Except for the towers, the Toronto of the future looks more than ever like the city of the past.

Densely populated, with things close together and people walking or taking transit, the 21st-century metropolis will be inhabited much as was the 19th-century city before it. Then, residents had little choice but to live close to where they worked. Proximity was the issue, not mobility.

Then came the car and suburbia, which promised nothing less than the obliteration of time and space. Alas, decades of sprawl have led to cul-de-sac congestion and dead-end ennui.

So when lawyer-turned-builder Steve Diamond unveiled his futuristic proposal for the northwest corner of Front and Spadina, it suddenly seemed as if the clock had been turned back. His scheme, which mixes residential, retail and office development, consists of a series of mid-rise buildings clustered around a grid of narrow streets running between Front and Wellington.

The plan has been called an “open-air shopping centre,” but that’s just another way of saying it will be part of the city. After all, what are Queen West, Bloor St. or Kensington Market but open-air shopping centres?

The difference is that in modern times these neighbourhoods, or portions thereof, tend to be constructed by a single developer and designed by a single architect using a single palette of materials. As a result, this sort of mega-growth usually ends up dull and dreary.

At the same time, the gradual decline of retail into an ever-shrinking series of franchises and chains hasn’t helped, either. The forces of homogeneity are turning cities around the world into copies of one another.

Considering that there are something like 130 Shoppers Drug Marts in Toronto, as well as countless Tim Hortons, Starbucks, McDonald’s, Loblaws, LCBOs . . . it’s no wonder the city grows ever more familiar and sterile.

In the real-life Monopoly game of late capitalism, the winner takes all. More and more wealth ends up in fewer and fewer hands. Mom and Pop have been replaced by corporate giants who leave little room for smaller players.

But size also has limits. Though the Walmarts and Home Depots are attempting to adapt to an urban context, so far their bigger-is-better model, which dominates the suburbs, has had little success downtown where the action is moving.

When they do show up it’s in a smaller format; the Canadian Tires at Bay and Dundas or Danforth and Pape have little in common with their city-killing big-box counterpart at Lake Shore and Leslie.

Even the Walmart proposed for Bathurst south of Bloor was a shadow of the behemoths that cast the hinterland in darkness. That’s why the proliferation of sameness favours fast-food, grocery and drugstore industries over large retailers.

Banks also play a role in the process by making it infinitely easier for developers with corporate tenants than those dealing with the small entrepreneurs they claim to love.

But as projects like Diamond’s appear so could opportunities for more varied retail. First, however, Toronto, which is fast becoming a shopping desert, must learn to behave like a city, not simply look like one.

As the places where we live and work grow ever smaller, inhabitants are spreading out into the city to gain the space they lack and do things they can’t at home or office. This could increase demand for more than the highly proscribed and utterly predictable offerings of corporate Canada. Unlike the suburbs, the city abhors a vacuum. One way or another, it will have to be filled.

> via The Star