‘AusterityTO’ examines state of Toronto infrastructure amid calls for better public spaces

A new online campaign is targeting the declining state of public infrastructure in Toronto under the mayor’s tenure amid broader calls for improving publicly owned amenities.

Dubbed ‘AusterityTO,’ organizers curated numerous areas in Toronto similar to a presentation of Nuit Blanche.

“Over the past eight years a bold, world-class artist has been using Canada’s largest city as his canvas. Using ultra-low taxes, municipal bureaucracy and political stagnation as his primary artistic tools, John Tory has embarked on a conceptual undertaking of unprecedented scope and scale,” the campaign’s website said.

“‘AusterityTO’ is a series of public art installations which explore the values and desires of Toronto’s residents. Each sculpture was painstakingly crafted by the artist as a meditation on the nature of public services, decay and austerity.”

There are 14 examples listed on the website and some of the areas featured still had artist-style labels on-site before the time of publication, such as a rusty pedestrian bridge over Lake Shore Boulevard West at Ontario Place called Open Road.

“Through the use of negative space, the artist draws attention to what could be here, and what is actually here instead. He invites viewers to interact with the space by driving through it,” the website said.

“Without the use of a vehicle, it can only be appreciated from the periphery. In an urban environment where space is often scarce, this installation emphasized the sheer size of the open expanse.”

Other installations included Perseverance, a dead tree with weeds and branches on College Street located in the middle of the sidewalk.

The campaign has sparked a flurry of responses on social media sites such as Twitter. User after user pointed out various examples. Broken and/or overflowing garbage bins were popular under the hashtag #AusterityTO.

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“Hey you – wanna buy a watch? #AusterityTO,” user Dave Till wrote while showing a picture of a garbage bin with a door wide open.

“Kids pool heater broken, diving board broken, water slide broken, showers cold. #AusterityTO, #cityoftoronto, #regentpark,” user @Stephans wrote, referring to the Pam McConnell Aquatic Centre that’s a decade old.

CityNews emailed the organizers of ‘AusterityTO’ to ask for an interview to discuss the campaign, but a response wasn’t received by the time of publication.

Gil Penalosa, one of the frontrunners in the Toronto mayoral race, said he agreed with the campaign’s sentiment and added neglect can cause things to spiral.

“I think they are right. People are sick and tired. We’re living in one of the most expensive cities in the world, a very wealthy city, and it’s unacceptable we have so many garbage cans on the sidewalk with the doors open that are broken,” he told CityNews.

“The problem with this is that it’s also the psychological theory of the broken window that if you break a bench and you don’t fix it within a couple of days, they break another one … then they break two, and then four, and then eight and then 16, it becomes [geometric].”

John Tory’s campaign issued a statement in response to a request for comment by CityNews. A spokesperson didn’t specifically address ‘AusterityTO,’ but touted his record of investments in transit and housing.

“He has done all this while keeping taxes affordable when many found life in a big growing city difficult to afford, and still prioritized excellent delivery of the services residents expect,” Jenessa Crognali, the director of communications for the John Tory Re-election Campaign, wrote.

“As an example of this, the mayor found $1.6 billion in savings within the existing City budget and secured $3.2 billion in relief funding from other levels of government. And in the face of economic uncertainty and rising costs, the mayor has committed to keeping any tax increases below the rate of inflation if re-elected.”

She went on to say Tory is committed to modernizing the “nuts and bolts of services” if he’s re-elected.

Infrastructure in Toronto ‘is in decay,’ assistant professor says

Victor Perez-Amado, an assistant professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, studies the issue of infrastructure in the public realm. He said the City needs to be doing more to make Toronto equitable and inclusive for all.

“The state of the infrastructure is in decay or there’s not enough effort put into it,” he told CityNews.

“If you want people to invest in our economy rather than just having corridors where you walk from point A to point B, you might as well invest in places where people go, stay in a place, shop and spend some time, and then they continue because the spaces are beautiful and they’re comfortable to be at.”

Perez-Amado said he often encountered some form of resistance when trying to push for improved public infrastructure.

“You can have something that is beautiful but at the same time becomes another function and at the same time offers shade. But then the answer that I get is that, ‘Oh, but who is going to be maintaining this? It’s going to cost us money and then we have to replant it next year.’ And that’s when my answer is ‘Maybe you have to plant things that are native plant species where you don’t have to replant them every year where they come back by themselves,’” he said.

“If we want to have a healthy, living, mentally and physical (sic), we need to have good public amenities and good public space – and that means streets, parks and other spaces.”

Cara Chellew, an urban planning PhD student at McGill University, said the City of Toronto needs to ramp up its efforts to create more welcoming spaces.

“We really need to prioritize making a city for people rather than a city people move through. There’s a lot of attention to moving people quickly through the city rather than creating places we want to stay and linger,” she said.

Lack of benches and accessible seating cited as area in need of improvement

As Toronto marked Nuit Blanche at the beginning of October, there was no shortage of attendees. But seemingly there weren’t too many places to rest while exploring certain areas.

“When you walk for Nuit Blanche, the number of seating is minimal and then the ones that are available are not providing for people of different ages … they don’t have backrests, they don’t have armrests, nothing like that,” Perez-Amado said.

In downtown, the lack of benches is particularly noticeable. CityNews drove down Bay Street south of Wellesley Street West. While a handful of bus shelters had small seats, there were only two benches to be found on that corridor. On Yonge Street south of Wellesley Street, the situation is worse.

“There’s only one bench and I think they actually took it out because it was vandalized this year,” Perez-Amado said.

He went on to say Toronto is failing in comparison to cities like New York and Montreal.

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“We just came out of a pandemic, some people might say that we need to invest in health instead of the public realm. But at the end of the day, the city is the city. We need to find someone that takes the public amenities and what we have into consideration and seriously,” Perez-Amado said.

Chellew said Toronto has embraced a concept called defensive urbanism, meaning when the built environment makes it unwelcoming for people.

“I think it’s a mix of this way of cutting costs and making public spaces more secure in a way but also there’s this push to make our public spaces kind of free of the presence of poverty or any sort of person that potentially makes other people feel uncomfortable,” she said.

Those experiencing homelessness, skateboarders and youth are often the targets of this, Chellew said, adding by restricting public amenities it might create the opposite of the desired effect.

“There’s this idea that actually we want people to be hanging out in public spaces because more people makes these spaces safer, but if you remove amenities like benches there’s no place to hang out there’s less people in these spaces and so it is definitely counterintuitive,” she said.

David Lepofsky, the chair of Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance and a visiting professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, said more public seating is a need versus a want.

“A welcoming city, a people-friendly city would ensure that we have enough accessible public seating in public spaces to enable people to all enjoy what this city has to offer,” he told CityNews.

“It’s important that we have enough public seating available for the many seniors and the many other people who have chronic fatiguing conditions or chronic pain.”

Hey you – wanna buy a watch? #AusterityTO pic.twitter.com/SvCmeWMhSC

— Dave Till (@davetill) October 7, 2022

Kids pool heater broken, diving board broken, water slide broken, showers cold. #AusterityTO, #cityoftoronto, #regentpark, pic.twitter.com/ZeYnmbdkVe

— stephans (@stephans) October 2, 2022