Toronto housing activists Daniel Rotsztain and Mike Strulberg have hit on a fun method of grass-roots protest with a very serious message. They have been posting up convincing-looking development proposal signs outside some of Toronto's most iconic and beloved buildings. The fake signs - complete with City of Toronto logos, artists' renditions of the outrageous and absurd building proposals, and convincing legalistic real-estate jargon descriptions of the projects - have got people talking (at last) about what kind of city we want to live in.
For example, there is one outside Old City Hall, calling attention to plans for a 90-storey condo development to be perched on top of the venerable old Romanesque Revival building. There is another showing a 50-storey residential building nestled within the circular wings of the iconic modernist building of New City Hall (with the existing building being converted for "commercial uses"). Or a 30-storey residential tower connected to the whimsical Gothic Revival castle of Casa Loma (the old structure even being relocated a little to acommodated the new tower). Or a 42-storey addition to be built on top of the current 76-storey condo tower recently completed at 1 Bloor Street East.
Because these faux development proposals are so convincing, many people have been taking them completely serìously, despite the absurdity of the suggested developments, and making complaints and objections to the city about the proposals.
And this is all part of the aim of the campaign: to point out the fact that there are so many inappropriate new developments being built recently in downtown Toronto, particularly those that purport to incorporate or repurpose existing heritage buildings, that these kinds of absurdities do not immediately seem ridiculous and comical to many people. (One particular example of just this kind of inappropriate development that sticks out for me is the new tower development that was recently built over and around the 19th century Royal Canadian Military Institute building on University Avenue. There are, though, many other examples of this kind of façadism in Toronto).
The creators of the campaign stress that they are not anti-development, or even against the need to increase population density in the city centre in order to avoid urban sprawl and thoughtless development of the suburbs and green-belt lands. Rather, they are cautioning against "concentrated hyper-density", and particularly against the inappropriate usurping of the few heritage buildings that still remain intact in Toronto. They are also, in the process, making a protest against the old style of development proposal signage that largely presents the propsals as a fait accompli, without engaging the public or encouraging their input.
How about a mid-air residential appendage clinging to the outside of the CN Tower, anyone?
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