Toronto: City of the Future?

When I drive or walk out of my building, I often joke to myself that I live in the "City of the Future". From that vantage point, I can only see very new condo buildings, the SkyDome, and the CN Tower, which makes me feel like I live in some futuristic space-city.

But while walking through Kensington Market and Chinatown the other day, I started to ponder a bit more this "City of the Future" idea and think it might be true. When I say this, I mean nothing about the architecture (Toronto architecture generally blows, btw). I'm talking about the culture and the identity of the city.

One of the most significant things I've noticed about Canada is that Canadians and the Canadian media (probably more the latter) are very interested in establishing an identity separate from that of the United States. One of the things that seems to be sticking in this search for a unique identity is Canada as the "place someone emigrates" (I hope I got that usage correct - someone please correct me if I didn't).

At one time, the United States was the place to go if you wanted to, or were forced to, leave your homeland. All you had to do was show up, and you were in. Over the last hundred years, it's become progressively more difficult, to the point where now the US isn't much thought of as friendly to outsiders. It seems that Canada has jumped in to pick up that slack and is building its identity around it.

In the United States, we traditionally talk about the "melting pot", where lots of cultures go in, and something uniquely "American" emerges. In Canada, they speak of the "mosaic", where people are able to retain their cultural identities but exist in harmony with one another.

And that's where the idea of Toronto as the City of the Future comes in. Toronto doesn't really have a unique identity. It's sort of like New York, Chicago, or Boston, but doesn't really have the unique identity that any of those cities have. This lack of an identity seems to be a point of concern for many Torontonians (again, mainly as expressed through the media). What's interesting, though, is that this lack of an identity and lack of an "identity momentum", is allowing the city to construct its identity right now. That's pretty interesting to me, as it's not something that most American cities have gotten to do in a while. Their identities are largely set. They do change, but only rather slowly.

Toronto's identity, however, is changing (emerging, really) rapidly. And what it's growing towards is one of a truly multicultural mosaic. This new emphasis on being a mosaic of cultures rather than a melting pot of cultures, coupled with the tremendous human migrations underway in the world, means that what Toronto is becoming is what many other cities will become in the years ahead. Thus, I think it's legitimate to call it the City of the Future.