In Conversation with Brent Toderian

How do we build cities for the future? How could we improve the cultural fabric of our communities? How does a city tackle the more systemic types of crises like poverty, opioid use and housing in an immediate way, while also building a successful and vital city? These are just a few of the discussion topics that we explored with Brent Toderian, City Planner and Urbanist at Toderian Urban Works

Moderator: Skylar Franke, acting President of the Urban League of London.

Skylar: Brent is an internationally respected thought leader on cities and leading global practitioner in advanced urbanism, city planning and design.

Brent: I did ask to make an opening statement so that I didn’t leave your city without saying a few key things. Four quick comments on what I just saw. I’ve been to a thousand conference, in council chambers during a thousand public hearings, and that’s the best acknowledgement and recognition of the First Nations context I’ve ever seen.

Secondly, I’ve never seen a conference look at where you’re from, and that’s a cool idea. Especially when it’s about the neighbourhoods in the city.

Third, I am well aware, you don’t have to point it out, that I burned fossil fuels to get here… well aware of the implications, ironic nature of the work I do and how it involves travel. But what I always say is “you are my carbon offset. I don’t go anywhere if I don’t think there is an opportunity for real substance of change, and if my present can’t help with that. If you all don’t go away and do differently, then all I’ve done is burn fossil fuels to get here and be away from my two sons. That’s pressure on you. That’s pressure on me too because I have to be convincing. But that’s pressure on you too. It’s not enough to talk and go away and do a little bit, because that’s not the moment we’re in.

I’m going to talk mostly about the climate crisis. That is the appropriate word for it. I no longer accept language that doesn’t convey level of urgency. But what I’ve been saying is that Canada and much of the world where I work is facing at least five crises. The first is the housing crisis and affordability and homelessness.

Second is the public health crisis: we’re making ourselves sick by the way we’ve been building our cities and suburbs and making bad decisions regarding how we get around in a city, and that’s on us as city builders.

Then there’s the infrastructure cost crisis, where, finally, thankfully, cities are doing the math about how much sprawl actually costs, compared to inn-fill, and how important it is to all your taxes, and some cities potentially literally going bankrupt because they can’t handle the ongoing costs of dumb development.

Finally, there’s a demographic crisis because cities can’t attract millennials or keep millennials or even the young generations after millennials. And ironically, often, because the cities aren’t doing the things to attract them, because of political opposition from the boomers. I’m putting it bluntly. We often talk about having a populist politics problem in this country, at times I characterize it as a boomer politics problem, where it’s that generations saying “no” to the things the younger generations need. Part of the problem is younger generations are not coming out to vote. There are more millennials in the country, not neccessarily in the cities, than there are boomers now. Millennials are now the largest demographic on planet Earth, and not voting enough.

In terms of the climate emergency: I’ve helped two cities craft their response to climate emergency declaration and am working on another one. I consider this to be the most important potential game changing shift to how we build cities I’ve seen in my career. By the way, Doug Ford recognizes that floods are about climate change. So no right wing conservative gets to claim they don’t’ understand it anymore, because if Doug Ford gets it… [laughter]

But there are three different kinds of cities - and I was talking to one of your councillors and I just added one based on you. You are now the catalyst for me adding the fourth in terms of how cities respond to the climate emergency declaration. One is they’re doing it for optics, and it means nothing. Two: they’re taking it seriously but there’s a fundamental disconnect between what they need to do to address it. They say we’re going to electrify buses and city hall fleet, but they’re not addressing the two largest levers that city halls have in its control that require transformation: land use, and mobility. Don’t get me stated on your LRT decisions lately. I observed on Thursday night the irony of declaring an emergency about a month after you made the wrong decision on public transit, is striking. That’s the second kind.

The third kind – these cities ‘get it’ and are doing the right things, and it’s a debate about whether they’re going far enough.

There’s a fourth one that I’ve just added based on Andrew Sheer’s announcement yesterday, is: not only do you not get the things you need to do; you’re doubling down on mistakes and using the climate emergency as an excuse. “We need to widen roads, because that’ll get rid of idling and reduce driving.” That’s bullshit. Will lead to more driving, more idling, and won’t even reduce congestion. It’s worse than not understanding, it’s doing the wrong things.

I use this as an example, in your recent climate change conversations, you’ve been talking about floods, wildfires, sea level rises and those important things. Dr. Roberta Bondar talked for half hour about ticks – very important. Lime disease has exploded because of climate change. And I work in Latin America where it is Zika, and the expansions of zones of Zika, kind of a “Handmaids Tale” where the scenario is about can we bear children without developmental handicaps. It’s because of climate change. We’re thinking about storms and floods, but it could be the bugs that get us, and the pandemics. Is ay that because it’s the height of arrogance to think we can future-proof our cities for climate change, and worse when people think their cities can benefit from climate change because “hey it’ll be a little warmer.”

So when you’re thinking about that response to the “I remind all of you to challenge your politicians and your staff about this. Progress doesn’t depend on starting the right things, it depends on stopping the wrong things and going back and fixing the mistakes. I don’t take seriously any city that declares a climate emergency that says we’re going to do things right from now on, but we have five or six road projects that we already started so we’re going to finish those, and you know we’re working on sprawl and we’re going to finish that. But after that we’ll start taking the emergency seriously.” And that’s the hard part: it’s about what you stop. And often that’s the hard part because politicians and everyone doesn’t want to stop things, but literally the difference between success and failure and credibility and no credibility. So watch what city hall cancels, and stops, and that will determine whether or not they’re taking it seriously.

I could talk for an hour on cars and roads. If you design a city for cars – which you have been doing, you are probably the worst city in Ontario for car culture, you are further behind than everyone else – it fails for everyone including drivers. If you design a multimodal city it works better for everyone including drivers. The narrative that this is a war on the car is alt-right bullshit and clickbait. And it doesn’t understand how cities and geometry really works. It works better for drivers, because if she takes public transit and he rides a bike… But if you’re all driving, you’re not moving.

 And it’s incredibly expensive. The truth about a city’s aspirations aren’t found in its visions and its policies, they’re found in its budget - where you’re putting the money.

And we have to talk about the suburbs. We tend to have this conversation and it’s about in-fill and whether the downtown is good. I love your new flex street and your King Street bike line, but we will succeed or fail as a species depending on what you do, how much you do to the suburbs.

I’ve added a sixth crisis and it’s a leadership crisis. In the era of fake news, and populous politics, and bullshit, and just a lack of will, that’s the problem. That’s probably the major crisis we face. And seven years ago when I last visited you and gave a talk I said, London seems plagued by what I call false choices. “In our approval of developments, do we do fast or do we do good?” That’s a false choice. “Is it good design or are we open for business?” that’s a false choice, manufactured.

The reporter asked me a question that was a false choice. “Do we do big bold ideas for the city or do we do reasonable affordable projects.” Do you see the false choice? Big bold ideas like LLT or BRT systems are good for business, and quite reasonable when you consider the context of the climate emergency. So watch for this kind of language, because it’s positioning, deliberately. This isn’t about conservative or liberal or progressive, right or left, this is about smart or dumb, success or failure.

Constructive Candor is constructive, because you’re trying to make it better. It’s not about your ego, not trying to tear people down, but trying to be constructive. Candor is necessary, candor just means honesty. And bluntness is just honesty in many cases. By the way a lot of people are blunt and not honest, so be careful about that.

Skylar: You mentioned the budget. London switched over to doing four year multiyear budget cycles. It’s coming up to the end of this year, going to be tabled on December 9th. I was wondering if you’ve seen, in other communities, really exciting and meaningful engagement from the community in helping shape those kinds of budget processes? With four-year budgets, a lot of thought goes into it and it’s harder to add stuff later on into those.

Brent: I’ve seen great conversations around budgets. It’s remarkable how rare it is for there to be a real community conversation around budget time. Cities have an obligation in my opinion - or activists or third sector groups, have an obligation - to talk about the “so what?” in the budget: what are the implications of it? I’ve seen cities that do that better. I haven’t seen cities that really line-by-line qualify the question of, does this help or hurt the climate situation? And even that is not enough. It could help but it doesn’t go nearly far enough fast enough. It’ll take you fifty years to get to that pace of change while you’re by the way doubling another part of your budget that takes you in the wrong direction. I think we should do climate modeling and apply that to budgets. You need climate scientists looking at budgets, I believe.

Skylar: what cities have you seen doing the response really well?

Brent: The European cities

What good does one city do? Well A, don’t underestimate the importance of one city, because it DOES have an impact and more importantly the power of that city to inspire. After Vancouver did it, Halifax did it, then Kingston wanted to be the first Ontario city to do it, which inspired other cities. So one city made a big difference. Whether they’re doing it well, goes back to my four categories. I do think Vancouver is doing it well but I really wasn’t sure initially.

Your London Plan is an exceptionally good city plan –and I’m not just saying that because I helped with it – that’s not currently fully being implemented, not even close. It’s also stuck at the board or the tribunal or whatever you call it now. That plan was years in the making and should be a turning point for the city and you need to work to make that plan a turning point, a game changer. You need to be able to talk about London before that plan, and after that plan. But what I’m saying right now is that work is being done to prepare the report that follows up on the climate emergency declaration. That report has to be another turning point. You have to treat that report like possibly the most important thing that your city will do in a generation. That’s how important it is. Sorry, councillors and staff, if I’m making you in anyway uncomfortable, but every single person should be paying attention to that report like it’s a game changer for the city. So far you’re not having that conversation yet.

Skylar: what is the role of neighbourhoods in cities when it comes to influencing development?

Brent: well it’s at the neighbourhood level where change is discussed, because everything we do up here needs to translate down. What can’t happen is you have a conversation up here at the city level and when ti gets down to the neighbours all the urgency goes away, because of political opposition or NIMBY (which I sometimes defend or criticize, usually not so simple as NIMBY or not-NIMBY.) What happens is you start to prioritize everything higher than the climate emergency, and I’ve seen that happen. For all of you who really, really care about character houses in a neighbourhood, for example, is that a more important thing than the implications of the greenhouse gas emissions per capita of your neighbourhood? If it is, you’re not considering climate change an emergency. You don’t get to have it both ways.

There isn’t a neighbourhood in your city that probably doesn’t have to change. But what matters is how that change happens, what that change is, and how the conversation includes the neighbours and neighbourhoods in that change. But if you’re asking yourself do we need to change yes or no, you’re not taking the implications of the 5 crises seriously enough.

Skylar: what would you say if you were writing the report for London for the climate emergency? What are the top three actions you’d want London to take immediately in the next two years?

Brent: Transform your decision making process and include your past decisions on mobility. Transform your decision making process including past decisions on land use. Third part is the hardest part, which goes beyond those first two, you have to think about ways to retrofit everything that already exists in your city. Even for all the cities that right now are cancelling right on a dime bad road projects and no more car-dependent sprawl, you have 40 or 50 years of car-dependent decision and houses that aren’t as energy efficient as they should be, etcetera. Even all the buildings that have passed under the requirements in Vancouver make up a small fraction of the whole city. The real challenge is how to retrofit everything that already exists, and city halls don’t have direct control over that because city hall can’t force someone to make their existing condition better. You can only force somebody who wants to build something new how to be better.

So having a proactive approach to retrofit, fixing the mistakes of the past is the third one, and it’s the hardest one. The other two are incredibly hard, but that’s the hardest. All take remarkable leadership and will, and as I said on Thursday none of those three things will be probably politically popular if your communities aren’t connecting the dots between those necessities and the climate emergency. You have to change your conversation in your city, your awareness, your understanding of your public, because no person who supported the declaration of climate emergency can be against those things. And if you’re against those things you’re not taking the climate emergency seriously.

Skylar: You hear we’re conservative thinkers here in London. Is London as conservative as we think or is this resistance to change happening everywhere?

Brent: I don’t care if London is as conservative as you think. I spent six years planning for a more conservative city than you are – Calgary. I worked for the most conservative city and the least conservative city in Canada. You are kind of conservative, which is more boomers. And there can be in that politics a kind of “I’ve got mine and I don’t want to change.” Which I find remarkable because the one thing I know about seniors is that they care about their grandkids. I don’t understand the disconnect I see over and over again at public hearings.

You might be that kind of conservative, but you’re not as conservative as Calgary. And even the conservative cities are doing the math, they’re better at business than you are, and they understand the difference between a cost and an investment, a value creator for your city and waste, and I think you guys are using conservatism and fiscal conservatism to fall further behind and undermine the things that would make you money and save you money. I don’t care how conservative that you think you are, what I care about is you stop using the excuse of being conservative to do dumb things - fiscally dumb things.

Skylar: Have you seen things we’re doing well?

Brent: John Fleming and I were walking downtown last night and l was looking at all the details of your flex street, and I was thinking about what we had done in Vancouver just before the Olympics and lamenting the mistakes we made. And the whole idea of flex parking, you did it better than we did. So maybe you learned from us, but you did it better. I said I’m going to tweet that London did it better than Vancouver. But it’s a small thing and don’t get excited – you’re doing a lot of things worse. Doesn’t change that you’re probably the most car dependent city of any Ontario city.

I like you getting into the conversation about separated bike lanes. I understand the logic of King Street connecting to the river, but you’re in danger of doing what Vancouver did under my watch, which is we did it one bike lane at a time, painfully. I call that pulling the Band-Aid off slowly, because every bike lane we opened, I was the one who got called by the media and had to explain why there weren’t more cyclists in it (well because it wasn’t a complete network) and “are we done now?” No of course we’re not done, would we be done if we built one sidewalk in the city? One road in the city?

Believe it or not, the most conservative city in Canada did the best downtown bike lane pilot I’ve ever seen. They piloted a complete network. They did it better than Vancouver and better than you. I had a little debate about whether King Street should be the connection because that’s a horrible road and I know there’s been a debate about whether you should put bikes in the flex street, but I realize you did that because King Street was already being ripped up and it was an opportunity and you didn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. But you’re in the most dangerous point of that conversation, where if it isn’t filled with bikes everyone says “see it’s a failure, why did we waste money on it?” It’s a dangerous time for safe bike infrastructure.