general point,” Harris writes. “Residents with connections to many people in their neighbourhoods have better health.” The effects of very poor districts are especially terrible for kids.

The Messy Cities essays aren’t as scholarly or rigorous as Harris’s book, but they do bring to vivid life what it means to be a part of a connected community. One entry that has stayed in my mind describes a future Toronto neighbourhood where a young child is able to walk home from school alone, get a bit lost, but end up finding his way regardless. In “Conjay’s First Walk Home,” set in 2035, the architects Tura Cousins Wilson and Shane Laptiste imagine a world in which a boy in grade 2 navigates using “the sights and sounds and smells of Little Jamaica, his thriving community.”

A few essays fall into what Harris cautiously identifies as potentially over-romanticized views of poor neighbourhoods. While there may be a stereotypical It’s a Wonderful Life community out there — where everyone helps each other — that is not the standard. Harris notes that the research shows that poorer neighbourhoods often have very high rates of transience, making it hard for people to form long-term bonds, and that poorer households don’t necessarily have the “C’mon in, everybody!” vibe that is often portrayed.

Other Messy Cities essays, some of which venture outside of Toronto with forays into Mexico City, Tokyo, and the West Bank, are focused on blueprints for small but important changes. Two standouts are Shari Kasman’s “A Beach like No Other” and “The Ballet of the Parking Lot,” by Brendan Stewart and Daniel Rotsztain.

A multidisciplinary artist and the author of Galleria: The Mall That Time Forgot, Kasman offers a description of how locals took over a vacant, fenced-off gravel lot in Toronto’s Bloordale and turned it into a community hangout and recreation space for about a year early in the pandemic. It became a popular spot that got kudos, although never city money or official approval. “So, the beach was an illegal guerrilla project that wasn’t technically allowed to exist,” Kasman writes, “but was permitted to exist, or was tolerated, yet it was admired by authorities, though it could not be supported financially, due to its status of being on the wrong side of the law.”

Stewart, a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Guelph, and Rotsztain, an illustrator and urban geographer, offer a slightly more formal discussion of how strip-mall parking lots can be transformed — they call it “community quilting”— into third places, where people short on parks and other gathering spaces can congregate. These experimental spaces have managed to get some cooperation from landlords and the city, and the concept looks to be longer lasting. “The strip malls of Toronto cover over 1,400 hectares of land and are located within a five-minute walk of more than 900,000 people, over 350,000 of whom live within the City-designated Neighbourhood Improvement Areas, which are lower-income and underserved by public and private amenities,” Stewart and Rotsztain note. The temporary installations, by their account, have been successful — used by many and appreciated by business owners.

Despite the success of one transformed parking lot in Scarborough, in the summer of 2023, the project ran into one big problem: garbage. The Bloordale Beach creators had also encountered this challenge. The Scarborough organizers responded “more or less overnight” with short‑term and longer-term solutions alike. Even good ideas can have some negative spillover, this example reminds us. The trick is to wrestle the issues to the ground promptly through practical, community-based strategies.

Messy Cities closes with a conclusion by the editors, who celebrate how “messy urbanism can propose new forms of inclusion and engagement in the alienating spaces of the twenty-first-century city.” It would have been great if they had included an even larger variety of concrete examples showing how grassroots organizations or renegade professors or whoever has successfully tackled projects aimed at making better places for everyone. Many of the essays read like memoirs or travelogues. Some are calls to action. Others lack specifics.

Harris also calls for change in his final reflections, noting that cities and neighbourhoods are becoming more unequal, increasingly filled with groups of people who talk past each other instead of with each other. His are the big, expensive solutions — not guerrilla fixes. We need good schools everywhere, for one thing, and more alternatives to home ownership. Both would reduce the frenzied competition to buy homes — and to buy them near the “good” schools. “Such measures would reduce the financial significance of neighbourhoods while increasing their social role,” he writes, “as residents find schools more inclusive and denser neighbourhoods more friendly.”

That’s a big ask, but if guerrilla urbanists and the public policy nerds who support them continue demonstrating small successes, maybe they can start moving the needle.