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Among other factors, powerful global corporations, emergence of Web 2.0 technologies, and the increased ease of information displacement have changed our social landscapes. In light of this shift, how will cities, like Toronto, be using technology to gain a competitive advantage in the changing global landscape? Are they improving the quality of life for its residents? What defines a fully developed/knowledge city? Where does Toronto stand?

The panel was moderated by the engaging James Norrie, Associate Dean of the Ted Rogers School of Management with fellow esteemed panelists Dave Wallace, CIO – City of Toronto, John Cannon, CIO – Toronto Transit Commission and Diane Francis, Editor-at-Large, National Post. The panel was introduced by our Twitter-obsessed Mayor David Miller (@mayormiller), who likes to tweet photos of journalists, clearly feeling empowered and tickled by the opportunity to turn the camera on the press.

It was a wide-ranging conversation, and provided a great opportunity for the City of Toronto to tell the audience of Ryerson Information Technology Management students, alumni, faculty and members of the technology community and industry about the City’s initiatives and vision for the future.

Congratulations to organizers, Matthew Merritt, Dimitry Sapon and Jaime Sorgente (@jsorgent) for a very pro-style conference. As a tech conference created by students for the wider Ryerson and Toronto community I was very impressed with their professionalism and attention to detail.

There was a lot of audience interest in the TTC’s new information initiatives, include next bus/train information, and the upcoming trip planner and Google Transit integration. Dave Wallace shared an update about the City’s 311 program, spoke about the important lessons they learned at the Web 2.0 Summit about fast, iterative web development approaches and listening to the community. He is also clearly excited to be a leader in municipal open data and is working out some of the difficult issues around privacy, standards and industry and community collaboration. He did drop a little mention about dark fibre in the city which I had hoped we could follow-up, but we ran out of time. Diane Francis opened the panel discussion with a high-level overview of Toronto’s natural advantages as a global financial capital and reviewed the current state of the imploding media industry and the radical transformation underway in this important sector of Toronto’s economy. Read her very insightful piece, It’s not about AIG, stupid…, about the massive global financial system bailout happening with AIG as a conduit.

I was there to bring a provocation about the creative city, the importance of social technology and place, the future of community and the responsibility and opportunity for students and graduates to get involved in co-creating our future city. I was pleased that both the Mayor and Dave Wallace recognized ChangeCamp as an important forum for exploring future community collaboration, and that John Cannon also recognized the impact of TransitCamp in helping inform the future direction of TTC.ca and it’s customer information initiatives.

I am excited by the growing momentum we have in Toronto right now towards open, participatory, creative and effective government that recognizes how technology can enable a transformation in our city. 2009 is looking very promising!

Below the jump are my full prepared remarks for the panel discussion. Enjoy.

RICHARD FLORIDA’S CREATIVE CLASS

• Many in this room are familiar with the work of Richard Florida, who wrote “Rise of the Creative Class”
• Richard Florida has been warmly welcomed and celebrated across the City of Toronto for choosing us among all creative cities to live and do his work.
• Richard’s selection of Toronto as his home base is absolutely an honour and a signal of Toronto’s stature in the global pantheon of creative cities
• It is also a sign of the importance that our political class is giving to his theories
• However, his presence is also mostly meaningless in terms of the reality we experience on the ground and how we will together build the true future of Toronto as a global knowledge city.
• Florida’s argument is that creative talent drives future prosperity, that global creative talent is attracted to vibrant, livable, tolerant places with high concentrations of technology, bohemians and artists.

SOCIAL TECHNOLOGY AND COMMUNITY-BUILDING

• But while Richard Florida and the Martin Prosperity Institute are busy counting patent applications and measuring relative concentrations of artists & designers, the technology that is truly transforming global creative hubs like Toronto is social technology and we’re not paying it enough attention
• Because of social technologies like Twitter, Facebook and wikis, communities of talented, knowledgeable and creative people are finding each other and discovering their shared passions.
• These are not “virtual communities”, they are very real.
• Creative people are interacting and meeting one another using social web tools at an accelerating rate
• They are discovering their shared passions and are choosing to meet in physical face-to-face meetups and unconference-like gatherings to share knowledge, expertise and to build community together.
• For those who are unfamiliar, an unconference is an event for knowledge sharing where the participants create the content.
• It is a free and open structure for self-organizing a knowledge community.
• Since the first BarCamp, an unconference for technologists, landed in Toronto in the fall of 2005, these communities have been growing and propagating at an accelerating rate.
• BarCamp spored to create DemoCamp, PodCamp, EnterpriseCamp, SustainabilityCamp, FacebookCamp, SciBarCamp, StartupCamp, TransitCamp and ChangeCamp

OPEN CREATIVE COMMUNITIES

• Toronto’s ‘Camp communities are signals from the future.
• They are examples of what I call open creative communities.
• An open creative community is a community that forms around shared practices, interests, values or geographic proximity.
• They are creative, in that their members are engaged in the collaborative creation and sharing of original and meaningful new ideas.
• They are open in that anyone can join, there is no professional accreditation process, no membership fee.
• These communities are NOT democratic, they are meritocratic.
• Status exists and is earned and lost in a free-market of reputational authority.
• These communities are becoming distributed and decentralized laboratories of technological, business and social innovation.
• They are figuring out how to create value outside of organizational structures and without heavy overhead or hard infrastructure.
• They are forming new business and personal relationships and people are leaving traditional corporations to become free agents and forming distributed networks of capability.
• They are building an internal economy based on values, passion, creativity, trust and personal reputation.

TORONTO, GLOBAL KNOWLEDGE CITY?

• So what does this all mean to Toronto as a global knowledge city?
• We need to pay attention to these new forms of self-organization that are made possible by the social web.
• People in positions of power need to realize that there are huge, growing and increasingly organized and self-aware creative communities that are ready to be engaged, to solve the most pressing and challenging problems of the day.
• We are facing the greatest transformational crisis in the global economy since the 1930’s.
• The world is not going to be the same. We can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
• The bailouts are buying time, not solving the problem.
• Toronto has one of the most vibrant, connected, creative and diverse set of innovators and problem-solvers in the world.
• We are arguably the most advanced global city in the world in terms of our adoption of social technology and the thought leaders and practitioners that are using these enabling technologies to create new models for creating value.
• What we lack is a leadership class that truly understands the transformation that is happening now, just below the threshold of our shared day-to-day awareness.
• Government, academia and the not-for-profit sectors need to realize that global corporations (and all our major corporations are global) are increasingly disconnected from their communities, are organized globally and therefore with little interest in investing in local communities in real ways.
• Our citizens, however, are invested.
• We are invested in the place we call home, in the social relationships we have formed and in our shared future.
• If we can engage one another as citizens again, if we can get people out of their corporate and organizational silos and re-invigorate the public sphere, we can release a huge amount of creative energy for change, for resilience, for innovation and adaptation.
• That means work. Hard work. By all of us. In this room. Now.

1. Open our data. transit. library catalogues. community centre schedules. maps. 311. expose it all so the people of Toronto can use it to make a better city. do it now.
2. Crowdsource info gathering that helps the city.  somebody would have FixMyStreet.to up and running in a week if the Mayor promised to listen. encourage it.
3. Ask for help creating a city that thinks like the web. copy Washington, DC’s contest strategy. launch it at BarCamp.

The Mayor responded immediately by pre-announcing that TTC routing data would be opened up in Google Transit format in June of 2009, and said that, while he couldn’t promise that the City would be ready to process the output, that Toronto’s web geeks should go ahead and do a Toronto version of FixMyStreet and that City would listen. This is huge.

The moment was the culmination of a lot of our hopes and dreams for a city that understands the power of open, the meaning of participation and a signal of a more effective and responsive government of and for the people of Toronto. Will Pate and I have offered our assistance to make this vision a reality and we hope others will join us.

Mark’s presentation was excellent and highly recommended.  I have embedded the slides here, but you should go to Mark’s blog for the full audio presentation (and audio of Mayor Miller’s response) for the full effect.

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Sunday is the first TVO AgendaCamp, taking place at the Art Gallery of Windsor, Windsor’s jewel overlooking the beautiful riverside walk and the Detroit skyline. A stunning location for an innovative new format in citizen-powered exploration and social-media enhanced journalism.

Creative facilitator-ninja Dan Rose and I will be helping to run a 3-ring circus of citizen journalism and economic policy thinking.  Linking social media, a BarCamp-inspired unconference and one of Canada’s premier public issues broadcast journalism platforms is a very exciting opportunity for me. The topic – Ontario’s changing economy with a focus on the manufacturing sector and places like Windsor that depend upon it – couldn’t be more relevant or timely.

For those of you who can’t make it to Windsor, TVO.org will be the place to be from 10:00 am Sunday until 4:30pm. Arm-chair policy wonks and social media junkies can follow along as video is streamed live, as citizen-journalist YouTube videos and Flickr images are uploaded, the Wiki is populated with content and the whole event is live-blogged and Twittered. Use and follow the tag: AgendaCamp. We have MacBooks and FlipVideo cameras available on-site for participants, plus pro equipment and staff from TVO helping to capture the content and stories.

The strategy and platform for this was built by TVO.org’s great production team, helped along with insight and guidance from Sean Howard.

We have a great platform, an amazing group of on-site participants, a bunch of technology and a beautiful and inspiring venue. I really can’t wait! I hope you can join us online and help us start an important new conversation.

How will this instability in the system affect citizens and businesses in the places they call home?  Even before the Wall Street meltdown, Ontario’s local and regional economies were under stress and changing rapidly. The current crisis appears likely to accelerate and exacerbate these changes.

It is said that all politics are local. What about economies?

Dan Dunsky, Executive Producer of TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin, believes that we need to think about Ontario’s economies in the plural and his team has identified that major sectors of Ontario’s economy correspond to our geographic landscape and its people in specific places. How do these places and people adapt to global forces that are largely outside of their control? How can we get ahead of the change curve and make our regions more resilient and adaptable to accelerating change?

To tackle this critically important question about our future well-being, TVO is launching an innovative new project that brings together collaborative events and social media together with premier broadcast journalism and expert inquiry.  I am advising and supporting TVO for this project, “The Agenda with Steve Paikin: on the Road” & AgendaCamp.

We’re looking for participants – like you. More after the jump…

Ontario’s trade manufacturing economy is concentrated along the highway 401 corridor of southwestern Ontario particularly close to the US-Canada border. Ontario’s natural resources sector dominates our vast northern expanse.  Eastern Ontario is home to a rich rural economy located in places with storied histories since before Confederation.  Ontario’s native people made a sustainable living from the lakes and forests across Ontario long before Europeans arrived. Ontario’s burgeoning knowledge-based and technology-driven economy is concentrated in places like Waterloo, Greater Toronto and Ottawa but is also popping up anyplace where talent and connectivity can find a suitable home.

The Agenda is going on the road to find these economies and their people and engage them in a new conversation about their challenges and future opportunities.  The first show and event will take place in less than three weeks in Windsor (October 19th and 20th), followed by Sault Ste. Marie (November 16th and 17th).

The audacious format looks like this:

1. AgendaCamp: an all-day Sunday participatory event, similar to the Barcamp model of unconference, that takes place face-to-face and is also live-blogged, with video capture and other social media content uploaded to the web in near realtime
2. The Agenda on the Road: a live-to-air broadcast hosted Monday evening by Steve Paikin featuring a panel of invited guests and a studio audience, where the best AgendaCamp ideas can find a larger audience

AgendaCamp is looking for:

• local citizens and business-people
• academic experts and bloggers
• policy-makers and politicians
• artists and technologists
• bankers and social activists

- really anybody who has a stake, an opinion and a passion for the subject of the economy and it’s impact on our communities and our lives.  If you are interested in participating in AgendaCamp please register your email address at http://tvo.org/agendacamp/ for more information or email me at mark@remarkk.com.

Thanks to collaborators Sean Howard and Daniel Rose for being part of this project. We’re enjoying working together with Steve Paikin, Mike Miner and the rest of the TVO team.

My dream list of participants from across the web and blogosphere includes: Richard Florida, Anthony Williams, Naomi Klein, David Eaves, Deborah Leslie, David Wolfe, Meric Gertler, John Britton, David Crow, Jevon MacDonald, Warren Kinsella, Andrew Coyne, Kate Trgovac, Bob LeDrew, Canadian Silver Bug, James Bow, Kate McMillan (small dead animals), Uncorrected Proofs, Steve Janke (Angry in the Great White North), Zednik (A View from the Right), Graeme Steward (Nunc Scio),  More Notes from the Underground, Canada’s World, Another Point of View, Dr. Dawg (Dawg’s Blog).

Who am I missing? You?

Friday’s Globe and Mail featured a prediction by Jeffrey Rubin, the CIBC World Markets economist, that damage from Hurricane Gustav and other intense storms this season could cause a sudden spike in gas prices to $1.75 a litre.

Every time there is a price spike, the media runs to the local gas station to cover the “pain at the pumps”. But does that pain translate into a change in behaviour? How much of an impact do gas prices have on the commuting public in the GTA? Do increasing gas prices cause people to make different personal transportation decisions, or are households just absorbing the extra costs?

It appears that gas prices are affecting vehicle purchasing decisions (sorry GM), but are consumers switching from private vehicles to other modes of transportation? I would love to see the research on that. (Perhaps our friends at Metrolinx have some sources they can share? If readers know of recent research on this question, please leave a link in the comments.)

Surely demographic factors influence gas price sensitivity and the substitution of one mode of transportation for another. It makes sense that household incomes will affect price sensitivity, with the working poor being hit hardest. At the same time, many service workers need to use private vehicles to get to or perform their work (i.e. not the GO train Bay Street crowd) and have few alternatives. This creates a political problem that will bring calls for action.

But I also believe that there is a relationship to a another familiar demographic trend with political and policy implications: Boomer parents versus their Gen Y children.

Older upper middle-class car owners who live in the bedroom communities surrounding the City of Toronto and other major urban centres in the 905 will not be terribly affected by increasing gas prices – at least not enough to effect a historic shift to more sustainable modes of transportation. In addition to enjoying relative affluence, my guess is that this group have deep-seated cultural habits and experience systemic barriers that make switching costs relatively high.

Meanwhile young, newly urban professionals, creatives and knowledge workers who are repopulating our city centres (like Metronauts writer Adam Schwabe) are moving en masse to enjoy the vibrancy of city life, reduce their carbon footprint and increase the quality of their lives by spending less time in the daily commute. Generation Y workers, the Echo, the Millennials – or whatever you want to call them – are changing the workplace, the urban fabric and the nature of the transportation problem. This is more than a stage of life question – research points to a values-driven shift towards more sustainable choices by young people for environmental and financial reasons:

Workers under the age of 25 in the Toronto region use public transit 30.8 per cent of the time, while a further 9.5 per cent walk and 1.5 per cent use a bike.

That’s a considerably higher reliance on environmentally friendly means of getting to work than the average commuter in the Toronto region, who commutes by public transit 22.2 per cent of the time, by foot 4.8 per cent of the time and 1.0 per cent by bike.

Which of these two groups receives the lions share of attention in the media and the political conversation that surrounds the work of Metrolinx planners and the development of its Regional Transportation Plan? I don’t think anyone should be surprised to see plans and investments that reflect the needs of the suburban Boomer commuter class, but what of Gen-Y and the New Urbanists?

Ultimately, and historically in this region, the allocation of scarce funding is a question of politics, not planning. So here’s the political question:

Should governments dull the pain of those making energy-intensive choices about where they live and work and how they choose to travel, or should governments reward those that make more sustainable choices with the required supporting infrastructure, planning policies and design of dense mixed-use city centres?

I believe that the Gen-Y shift to urban life is a generational opportunity to shift behaviour and a leverage point for systemic change, if our planners and politicians can find a way support and embrace it. But can planners and politicians hear their voices?

Image by Will Gotshall-Maxon

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The economic conditions that supported the tremendous growth of North American suburbs during the last half of the 20th century – cheap energy and the modern industrial production system – appear to be undergoing a sharp reversal. What do these signals of the future mean for the suburbs and the demands that will be placed on politicians asked to respond to these changes?

You don’t have to be a peak oil theorist to recognize – as James Smith, CEO of Shell UK has – that “the era of easy oil is over”. The reality that we are not going to ever return to an age of cheap oil is just starting to sink into the consciousness of the marketplace, electorate and policy-makers. Scenarios of a serious supply crunch and $200 a barrel oil are no longer on the fringe.

The Freakonomics blog at NY Times recently held a quorum inviting a small group of smart and opinionated experts to imagine the future of American suburbia in 40 years time. The responses vary from James Kunstler’s “the suburbs have three destinies, none of them exclusive: as materials salvage, as slums, and as ruins” to the more hopeful “Suburbia will be flexible, it will be smarter, and it will be hybrid” of John Archer.

What about in the Toronto region?

In the Toronto area context Toronto Star writers Christopher Hume and Phinjo Gombu have been considering these same issues in the GTA: Downtown density will prevail over slums of suburbia, A planning headache, 50 years in the making; Reinventing Suburbia.

One of the primary issues facing the suburban electorate and their politicians are the very real economic hardships that expensive oil will bring to the suburbs.

The cost of living is increasing with the cost of transportation. Ontario’s industrial economy is being hit hard. The investments necessary to reconfigure how we plan and build and how we move around the sprawling megalopolis are staggering. The required shifts in 50 year-old cultural mindsets and behaviours may be even more difficult to make. The very instruments being suggested to help pay for some of this – road-pricing, congestion charges and other carrots and sticks – are political hot potatoes unpopular to those being asked to pay the price or change their behaviour. There are economic winners and losers, and where the money flows, politics is sure to follow.

Can our politics cope with what is being asked of it? Can we move beyond the us vs. them dynamic across municipal boundaries to a greater sense of shared destiny and community across a vast city-region? Can our institutions adapt? Can we solve the wicked problems that will surface during a period of rapid change and uncertainty? Will our suburbs become slums and ruins or smarter and hybrid?

These are questions that we’re looking to our community of readers to help answer. What are the political fault-lines of suburbia’s adaptation, re-imagination and renewal?

Photo by Rosanne Haaland.

Comments closed, please join the conversation at Metronauts.ca.

On the anniversary of the first TransitCamp, I am excited to announce that Remarkk! Consulting, working with a stellar cast from the TransitCamp and OpenCities communities, has been engaged by Metrolinx (aka, the Greater Toronto Transportation Authority) in order to adapt and extend the TransitCamp community across the vast city-region of the GTA and Hamilton and from transit into all aspects of integrated regional mobility, including roads, bike routes and pedestrian experiences.

What is TransitCamp?

TransitCamp is a solutions playground, not a complaints department. TransitCamp is an open creative community.

As described in the Harvard Business Review article [Sick Transit Gloria], we will use open source tools (including unconferences) to bring together community members from across the GTA and Hamilton to participate in intense, participatory and fun face-to-face and online happenings to reimagine the future of the region’s transportation system. This will be, above all, a community-led experience. While we are helping to build the platforms, it is people passionate about transit and transportation issues in the region who will provide the content.

We were delighted to discover that Rob MacIsaac, Chair of Metrolinx and the Metrolinx planning and communications staff are open to new ideas and approaches. The community will have an unprecedented opportunity to contribute to the future of the region in a very tangible way. Metrolinx is responsible for developing an integrated Regional Transportation Plan in 2008 and is the Ontario government agency responsible for deploying at least $17 billion in new capital to projects across the region.

But this is a Camp, so it’s not all serious. We’re also going to have a lot of Campy fun. There will be accordions and chickens and other mayhem.

When is the next TransitCamp?

No date has been set just yet, but we would like to have the next TransitCamp in March. Watch this space! We are planning a series of TransitCamps across the GTA, so we can look forward to doing more than just one event over the coming months.

How do you get involved?

1. Join the TransitCamp Google Group. You will receive updates from the organizers, and also be able to join the discussion and participate in the design of the unconference experience. (Twitterers can follow here. You can also join the Facebook group.)
2. Read about the original TransitCamp experience from February 2007. There are many links of interest on this wiki page.
3. Check out the Regional Transportation Plan papers on the Metrolinx site and start imagining the future.
4. Participate!

What does participation mean?

Help us design the events and the online community spaces and help fill them with your aspirations, ideas and passions. Tell us what you would like to do together as a community.

You can leave comments on this blog post, or start a thread on the Google Group, or blog about it, share videos, photos – express yourself! (tag: transitcamp).

If TransitCamp is a solutions playground, every game on the playground needs basic rules so that the participants can have the best play possible. What kinds of games would you design?

Who is already involved?

Eli Singer; Jay Goldman; Sean Howard; Misha Glouberman; Michele Perras; Daniel Rose; David Eaves; Mark Surman; David Crow; Jed Kilbourn (don’t worry, we’ll get him a blog soon); and soon many others….

FAQ Links:

What is an unconference?

Why “unconferences” are fun conferences

What is a wiki?

torontotransitcamp, transitcamp

Kingwell argues that there is nothing new about Toronto as a rich source of ideas and the shift “of Canada from being a resource basket to a linked series of communications nodes held together by thought”, and continues…

But the economic and social conditions of ideas have changed, here as much as elsewhere, putting the city on the brink of a certain kind of identity, and a certain kind of success: a creative-class boom town. My suggestion is that we are thinking about this possibility in exactly the wrong way. The question for Toronto now is not whether ideas can flourish in this place, because demonstrably they do, but what consequences in justice that flourishing will entail. On the edge of new identities and possibilities, what is our idea of justice?

It’s a good read. Kingwell describes the central creative era political faultline around the question “what is the city for?”. Is the city for glory or for justice? Kingwell argues,

Though a city in pursuit of glory may neglect justice, the opposite does not hold: a truly just city is always a glorious one, because it allows greatness even as it looks to the conditions of strangeness posed by the other.

Kingwell warns against a certain “hucksterism” in the creative city agenda that sees the city as a glittering entertainment space for the bohemian bourgeois. You can see this vision being realized everyday in the horrifying marketing campaigns of downtown loft condos targeted at the nouveau-hipster-doofus.

Another great quote:

Toronto is not a city in the modern sense of a unified whole. I suspect it never will be, and probably need not try. Toronto is, instead, a linked series of towns loosely held together by the gravitational force of its downtown core and the pinned-in-place effect of the surveillance rod we call the CN Tower. Like Canada in general, that triumph of communications technology in defiance of all nationalist sense, Toronto is postmodern in both its geography and its psychogeography. There is a physical centre, in the sense of a summing of vectors like a centre of gravity, but there is no normative or mythic one, no single agora or narrative. This much is obvious, and often said. But we continue to fail in grasping its political significance.

Great food for thought, the whole piece is a must read. I’m interested in your take on it.

If you aren’t familiar with the Ignite format, it is 20 slides, 5 minutes, 15 seconds per slide on an automatic timer. The format enforces quite a lot of discipline on you – and decisions about what to communicate with images, text and speaking notes are fun to play with. This was the first attempt, and I’d love to practice it some more to improve my delivery.

As a follow-up, I am challenging interested members of the DemoCamp community to take the open source code behind FixMyStreet and localize it for Toronto and the GTA. FixMyStreet is a bug tracker for city services that sits outside government control. Users identify, report and map local issues and the system forwards them onto the appropriate local authority for action and follow-up. If some developers in the community want to take this on, I will work with them to connect this to city halls across the region.