Toronto Magazine - Premier 2008 - 48

I’m a huge fan of ToronTo. To me IT Is The quInTessenTIal CITY. It’s not as big as New York or London, but it has as much or more diversity as either of them. And to its credit, it has not become completely gentrified and yuppified. Instead, it is one of very few great world cities that really do still have neighbourhoods, where people of different classes and ethnicities can mix and mingle and where neighbourhood shopping districts are not overwhelmed by chains. Like many cities at the cutting edge of this global economy, Toronto is going through some massive, far-reaching changes. Today, economic value is driven by our knowledge, synthesis and creativity rather than manufacturing — our cities reflect this as they stumble, adjust and take advantage of the shift from an industrial to a creative economy. What’s more, this change is essentially urban in nature. But what makes Toronto so transformative and exciting is that it is uniquely situated — geographically and socially — to take advantage of the global transformation to a creative economy. There are only a handful of city-regions in the world that sit on the front burner of what I’ve called the rise of the creative class. Toronto is one of them. Whether it acknowledges this extremely advantageous position and works toward fulfilling this potential, or whether it clings to outdated notions of itself is the question of the moment. And it’s a big question — perhaps the biggest Toronto has ever faced. This is a pivotal moment in Toronto’s history: Does it move forward or stand still? The creative class makes up 36 per cent of its workforce. Of North America’s 10 most populous cities, only Boston, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., do better. Toronto ranks second in the world, behind only New York City, on Lisa Benton-Short’s Mosaic Index — a measure of a region’s foreign-born population, not just the raw numbers but how diverse that population is, how many different parts 48 toronto | 2008 of the world are represented in its mosaic. It also happens to be a crucial indicator of a region’s openness to new ideas, to new people and, therefore, to economic growth. Toronto is the centre of one of North America’s mega-regions — again, not quite as big as the one that stretches from Boston to Washington, or that which connects Chicago and Pittsburgh, or Greater London or Tokyo, but it is among the world’s 10 largest. Toronto’s mega-region has a gravitational pull that reaches from Ottawa to Buffalo. It has an incredibly skilled workforce and immediate access to a market that is enormous. It’s close to the United States, and this combination of proximity and distance is one of its greatest advantages. Many Torontonians don’t think of their city’s relationship with its region this way. Historically, Torontonians have demonstrated a kind of civic modesty that, while not entirely unattractive, sometimes works against them. I expect that many Torontonians will be surprised to hear that, in my view, they sit at the heart of one of the most promising mega-regions in the world. Torontonians may also be just as surprised by what seems to an insider a truly remarkable strength: the city’s deeply ingrained sense of economic and social fairness. The world desperately needs a social and economic model that can harness the power of the creative economy and do so in a way that harnesses the creative energy of every single human being. That is the great challenge of our time — to build a truly inclusive agenda for the creative age, to understand and act on the fact that creativity refuses to accept and be limited by the social categories of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and age that we have imposed on ourselves. This model must start from the first principle that further economic development requires further human development across the board. Toronto is one of only a very few places in the world that have

Toronto Magazine - Premier 2008

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