Archive for category Toronto
A Time-Lapse Trip Around Toronto
Via great Toronto blog The Intrepid, a time-lapse video of a drive around the city that’s really worth a watch. Refreshingly, it doesn’t focus on the classic skyline shots, and instead seems to stay around the west end. Enjoy!
By the way, for those of you who missed it on Twitter, this is apparently a relatively accurate rendering of what the city’s skyline will look like in a few years.
Mondoville and Required Reading: Toronto’s Gawker and Fimoculous?
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology, Toronto on September 11, 2009
Recently, after years of scattered complaining, the Toronto tech world finally got the cover story it deserved: a stinging indictment in NOW Magazine that suggested that, despite a wealth of advantages, the city has failed to capitalise on any of its tech potential. While Silicon Valley and Alley are creating jobs, services and new methods to empower people, Toronto lags.
The issue is obviously complicated: it encompasses infrastructure, government policy, the university system and, some would argue, the lack of a robust entrepreneurial culture in Canada. But one aspect that I believe gets overlooked is the lack of any central tech-culture websites to consolidate and focus all the energy here. While the high use of Twitter in Toronto has done a lot to cement a sense of a ‘tech community’, we still have a long way to go, and let’s be honest: Scrawled in Wax ain’t gonna’ help.
There might be reason for hope, though. Two recent happenings – the launches of Mondoville and Required Reading – seem to augur good things for developing a web/blogger culture in Toronto.
Mondoville, which is looking pretty good, was launched by Toronto media gadfly Marc Weisblott. Tweeting under the name @scroll, he relentlessly critiques Toronto media’s inability to react quickly enough to the web or create new media entities. While it’s true that he can be a bit of an asshole sometimes (sorry Marc, it’s true), he’s doing a heck of a lot more good than most, and he has a solid understanding of the web and its culture.
Mondoville is very Gawker-like. It’s pop, focused on celebrity, but smart and snarky, and carries with it that hard-to-describe ‘web vibe’ – irony, wit, pastiche etc. The design is clean, and the homepage has a tracker for popular trending Twitter topics in Toronto, which adds to the sense that it’s a ‘destination site’. The only real critique I would level at it is that it follows the “let’s start another blog” model. I would have liked to see some form of melding social-networking and blog a la Gdgt, or at least a new-ish approach like Mediaite.
Still, the more important thing is that it’s a place for web-savvy Torontonians to see their city’s place in a larger culture. So frequently, our conception of where we live is dependent upon its representation in the public sphere. And how many movies or novels or games are about Toronto? Almost none, right? So I think that’s a bigger deal than it sounds. I often wonder if Toronto so frequently feels like the city that almost-could because there is a sense Toronto doesn’t exist in global culture the way it should. More to the point, public visions of local culture give us something to share – something that we desperately lack.
And often, the things we share are the things we read. That’s what I love about Kate Carraway’s new Required Reading blog on Eye. Required Reading is a link blog that passes on cool, smart interesting things around the web that Carraway has recently discovered. But the thing I like about it isn’t the links themselves. Rather, somewhat like Rex Sorgatz’s Fimoculous, it’s the vibe produced by the aggregated collection of links, combined with the witty commentary, that makes it great. It’s like a snapshot of contemporary culture. Posts on one day will contain links to Douglass Rushkoff on economics and an amazing piece on the rebirth of Hamilton; on another, we get links to stories on rapper Drake, or a smart, almost implied take on modern feminism. Plus, because Carraway isn’t a ‘web insider’, you get charming revelations like finding a blog about some mommy named Dooce, who’s “apparently very popular”. It’s great.
More to the point, it consolidates the stuff that smart, savvy, privileged people in Toronto are reading. It puts it somewhere. And it’s consistently good. To me, that’s a big deal for a city so full of clever, talented people that seems to be searching for an identity. And what I hope is that it’s a start – or expansion – of a blogger, techie community in this city that I’ve decided to call home.
I’d be curious to hear what other Torontonians think. If you get a chance to look at the sites, hit the comments and let me know.
Razing Green Spaces to Revitalise The Suburbs
Posted by Nav in Cultural Theory, Diaspora, Immigration, Toronto on June 26, 2009
That, apparently, is what’s going on in Amsterdam. Its Slotervaart neighbourhood has been plagued by poverty, crime and ghettoisation for years now. But, as my fave columnist Doug Saunders explains, part of the problem is precisely the open design of the suburbs, that has made the area “a lonely expanse of bleak concrete buildings separated by big, frightening, empty spaces, and no connection to the wider world.” To fix it, they’re making the suburb more like downtown: getting rid of the open spaces, building high-density high-rises and giving tax breaks to young entrepreneurs to come set up businesses there. It’s an interesting re-think of the problem of the suburbs, one that reverses the trend of having big-box stores and other chains move into downtown cores and, instead, exports the indie spirit from downtown to the burbs.
And while my primary focus on this blog has always been technology and the web, over the past year or so it’s become increasingly apparent to me how important sub/urban spaces are to creativity, productivity and one’s quality of life. It’s easy sometimes to forget that, for all our rhetoric about the ethereal, diaphanous virtual, physical spaces still significantly impact our lives. And after moving back into downtown Toronto after a rather unpleasant 2 year stint in the suburbs, the things that quickly struck me about downtown living again were:
- Higher population density means it’s far easier to find niche interests that are more difficult to sustain in the suburbs, whether vegan restaurants, poetry readings or organic coffee shops.
- The proximity and frequent overlap of residential and business/entertainment areas means that people can engage in cultural activities far more easily. Put more plainly, when you just have to walk for five minutes to see a show or grab a pint, you do it more often.
- Multi-income neighbourhoods, where broke students, young immigrant families and wealthier, established individuals all live near to each other, facilitate mixing much more readily than large, more homogeneous neighbourhoods in the suburbs.
Yet, beyond all these obvious, optimistic statements, the thing that has always troubled me about the sub/urban split is the manner in which moving from the fringes of a city to its centre has always carried some rather uncomfortable cultural metaphors. The closer you get to downtown, the more difficult it is to engage in things that don’t fit into a ‘mainstream lifestyle’, and often, ‘to move downtown’ is also to move into the cultural mainstream, a mentality that fits far too closely with a politics of assimilation. In one sense, assimilation is both necessary and good. But when it is underpinned by a hierarchy of cultures that assert the superiority of a host country’s values, that’s when it starts to get messy and rough on people who ‘don’t fit’. It’s that kind of exclusionary discourse that encourages people to say where there are more people like them.
What I’d like to see is an emphasis on not only making the suburbs more ‘downtown-y’ but also to preserve some of their cultural difference in the transition – i.e. that temples, outdoor markets and dance clubs (random examples) be included alongside plans for retails centres and generic arts facilities. We shouldn’t only strive to make the suburbs like downtown; we also need to export the delightful cultural hybrids we produce in the suburbs to all those hipsters living downtown.
Find Toronto Homes with Google Maps Mashup
Although the main focus of this blog is the overlap of technology and the socio-cultural, sometimes I feel like we Canadians are missing out on the Web 2.0 wave – with every cool mashup coming out of San Fransisco, it seems that every hip new site is geared towards Americans. To that end, I just wanted to quickly point to a post on blogTO about a new Google Maps mashup from housing123.com. The site takes listings from the Toronto MLS and melds them with the ease and visual prettiness of Google Maps – definitely a useful tool for those looking for housing in this incredibly affordable city (no sarcasm there, I swear). The interface is spare, with no settings for price range yet, which would definitely be useful. Still – you can select the number of rooms/bathrooms etc. and whether you are looking for a town home, condo or a house. Overall, it’s some nice, clean work. If you’re in the market, check it out.
Oh, by-the-by, blogTO is a great Toronto blog for you t.dot hipsters out there.
