Lovely Spaces in Unknown Places: Creative City Building in Toronto’s Inner Suburbs

Toronto’s suburbs are a creative wasteland and historic mistake. Toronto’s downtown is stimulating, eclectic and full of life. The suburbs are the home of the Strong Neighbourhoods strategy – targeting “priority areas” marked by violence, poverty and a lack of community. The downtown is home to the Creative City strategy – targeting the hip, intelligent and worldly creative class, with new solutions to every problem. Are these perceptions accurate? Are the two strategies incompatible? In this report, I examine the applicability of a creative cities strategy to Toronto’s inner suburbs, particularly its priority neighbourhoods. I studied two priority neighbourhoods – one in North York, the other in Scarborough − through personal observations and interviews with individuals working in arts, culture and creative industries. Interview subjects include: Sady Ducros, whose graffiti art and ideas for community youth engagement continue to enliven the community a decade after he moved downtown; Rev. Denise Gillard, whose combined church and music/dance school is internationally lauded, and hidden in the back unit of an industrial park; Albert Sliwin, whose abandoned manufacturing plants evolved into the city’s second fashion district. Observations from these and other interviews revealed that: patterns of creativity and building use are similar to those in downtown environments, but adapted to a different built form; creative groups offer significant social benefits to marginalized communities; the suburbs have a creative class strongly rooted in local neighbourhoods; the creative activities are hampered by physical dispersion and a lack of connectivity between organizations; creative groups face significant funding challenges. These results demonstrate that the creative class is having a significant impact on the social, physical, economic, and cultural life of the inner suburbs and has the potential for even greater impacts in future. I therefore propose the development of a Creative City Strategy for the Inner Suburbs, to be formed through community engagement and integrated with existing creative city and strong neighbourhood agendas. This perspective would lead to a more inclusive, diverse and effective creative city vision for Toronto