Toronto’s shit smells of roses, says Dr. Florida
In case you missed it, the weekend Globe featured the latest in its series titled “Richard Florida Ingratiates Himself.” In each installment, Florida heaps his brainy-sounding flattery upon a different area of Toronto while appearing photographed in its midst with a shit-eating grin.
First it was Kensington Market, then Dundas Square, now the U of T, which he praises for being nondescript—sorry, I mean “seamless.”
The description strikes me as either an insult (“That was a campus I just walked through? I thought it was just a few low-rise office towers amid some churches”) or a pleasant fib. If anything, the U of T’s border streets (Bloor, Spadina, Queen’s Park, College) do an excellent job of signaling to passersby that there’s nothing much to see inside the quad—it’s a subtle but highly effective cloistering. But don’t listen to a sourpuss like me. Just read the final paragraph of the story, in which Florida—pardon, that’s Dr. Florida to you and me—lays on the positivity thick and brown as Nutella:
“I wonder,” he says, standing in front of the main gates leading into King’s College Road, “if having the University of Toronto here in the centre of the city, creating a kind of meritocratic, open-minded, pluralistic mentality, didn’t have something to do with Toronto’s emergence as one of the most tolerant, open-minded, accepting and inclusive cities in the world.”
Meanwhile, look forward to the following future installments in the series:
•Dr. Florida shops at Bad Boy. His take, in a nutshell: Every city has a discount appliance retailer, but nobody has this appliance retailer. If you can tune out the shrieking pitchmen, it’s seamless. •Dr. Florida visits the Don Jail. His take: Inmates represent a key segment of the population whose creative capacity isn’t being tapped, despite the fact that prison populations can be so remarkably diverse. If you stare at your feet so that you can’t see the bars on the windows or the guards on their smoke breaks, it’s seamless. • Dr. Florida at the Ashbridges Bay Wastewater Treatment Plant. His take: Even the most creative city produces effluent , but Toronto’s is such a tolerant, open-minded and inclusive waste stream. And when you think of how we send it back into Lake Ontario, which is where we also source the water that quenches our life’s thirst, it’s seamless. What greater testament to Toronto as a waterfront city?
No Ivory Tower on This Campus: Source [Globe and Mail]
