Cities are key to Canada’s wealth. Here’s how Jane Jacobs still has solutions to make them better - Toronto Star

Former Toronto mayor John Sewell holding a picture of himself and urbanist Jane Jacobs.

John Sewell was Mayor of Toronto from 1978 – 1980 and knew Jane Jacobs well from his time at City Hall and for years to follow. He was recently awarded the Jane Jacobs Prize for his years of activism and civic leadership.

As this moment of political and economic rupture, I wish Canada’s political leaders would pay more attention to Jane Jacobs. More than 40 years ago, she clearly identified an important change in the global economy, with the title of her book “Cities and the Wealth of Nations.” Jane recognized that the economy of the nineteenth century, based on agriculture and natural resources, had been superceded by an economy based on cities.

Cities bring people together, often quite randomly, to share knowledge and ideas and capital, leading to significant innovation and a vibrant economy which, if managed with intelligent public responses, can support a host of social needs. Cities can integrate people from many countries, people with different cultures and beliefs, often with surprisingly harmonious results. Cities produce a number of artistic and political cultures, providing a welcome environment for all kinds of people.

Jane found that city design matters. They need a reasonable density that both minimizes public costs per capita and enables people to meet and interact with others.

She saw how short blocks were much better than big blocks, again to foster diverse kinds of businesses and activities, and so people would feel comfortable walking along them.

These four ideas above were all in aid of ensuring diversity — a mix of different people with different talents, interests, cultures, beliefs and languages — an essential for a successful and vibrant life. Nature writer Barry Lopez echoed Jane’s observations: “Diversity is a condition necessary for life. Diversity creates the biological tensioning that makes life in general vigorous and sustainable. It’s diversity that ensures perpetuity.”

Most of the world intuitively agrees with Jane’s observations. No one decides to take a holiday in a low density suburb: too boring, none of the diversity of a good city.

Jane saw that successful cities produce an extraordinary amount of wealth. They do that, she argued, by replacing those goods and services they import with those they can source locally. At this precarious juncture in our economic life, Canada would be well served to redeploy her import replacement strategy and devise policies to help local companies to produce goods and services now imported into the country.

As resonant today as they were half a century ago, Jane’s ideas are critical to Canada’s future. But here’s the problem. Canada’s constitution, conceived two centuries ago, gives no serious place to cities. The wealth they produce in tax revenue is consumed almost entirely by provincial and federal governments, with only 10 per cent left for the City to reinvest. To create adequate housing and good transit systems — essential underpinnings — cities must rely on handouts from other governments, what Jane described as “opportunistic beggary.” Healthy, productive cities require child care, public education, immigrant services. But their capacity to fund their own needs is severely constrained.

Further, city governments are generally far more progressive than their provincial and federal counterparts. My colleague David Miller heads C40, an organization of international cities, and he has shown how cities want to address climate change, but are often hobbled by senior governments, just as Toronto has been prevented by the province, to use one climate-related example, from continuing its very successful and innovative green roof program.

As former NDP MP Charlie Angus says, today is a time of monsters — Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, Xi. We often feel demeaned and sometimes powerless in the world in which we live, given what a mess national governments have made of things. The place for action is at the city level — empowering people to take on the problems of our time. We can begin to defeat the monsters here at home, where we live, if we work together in groups which interest us to create and enact the new agendas desperately needed if the values we hold are to survive. Jane certainly believed that cities held the key to a successful future for us all. 

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John Sewell was Mayor of Toronto from 1978 – 1980 and knew Jane Jacobs well from his time at City Hall and for years to follow. He was recently awarded the Jane Jacobs Prize for his years of activism and civic leadership.

Opinion articles are based on the author’s interpretations and judgments of facts, data and events. More details