By Roger Keil

Kat Cizek’s NFB documentary One Millionth Tower won the Heritage Toronto Award 2012  in the media category on October 9, 2012. This is a major accomplishment, one in a long line of awards and prizes that the NFB’s Highrise project has already raked in. The project is relevant in many ways but noteworthy in the current debate in Toronto about city building for one important reason. “Highrise” sheds a light on the thousands of residential towers in Canada’s largest city and in many more cities around the world. These concrete monuments, most of them built between Word War 2 and the 1980s are home to hundreds of millions of human residents in East and West, North and South. What is remarkable about many of them is their suburban location. In Toronto, for example, the majority of the 1000 and more highrises that give shelter to hundreds of thousands of the city’s diverse inhabitants are in the so-called inner suburbs, the in-between city  or, as it has been called the “third city,” between the glamour zones of the suburban sprawl and the core of the downtown. In this in-between city, massive modernist housing areas were built as both solution to housing need and social engineering project. A better city: light, transparent, green, airy, equal. These projects fell in disrepair and disrepute often soon after their inception but they remain major features of metropolitan landscapes today. Fortunately, a new generation of architects, academics and residents have taken up the cause of reclaiming the urbanity of those spaces and to regenerate them in collaboration with residents and neighbors. Even the fierce resistance of the current mayoral administration in Toronto to the social and environmental reform project has not been able to kill this worthy endeavor  and the "guerillas in the bureaucracy" and among the professional classes are working tirelessly and quietly to improve the lot of the tower communities across the city’s expansive suburbs. It is this work and the sophisticated “Highrise” project that got an award tonight.

While important and worthy of celebration in its own right, this moment also makes me reflect on something larger and contextual. The big news in urbanist Toronto in the early days of October 2012 have been the proposed massive rebuilding of a stretch of King Street in downtown Toronto via a cooperation of Toronto entrepreneur David Mirvish and architect Frank Gehry. After the stunning tower models -- more sculpture than buildings -- were revealed to the public, the professional critics of all things urban and architecture unanimously lauded the design and the plans in unusually gushing language. Chris Hume wrote in the Toronto Star that the “Mirvish and Gehry partnership will transform Toronto.”  Lisa Rochon of the Globe and Mail admonishes possible naysayers sternly in these words: “My message to marketing agents and real-estate agents is to back off. Let an architecture of difference take place, or condemn Toronto to a generic, forgettable skyline.” And her colleague Marcus Gee prompts the meek and modest Torontonians to “Think big for once”. In the mainstream press, one dissenting voice, Rosie DiManno, wrote a manifesto style call to “resist”: “It’s all gloss and greed, masquerading as art. Resist… Don’t mistake it for a gift from the gods of urban metamorphosis".

I must admit that I have been a huge fan of Frank Gehry’s work since I first laid eyes on his Venice Beach House  in the 1980s. I met the man a number of times and once acted as his interpreter. He is a wonderful human being and a great artist, a transformer of form and function who has few equals. His Guggenheim Bilbao is the most stunning modern building I have seen in my lifetime and perhaps the most important one built during that time. I also don’t mind tall buildings. But in this case, I throw my lot in with DiManno’s rejection. It is not about Gehry but I think his talents and ingenuity could be put to work more fruitfully.

Indeed, one wonders why a city so full of condominiums and gleaming office towers in its downtown core and along its “changing waterfront” (see the transformation here) wants more of the same while it lets its existing towers in the flatlands of the suburbs fall into oblivion and despair. Why, one might wonder, do we need Gehry where we already have so much wealth, art and power concentrated in a small section of the urban region downtown. To what purpose, one might ask, does Toronto need to wail once more in bouts of inferiority complexes about what a great city it could be if it only… (forgetting, of course, that Bilbao, for example, when the Guggenheim was built, was a declining rustbelt town with little hope while Toronto is a booming global city in a barreling postindustrial economy).

This, then, needs to be kept in mind. The poverty of the flatlands north, east and west of the wealthy and white downtown core will not go away. There is no automatic trickle-down effect of urbanity (a questionable urbanity to boot) from the centre to the periphery. Quite the opposite is true. Where spectacular projects are planned and built, most often the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. There is no other way in this neoliberal land economy that builds our cities. The great and sadly missed late Neil Smith wrote about “gentrification as a global urban strategy” in which middle class revanchism, neoliberalized local state action and global capital movements create a new urban landscape of exclusion and social segregation.  In this environment, the inner city and its new middle classes play a central role and, partly at least, steal the thunder of the sprawling suburbs of the past few decades. The most important part of this process is certainly its failsafe capacity to lead to eviction and displacement. It is in this light that the Gehry-Mirvish project has to be seen. A city that is already under strong criticism for failing its poor  continues its unimpeded trip towards building shiny “citadels” while leaving the “ghetto” unattended. There is no middle here, just polarization. No city of equal opportunity is built,  but a city of extremes.

Let us return now to One Millionth Tower and to the reason why it is important that it was made and that it exists in the public domain where it wins prize after prize and earns accolade after accolade. What if, I ask myself, David Mirvish had hired Frank Gehry to rebuild some of the tower neighbourhoods in the suburbs instead of adding to the forest of skyscrapers downtown? What if Mirvish sold all his high art and used some of the proceeds to finance art and architecture for the masses in the sprawling expanse of this immigrant city? What if the chorus of urbanist cheerleaders had the courage to demand the urbanization of the in-between city instead of the spectacularization of the downtown core? What if…