Photo by Vince LaConte

In Toronto’s Chinatown, an average morning goes on as usual, with longtime business owners setting up shop and elderly residents chatting loudly in local bakeries. But underneath the mundanity lies change. When onlookers enter the Chinatown landmark, the famous Dragon City Mall, the sight of its empty shops and corridors with the occasional elderly passersby may be a surprise. Dragon City Mall’s plight is representative of the larger trend that Chinatown is facing: one of demographic decline.

According to the 2021 Neighbourhood Profile, the number of ethnically Chinese people living in Chinatown was the lowest it had been in over a decade, dropping by almost 25 percent since 2011. This means that, after years of being a deeply entrenched and treasured enclave in the city’s downtown, the neighbourhood may be on the verge of a major shift. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Chinatown hasn’t always stood where it is today. It used to be located on York Street before growing larger and spreading north to Elizabeth Street. Later, two thirds of it were razed to make way for Nathan Phillips Square and a new City Hall. Chinese Canadian community leader and restaurateur Jean Lumb campaigned to preserve the remaining third of the neighborhood, which eventually moved to where it is today. Many of the old signs of the Chinatown on Elizabeth Street are still there if you look carefully. Lumb would go on to travel to Vancouver and Calgary to aid in efforts to save Chinatowns there too, the only woman organizer to do so.

And now, after surviving a forced relocation to its current home at Dundas Street and Spadina Avenue in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Chinatown’s Chinese population is not a majority in the neighbourhood. While there are a number of reasons for this, the trend is partially due to the decline of new immigrants moving to the area. When many Chinese immigrants moved to Canada in the late 19th century, most were poor workers from the southern Chinese province of Guangdong seeking new opportunities. The picture today is undoubtedly different. Many new immigrants are students or people coming from upper-class backgrounds. The change in demographic wealth also led to more Chinese immigrants favouring suburban towns over downtown enclaves. Although household income is on the rise in Chinatown, some residents see this as a bittersweet outcome.

Donna, the owner of a local salon called Hair Magic Cut located in the ageing Chinatown Centre mall, has operated her shop for 23 years, raising her kids in the neighbourhood. When asked about the statistical change in Chinatown, she said that while she welcomes any new arrivals to the neighbourhood, the hub of Asian culture that the neighbourhood represents is still deeply important to her.

In an herb shop right across from the salon, the owner, Ms. Zhou, gave another perspective on Chinatown’s past and future. “When I first started up shop in Chinatown 20 years ago, the leading population was the Vietnamese. Once they gained wealth they went north to the suburbs. Now it’s the Fujianese population’s turn. The supermarkets you see around here are all owned by them,” she says. The current demographic decline can be seen as a part of Chinatown’s larger story, one of immigration for opportunity before ultimately graduating to what’s often regarded as a higher status in Toronto society. The changing conditions in Chinatown are partially due to the success of the suburban Chinatowns that arose in the ’90s, namely the City of Markham. In contrast to Toronto’s Chinatown, the amount of Markham residents who identified as Chinese in a survey of visible minorities grew by roughly 40 percent throughout the 2010s, while the facilities and restaurants catering to this population are far newer and greater in number.

However, moving from Chinatown to the suburbs has gotten harder. Due to the rising cost of living, and with it, rising rent over the past decade, Ms. Zhou says fewer young people are inclined to run small businesses like hers.

Still, Chinatown is falling behind its suburban counterparts. Although this can be chalked up as the result of the declining Chinese population in the area, the issue runs deeper than a natural pattern of migration. The rising cost of living is making it harder for the neighbourhood to attract young families. Recent threats of gentrification to its long-standing businesses and restaurants worsen the situation.

Community members are still determined to preserve what’s left of Chinatown. Around the same time developers bought and razed the longstanding Chinatown dim sum restaurant Rol San in 2023, a group of organizers formed a land trust to protect the neighbourhood from further gentrification. To improve business and prioritize the neighbourhood’s culture, the Toronto Chinatown Business Improvement Area (CBIA), formed in 2007, hosts many events and festivals. The CBIA’s annual Toronto Chinatown Festival typically draws over 250,000 visitors, according to their website. (CBIA representatives did not respond to This Magazine’s requests for comment.)

It is clear that Chinatown may never return to its previous status as the city’s pre-eminent centre of Chinese culture. Many different groups have come and gone after successfully searching for opportunity and wealth. Still, Chinatown is losing its ability to sustain working-class people seeking opportunity. The decline of the Chinese population is not the cause of the neighbourhood’s decline; it’s a result of gentrification and the rising cost of living. These issues are causing the neighbourhood to lose its accessibility to newcomers.

A common sentiment organizers working to save Chinatown share is their pride and happiness in the neighbourhood; not only for its prime real estate, or convenience, but for its community. Even now, with the emptying malls and a gradual loss of traditional businesses, there is hope that a piece of Chinatown’s unique history and spirit can still be preserved through the change.

Photo by Patrick Sicotte

A late summer day in 2008 changed everything for the community of Montréal-Nord, a multicultural suburban borough in the city’s north end. Fredy Villanueva, an 18-year-old Honduran refugee, was shot and killed by a police officer in a park. The shock of his death rippled through the tight-knit neighbourhood, sparking immediate outrage, rioting, and protests.

Cassandra Exumé, currently the General Coordinator at Hoodstock, was the same age as Villanueva at the time. She remembers watching the borough she associated with childhood summers on the news, erupting in pain. Montréal-Nord was at a breaking point.

“The same day that there was the demonstration here in Montréal-Nord, Guillaume Hébert, Nargess Mustapha, and Will Prosper [Hoodstock’s co-founders] were just like, okay, we’re talking, we’re sad—but let’s build something from that sadness,” says Exumé. “We’re in pain right now. Just to make sure that this never happens again, what can we do?”

Out of those urgent conversations, Hoodstock, the grassroots neighbourhood collective, was born. It was first called Montréal-Nord Républik, Exumé explains, raising a little fist with a smile on “Républik.” The current name proudly puts “hood” at the front, riffing off the collective and the musical association of Woodstock for the rhyme.

Montréal-Nord, the neighbourhood Hoodstock calls home, has long been stigmatized, overlooked, and underestimated. Many residents are low-income and/or people of colour, with 42 percent of the community identifying as immigrants, according to the 2016 census. While the borough is strongly francophone, many members of the community are multilingual.

The organization runs on a “for us, by us” philosophy, with a BIPOC and immigrant-led team. Hoodstock organizes community meetings, consultations, and projects, often does workshops in schools, and organizes social events. They’ve recently moved into an open-door neighbourhood office, responding to their neighbours’ needs (such as helping them register to get a provincial healthcare card, enroll in government French classes, or resolve conflicts) as they arise or as they stop by. In the past year and a half, those needs have shifted dramatically.

Over the course of the pandemic, Montréal-Nord has experienced the highest concentration of COVID-19 cases in the city, with 12,199 cumulative cases per 100,000 people. In spring 2020, Hoodstock saw that many community members were being left behind by the federal and provincial government’s pandemic response, so they sprung into action.

“Could you imagine [experiencing the pandemic as] someone who doesn’t speak French or English, who is new to the country?” says Exumé.

The team went door-to-door distributing PPE and talking with people cooped up in their apartments. They organized a grocery delivery program for elders and the vulnerable, as well as connecting families with tablets and laptops for online schooling. “If we’d stuck to our original plan for 2020, we wouldn’t have helped so many people,” she says. “We have our vision, but we really are flexible with the changes of the world.”

Hoodstock works to fill in the gaps left by a systemic lack of resources and support for the borough. Current projects include Le Hood Stop, which will engage local youth in conversations around sexual assault and consent, a similar effort to talk to teens about gun- and gang-related violence, workshops to maintain momentum in the wake of George Floyd’s death, and connecting low-income households with affordable Wi-Fi plans.

It’s difficult for an organization like Hoodstock to plan too far into the future, as their work is determined by the ever-changing needs of their community, but Exumé sees this as the grassroots collective’s strength. “There are a lot of things we are not responsible for, but the systems are not taking care of us,” says Exumé. “How come a young, small organization has to do the work of a big government?”

Inside Vernal Small’s tailor shop, Jamall Caribbean Custom Tailor, near Eglinton and Oakwood. Photos by Sharine Taylor

Living in Toronto means I’m not too far from Jamaica. Not because geography affords proximity, but because the presence of the diaspora has made itself known. Over 200,330 people of Jamaican descent reside in Toronto alone, and that’s evident by the countless restaurants, small businesses, specialty shops, and grocery stores that populate the city. Though people who have migrated from the island have settled all over the country, in the 1970s during a heavy period of migration from the Caribbean, select pockets of neighbourhoods in Toronto were concentrated with people from the region. One of those neighbourhoods was Little Jamaica.

For a few months, when I was around seven years old, I lived right off Trethewey Drive, a street in Toronto’s west end, inside a low-rise, yellow-brick apartment with my mom, aunt, and cousin. Every other weekend, my aunt would drag us to Eglington Avenue West to get her nails and hair done, and over time it became my favourite spot to grab pan chicken cooked in the recognizable repurposed oil drums just like back home. The Little Jamaica community, which stretches from Eglinton Avenue West and Keele Street to Eglinton Avenue West and Marlee Avenue, was known for its vibrant Caribbean community and the proudly Black-owned businesses that once lined its streets. However, due to the almost eight-year, ongoing construction of the Eglinton Crosstown LRT, with aims to make travelling between the east and west end of the city easier, the area has been subject to a decline in business, and questions about the preservation of cultural heritage and legacy are being raised.

I began thinking about preservation and archiving. How many first-gens who share complicated hyphenated identities have to explore the histories of where they come from outside our home and native land, have to do so of their own accord, even if those seemingly distant histories are deeply bound up in the Canadian experience. Canada’s 1955 West Indian Domestic Scheme? The Jamaican Maroons in Nova Scotia during 1796? Those histories exist outside of our educational curriculums, and if we’re not aware of our own stories, whose job will it be to pass these narratives on to the generations that come after us?

Last summer, I was granted an opportunity to add to the ways we chronicle our histories. Fabienne Colas, a Montreal-based Haitian actress, asked, “What does it mean to be Black in Canada?” Through the Being Black in Canada program, run through her self-titled foundation, she gave emerging and first-time film directors an opportunity to explore what those answers could be. There was an unshakeable sense of urgency that made me want to focus on Little Jamaica, which had rapidly turned into a neighbourhood that was in a perpetual state of uneasiness and erasure.

I didn’t anticipate my film, Tallawah Abroad: Remembering Little Jamaica, becoming a project that consumed me in the ways that it did. Not because filmmaking was a daunting and challenging feat, but because I knew that, beyond filming, the people who lived, worked, had families, and were part of this community still had to contend with their realities. Despite documenting what this neighbourhood looked like two summers away from its scheduled completion date, people still had rent to pay, people still had mouths to feed, people still needed to survive. The almost eight-year task that has been creating an extended LRT line has entirely depleted the character of a community. What will be left of what we’d made of that space beyond a mural, a stationary roadside plaque, and the renaming of a back alley to Reggae Lane? In the eight months since I’ve filmed, shops have closed, lives have changed, and an important pillar of the community—Ronald “Jimmy” Ashford Wisdom—has died.

This all made me begin to think more about who gets archived in the collective Canadian, or even Toronto, memory. Whose cultural legacy and heritage are etched into our public and national consciousness? Canada touts diversity, by virtue of its immigration policies and the many Black people and people of colour who benefit from them, as its biggest asset. But it simply sees diversity as something to be achieved, a checkmark made to signify completion—and little thought is reserved for thinking about how and what diversity looks like in practice, beyond nation building or adding onto the national mythology. When we’re no longer of use for domestic labour, seasonal agricultural work, or any other surface reasons, are we not still worthy of being remembered?

I’ve discerned that much of the Black experience historically has been living in transit. We were kidnapped from the continent and brought to foreign land by force, through blood, and over hills and valleys too. We seem to be forever engaged in a never ending race towards freedom both literally and metaphorically. And this hasn’t changed from our contemporary realities as we come to know them through the plights and familiar stories of our migration. Though we may leave any area we’re in for an array of reasons, we seem to be a restless people, always running towards or away from something, but always with the ability to recreate home in the most innovative ways. Is it cruel irony that in the case of Little Jamaica, a transit line largely for other people is prioritized over our own sense of belonging? Perhaps.

I realized the process of etching who we are and what we’ve done into a collective national imagination is a bank of knowledge that is to be created by our own hands and powered by our own voices. I mean, who can tell the story of the paradoxical Black experience better than us? We’re made to feel both hyper visible and invisible. Our community is everywhere, but nowhere. We are known and unknown, and maybe that aspect of our identity makes us unique.

Perhaps Canada shouldn’t rest on its diversity and multicultural laurels too much if it means we don’t actively preserve the cultural legacies of the people who colour the nation. When the people who have been responsible for documenting the history of this nation are not intent on honouring the lives of people who have contributed to its tapestry, they take away from the possibilities and power of what could become should those stories be heard. The table’s big enough, and we should have a seat too.

In ways large and small, having the internet in your pocket changes the urban experience. Illustration by Matt Daley.

I stood there on the street, squinting into my phone, needing to double check. Could the nondescript restaurant before me really have, as the anonymous web commenter put it, “the. best. hot sauce. ever.”? It didn’t seem likely. But sure enough, after popping inside, the fiery, garlicky concoction was a revelation. Later that day, when I stepped into a seedy bar I’d walked by a hundred times before, it turned out that my phone was right again: there was a poetry slam going on inside. Suddenly, this neighbourhood I thought I knew well was full of surprises.

This is part of the charm of a new wave of mobile web applications—best publicized by the ubiquitous iPhone, but available on dozens of commonly available smartphones—that tell us more about our neighbourhoods than ever before, simply by relying on the people who live there. These applications promise to take previously scattered, separated bits of information and put them all in one easy-to-access place as they become more widespread. When you can walk down the street, quite literally holding the voices of a city in your hand, you get a step closer to realizing the elusive dream of urban diversity.

With web access and GPS now standard on most smartphones, there has been a torrent of location-based applications that tell you something about where you are right now. Among the most recent and talked-about arrivals is Foursquare (currently available for use in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal). Partly a game meant to encourage urban exploration and socializing, Foursquare users “check-in” with their smartphones upon arriving at places like a coffee shop or a bar and accumulate points for doing so.

It’s all admittedly a little silly, but each location in Foursquare also includes suggested to-do lists. When you settle into a new spot you’re able to see other users’ recommendations. Though these recommendations are usually pretty straightforward, at other times you’ll find things you may not have even heard of. My favourite tip so far suggested that you ask your server for “the secret pink menu” at a certain restaurant. You could call it a new approach to urban discovery, one that takes the online mantra of “by the people, for the people” and mixes it with happenstance.

Or take Yelp, another popular application, which lists user reviews of everything from restaurants to dentists. It’s even more futuristic, in that it actually puts a layer of information atop the street image on your phone’s camera—listing prices, opinions and directions to similar establishments just by having you hold up your phone. It’s as if you were suddenly given a pair of glasses from the future. More importantly, services like Yelp provide something its print progenitors could not: serendipity. In the past, anyone with enough time and interest could tease out the secrets of a city’s hidden corners through alt-weeklies, travel guides, or ethnic newspapers. While those outlets are still great for providing alternative takes on urban life, they aren’t very good at aggregating all that difference.

After all, it hardly makes sense to write up the newest mainstream dance club in a small immigrant newspaper—not because readers wouldn’t be interested, but because too few would care enough to make it worthwhile. The economics of print means you have to cater to a very specific audience with very specific information.

In a way, those silos of knowledge help divide cities into disconnected parts by separating people into demographic groups and then only telling these groups about themselves. By instead relying on users of all stripes to share their own, unique knowledge, urban mobile web apps put far more of a city’s voices and perspectives on the same page.

Part of being a truly diverse city means allowing all citizens the potential to break out of their silos and experience the new. One way of going about this—maybe the best way—is simply to stumble upon new things; the mobile web does a much better job of allowing for serendipity because all the information is, well, there in your hand, waiting to nudge you at just the right time. The mobile web creates a kind of equity by aggregating information in one, more neutral place.

Sure, this is a little utopian right now. There is, after all, the minor problem of needing to have that fancy phone with a $900per-month bill (give or take). Never mind the fact that, just because these services exist, it doesn’t mean anyone has figured out how to encourage a truly representative sample of people to use them.

But what it does mean is that the potential is there. I’m finding things I never knew existed by wandering around my hometown with my face glued to my phone. So far, my discoveries have been relatively mundane—some hot sauce here, an unannounced event there.

But I also feel as if I’m being encouraged to move out of my comfort zone. Each time I timidly head into somewhere new, I’m running into both experiences and crowds that I haven’t before. If fostering true diversity is about allowing real cultural exchange, then maybe peering into our smartphones is actually a decent place to start.

The first step to getting help, they say, is admitting you have a problem. That part took me years of halting, painful introspection and self-doubt.

Later, I told friends—just a handful at first. They weren’t surprised; some of them even admitted to the same problem.

Finally, I decided it was time to get serious, and that I needed to call in the professionals.

Nervous, faintly humiliated, I dialed the number to the National Anti-Racism Council of Canada and explained myself. I think I might be a little bit racist, I said. And I’d like to change.

If this story were scripted in Hollywood, it would end with a scene of me dancing at a great big crazy ethnic wedding—my own. If there’s adversity at the beginning, you know how it’s going to end.

But the truth is, this story will always be unfinished. I can’t prove that I’ve kicked the habit, and any transgressions will never be known outside the privacy of my own brain. I’m not sure whether this is comforting or alarming, but I know I’m not alone in my feelings. In a 2007 poll on racial tolerance, almost half of Canadians were honest enough to admit to being at least “slightly racist.” Tempting as it is to despair about this number, I felt that it was, in a way, also hopeful. An admission of prejudice is not necessarily a proud admission. In my case, it sure as shit wasn’t—it was a problem in need of a solution. If the next question in the poll had been “Would you like to be less racist?” I would have answered with an unqualified “yes!” and, again, I would not be alone.

Canada talks a good game on acceptance and diversity: our official bilingualism, our policy of multiculturalism, the crazy-quilt ethnic jumble of our big cities, the throat-singers and tango-dancers and tabla-players who share the stage at Parliament Hill each Canada Day. But I came to feel a strange disconnect between this image of a national rainbow-coloured paradise and my daily reality, which featured a grim mixture of resentment, misunderstanding, and petty grievance. I liked the idea of the paradise, but I couldn’t live up to it. I began to wonder if the failing was mine or theirs.

Now, it wasn’t anything nutso. I was never proud of my feelings. I didn’t believe that I was right in any absolute sense. I was a liberal, tolerant person by and large, and I loved living in a city where so many different ethnic groups rubbed elbows. But, ironically enough, it was moving into one such community that started me off on my path to intolerance.

I had been warned. A friend of mine moved to the neighbourhood several years earlier. He was quite vocal about his dislike of his neighbours, who I’ll call the Quiddinese*. He described them as “rude” and “insular.” His friends were shocked at his blunt appraisal, and I secretly judged him for it. Hmm, I thought. Xenophobic. It must be because he’s Québécois.

A few years later, the turn was mine.

Oh, the Quiddinese. Time and again, these people refused, it seemed to me, to give me a reason to like them. They were grouchy when I visited their shops—grouchier, I thought, with me than with each other. The men appeared to spend all their days smoking and kibitzing. The women looked to me hunched and joyless from years of hard work. Their children seemed to specialize in noisemaking: blatting, thumping cars, shouted conversations. I tried to make nice at first, but was soon defeated by their surliness and gave up. My dislike metastasized: I began to project it onto the peculiarities of Quiddinese home decor: Ugly people, I thought. Ugly dwellings. I dismissed the entire culture.

For years I lived like this, grumpy in a grumpy land. I narrowed my eyes when I passed their houses. I resigned myself to the most perfunctory transactions with them riding on the bus, passing on the sidewalk, in the local stores. A sense of home and belonging should not stop once you’ve left the house, yet I felt rejected in my own city, in my own neighbourhood. I tried to get used to living in a cloud of vague hostility, like background radiation. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t submit to it. It wasn’t just that I was mad at my Quiddinese neighbours; I was mad at myself. I had failed. I had surrendered to intolerance.

And so my quest began to unbias myself. In doing this, I knew I would be putting Canada to the test as well as myself. We all know the rhetoric: as Ayman Al-Yassini of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation told me, “As a country we are committed to multiculturalism.” Well, okay, I thought. But how committed? Enough to help out the almost 50 per cent who admitted to being racist?

The CRRF was, Al-Yassini said, in the business of dealing with “situations of racism and discrimination, or how to deal with it if you are the one having these thoughts or tendencies … and how to work on addressing it.” Perfect, I thought: maybe there’ll be a support group I can join, Racists Anonymous or something. Bring on the 12 steps.

That’s not quite how it works, as it turns out. The CRRF has a few different initiatives, mostly bureaucratic in nature, but “we don’t deal with individuals,” Al-Yassini told me.

I began scouring the web for someone else who might be able to help. Eventually I found a local woman whose website described her as being “trained in the areas of diversity leadership, equity, education, and workplace issues.” I decided to give her a call.

As soon as I explained myself (“Hi, I’m just wondering what kind of resources you might have for someone who believes themselves to be racist. I think I might be a little bit racist”) she was, it seemed to me, sternly vigilant. She wanted the full spelling of my name, where I worked, my phone number. (In my paranoid fantasies, she was preparing to file a police report.) She said she didn’t like to use the word “racism,” because people recoiled from it; instead, she preferred to talk about “anti-racism.” This sounded like crazy talk, but I was too cowed to argue. She said she would consider the project and call me back. She never did.

I supposed a moral climate checkered with both judgment and sympathy was all anyone in the process of reforming could expect. But it was humiliating, and not for the faint of heart. I took a perverse kind of solace in the thought that plenty of people might harbour dark feelings, but I was actually woman enough to dredge them up and examine them. “I think the numbers are probably higher than 50 percent of Canadians who are racist,” said Tina Lopes, a Toronto-based race-relations educator. “I would be surprised if it was not closer to 80 percent of people who learn to be racist and sexist and homophobic.”

Nor would I. But what, then, were we supposed to do about it? Anorexics, alcoholics, people with anger management problems, sex addicts—all of them can find treatment in any mid-size city. The prejudiced? That’s another story. No wonder we tamp our feelings down, will them not to exist, and hope for the best.

Denial might work in the short term—it always does—but as any dime-store psychologist will tell you, trying to ignore something pretty much guarantees it will surface later. If we don’t admit to “owning” our own prejudice, as the shrinks say, we are certain to express it in oblique ways, ignorant to any harm we may be causing.

When Suaad Hagi Mohamud—a black woman whose identity was questioned by the Canadian High Commission in Nairobi—was detained there for three months, no one involved in the incident dared to suggest that cultural bias played into it, when how could it not? She was a) dark-skinned, b) a woman, and c) veiled: three traits that, whether or not they should, carry a certain baggage. Yet no one in a position of authority was willing to say, “Yes, we were wrong, because we were ignorant and prejudiced.” That would belie our national mythos.

Probably because the United States’s identity is so tied up with a history of stunningly obvious racial inequity that has forced blacks and whites into contact—and conflict—with each other, Americans seem more fluent in race relations—and more inclined to wear their biases on their sleeve. But racism in Canada, as author Pasha Malla wrote in an insightful Globe and Mail article in 2008, is the province exclusively of others. When it manifests in unseemly outbursts, we’re quick to judge, and seldom ask ourselves if we might harbour similar feelings.

As a muslim in the post 9-11 world, Nouman Ashraf is better qualified than many to talk about the discrepancy between what values Canadians say they hold and what they actually do. “Preferences and biases always exist,” he told me. We were chatting in a café on the campus of the University of Toronto, where he was head of the department of anti-racism and cultural diversity. “The question isn’t to illegalize them. The question is to ask people about how this affects our behaviour as individuals, as organizations, and broadly as a nation.”

A big man with a salt-and-pepper beard, he’s fast-talking and approachable, verging on cuddly. As we spoke, he scribbled organizational charts—reflecting his background in management studies—on paper napkins.

There are, he said, espoused theories—“the theory to which you give allegiance in your mind, and sincerely believe,” he explained—and theories-in-action, which are reflected in what we actually do.

“Our espoused theory,” said Ashraf, “is one of a multicultural nation.” Our theories-in-action, individually and collectively, are another story. Established Canadians may think they are generous, but newcomers arouse their baser instincts, according to Ashraf. All of us are reduced, by perceived threats to shared resources—such as jobs or spots in university—to the level of wildebeests locking tusks over a watering hole.

Professionally, Ashraf dealt with these conflicts by holding panel discussions at the university “on everything from religion and sexuality to race and culture.

“I think that we are a microcosm of the most diverse city on the planet.” He gestured at the lineup at the café counter, where students of all stripes stood gabbing as they waited to be served. “And one of my core beliefs is, if we don’t allow opportunities for our students to engage with this difference … we will have failed them.”

Yes! I thought. I wanted to high-five him. Engagement: that’s what I, in my clumsy way, was striving for. Someone who could talk to me on the level, who could challenge me without tipping into defensiveness. What I needed to do, suggested Ashraf, was seek out young Quiddinese who were, in his words, my “peeps.” The obvious retort was that they weren’t my peeps and that was the problem. Then I remembered Avery.

Avery (not his real name) was a former co-worker of mine, a Quiddinese guy who was so witty and sharp that I didn’t trust myself not to try to impress him, so I just stayed out of his way. What better way to impress someone than to tell them that you hated their ethnic heritage? I sent off an email explaining my project and hoped for the best.

Like al-Yassini, Estella Muyinda ran an organization—the National Anti-Racism Council of Canada—that was committed to fighting racism. And, like him, when I spoke to her on the phone, she had no resources for me. “If you’re talking about programs, we’re not hands-on, give-you-thisprogram-to-do, because no government organization is funding anything of that nature,” she told me. What NARCC does, she said, is support grassroots organizations that act on a local scale, by providing them with

educational materials. Although it was not within her purview, professionally, she did try to take on my problem. “What triggered it? Where is this coming from? These are the questions that you have to answer first because there’s no panacea to this,” she told me. “If you don’t get to the root of your bias,” she said, “you’ll have a lot of problems accepting any solutions that are out there.”

Well, I knew what triggered it: feeling like I was constantly being treated poorly in my own neighbourhood was one part of it. The other part was daily coming up against what I saw as conflicting values. Muyinda told me I should stop thinking of the difference in our values as a barrier. I knew I was being difficult, but really: wasn’t that advice a kind of a panacea? What if I really was getting secondary treatment from my Quiddinese neighbours because I was different from them? Was I supposed to continue trying to be friendly or patronizing their shops anyway, even though they might be discriminating against me just as much as the reverse?

And then there were deeper issues than social niceties: one of the problems I had with Quiddinese culture was that homosexuality was not accepted, but littering apparently was. What was I supposed to do, try to reframe these behaviours as merely “colourful” even though I found them untenable?

It didn’t help that the more I talked to people about my project, the more grumblings I heard from every direction.

“It isn’t the [Quiddinese], is it?” said Pasha Malla. “A friend of mine…called this morning and was like, ‘Ah, fuck, these [Quiddinese] people are driving me crazy!’”

My friends—who I had thought a pretty tolerant and broadminded group of people—began to tell me their stories. One had dated a Quiddinese guy. “His family didn’t like me one bit,” she said. “They would have rather he married his second cousin.”

Another had fallen off his bike on an icy street, in front of a group of five or so Quiddinese men. “They didn’t say anything,” he said. “They didn’t ask if I was alright or help me up. They just stared at me.”

“This sums up the [Quiddinese] community for me,” said Peter. He had been watching a sports game on TV but he missed the end. So, later, passing by a Quiddinese bar, he stopped to ask a small group of men how the game ended. “They looked at me,” said Peter, his voice hushed with remembered shock, “like I’d just asked them for money. They had these … dark looks, and they were like”—Peter made his voice gruff—“‘Two to one.’ And I was like, ‘Oh really, who scored?’… and I thought to myself, ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?!’ Anybody else would have been like, ‘Yeah! Right on! We won! Okay!’… They had this look of complete distrust and I walked away, and I was disappointed and furious.” Doubly disappointed and furious, perhaps, because Peter himself is Quiddinese-Canadian. “The people certainly aren’t friendly,” he said.

Having this company was sort of comforting—but only in the way that being part of a mob is comforting.

The problem with this scenario, of course, was that it relieved me of any responsibility. In this version of events, I was an innocent who had stumbled into a snakepit of malice. There had to be more to it than that. For one thing, I was wildly generalizing. As Pasha Malla said to his incensed friend, “It’s not all the [Quiddinese] people in the world that are driving you crazy.”

Ascribing a bunch of traits to a people in the name of culture was a crude but tempting tool that robbed people of their individuality. Yet it wasn’t baseless, exactly—the quality of the exchanges I had in Japan, for example, were different from exchanges I had elsewhere. It was like a pointillist painting: up close, each person retained his or her particular qualities, but when you stepped back, the sum total made a distinct picture.

Yet ascribing certain qualities to any group of people—cheerful, spontaneous, family-oriented, devout, say—opens the door for others to call them childlike, chaotic, lazy, superstitious. Straightforward becomes rude, politeness seems remote or chilly. Still, we apparently need the idea of a shared culture and shared values: this is what makes us a nation, instead of just a bunch of random people on a big patch of land. That shared culture is what causes us to root for our countrymen and -women at the Olympics, or to stitch the flag on our backpacks when we travel.

So, yes, I was allowing for the fact that this was a group of individuals I was dealing with, but that they also existed within a cultural matrix. And some of those broad cultural traits aligned with my neuroses like a key in a lock.

After all, while there are, as Ashraf pointed out, some general conditions that can lead to discrimination, our targets are not arbitrary. If I was to take on the full responsibility for my problem, I was going to have to look into the murky depths of my own psyche.

Some schools of analysis suggest that we revile in others traits that are unrealized aspects of ourselves. According to Sylvia Brinton Perera, a Jungian psychoanalyst I spoke to who wrote a book on the topic of scapegoating, the revulsion I felt for the Quiddinese swagger and machismo (among other qualities) was, according to this theory, a result of having been taught not to externalize emotions, not to indulge in noisy selfglorification, not to be exhibitionistic.

This felt truer to me than anything I’d yet heard. At the same time, nothing in me particularly wanted to nurture those qualities in myself. The resistance went deep, and for good reason: “You probably internalized [your family’s values] before you were five,” she said. Overcoming deeply learned things was a life’s work. I needed something a little more immediate.

“How many individuals do you know?” Perera asked me. “Because as long as it’s collective it’s harder to manage.”

Which brought me back to Avery. Incredibly, he had responded to my email. “I’m not sure I’ll be much help,” he wrote back. “We may end up drawing up the blueprints for the internment camp together.”

Needless to say, Avery had a complicated relationship to his heritage. Both his parents were Quiddinese but he grew up immersed in mainstream Canadian culture. Rather than thinking of himself as having a foot in both camps, he thought of himself as having a foot in neither. “I always think of this James Branch Cabell thing,” he said, “where he’s like, ‘Patriotism is the religion of hell’—because it is.” What most irked him, it seemed, was the obsession many Quiddinese had with defining themselves by their patrimony, to the exclusion of other cultures and influences.

To some extent, Avery felt Canada’s ethos of multiculturalism was to blame. “You tell people to celebrate diversity. So … what you eventually build is a street lined with [Quiddinese] flags, a street of people speaking their own language.”

It wasn’t just the Quiddinese though. He disliked any cultural hegemony.

After I moaned about the Quiddinese being so loud, he asked me this: “What if you were living in the Gay Village?” he said. “That’s pretty loud. You walked into a bakery and you were holding hands with your boyfriend, you might not get the nicest service … Do you think after a year you’d be like, ‘Those fucking gays,’ or anything like that?”

“I might be,” I said. “It’s possible. But I’m not such an idiot that I would cluster all gays together.” I was, apparently, idiot enough to cluster all Quiddinese together. But it was a question of exposure, as well. I’d grown up isolated from the Quiddinese. They stayed among their kind and I with mine. “The celebration of diversity,” Avery said, “is also really a cause of ghettoization.” Although our conversation was full of such textbook phrases and lofty ideas, it also acted as a kind of confessional. No matter how stupid or offensive my questions, Avery was gracious and forgiving. I came away feeling kind of … melty inside. If, as Joni Mitchell says, “Love is touching souls,” so is this kind of open, unafraid dialogue.

Later, riding my bike home, I passed a few older Quiddinese men shooting the breeze on the street corner, and I had this thought: Hey, one of those guys could be Avery’s father. It was ludicrous in its simplicity, not to mention deeply corny, but it was also refreshingly effective. For the first time since beginning my project, I had softened.

Of course, all that sympathy evaporated the next time I passed a group of Quiddinese men who stared at me as they threw their cigarette butts on the sidewalk. Or the next time I was given the cold shoulder at a shop where they clearly knew me.

Given all the conversations I’d had, I felt safe in saying that it wasn’t my imagination or some cultural misunderstanding: I really was getting a frosty reception. In that case, all I could do was hope to understand why.

“I personally think the distrust comes from a lack of confidence,” said Peter, who had recently moved into the neighbourhood and found himself troubled by the same questions I was. “Like, ‘Why do you care about us? Why do you want to know about us?’”

Like Avery, he implicated multiculturalism. “In a community like Toronto’s, where it’s big enough that you can be selfsufficient, it becomes ignorant and mistrustful.

“What I would love to come to an end,” he said, “is, when you arrive in Canada, the sense that you keep doing whatever you’re doing.”

But was integration that easy? In addition to being cut off from their own culture when they moved, said Avery, the community is “also refused access to being Canadian.”

And this, according to Tina Lopes, was at the heart of the matter.

The Quiddinese were and are underdogs, both in the city and on a global scale. They come from a region of the world that gets little respect, and when they moved here, their status didn’t change—except now they’re out of their element, too. So they created a safe haven, a defensive perimeter.

“The unfortunate thing,” said Lopes, “is that I sometimes see that when someone who’s part of the dominant society … comes into their neighbourhood, there’s a bit of ‘We’re going to give you a taste of what I get.’”

What they got? In all the service jobs I ever worked, I was patient with people who struggled with English. I even got selfcongratulatory goosebumps from successful transactions.

But then I remembered Avery telling me how, after high school, he had changed his name. He was brilliant and articulate, but his Quiddinese name alone was enough to discourage employers. In school fights, he said, it was always the Quiddinese kids who took the blame. And at work, his boss once suggested he was absent because he’d been napping in the stock room; it was half-joking—but half-not.

The whole thing was much bigger than me. Each of us was, in the eyes of the other, accountable for transactions involving the worst of our ilk. Mutual mistrust flavoured every meeting, with the result that both parties ended up acting edgy and unfriendly. “I don’t think it’s a good human response,” said Lopes, “but I have some compassion for what is behind it.”

It was weird, but I didn’t want to hear what Lopes was saying. “How much out of your 24 hours do you experience that ‘you’re not welcome’ vibe?” she asked me. “And then think about if you were in their shoes and you were experiencing that eight hours—more!—how much it would eat away at you.”

Basically, I didn’t want to hear about anything that pointed up my own privilege. The slightly insane reality was that I worried it threatened to delegitimize my unhappiness. I wanted the occasional right to wallow in self-pity without having to think, “But then, in absolute terms, my life doesn’t suck as much as my Quiddinese neighbour’s.” But the fact remained: I moved through society more easily than they did, enjoying successes—professional, social—that weren’t available to them. Which was another troubling matter for me. Was my success at the cost of theirs, somehow? If they were oppressed, was I therefore the oppressor? I (somewhat guiltily) doubted it: humanity has an unmerited love affair with absolutes. Most of us are made up of more complex matter. After all, as Peter told me, the Quiddinese can be racist themselves. No one has a monopoly on tolerance.

While it would be tempting to conclude that, at the end of this process, I’ve “crossed over to the other side”—racist no more!—the pat answer is not the honest one. It may not even be fair for us to ask such radical transformations of ourselves—do we really need the burden of another expectation we can’t live up to? Aside from a commitment to a complete psychic overhaul, the best we can do is exercise an honest awareness of our own shortcomings.

I’m still petty sometimes, still cursing Quiddinese choices in home decor, still mad that some of the men seem to spend their days loafing while the women do the work. But I also look at each person and try to imagine a world of alienation, of being second class wherever I go.

As for me and Avery? Well, maybe I’ll get that big ethnic wedding yet.

Permaculture means taking more responsibility for knowing how your food got to your plate. Photo by Zorani/iStockPhoto; photo illustration by Dave Donald.

Trent Rhode looks great in a suit. The 27-year-old resident of Peterborough, Ont., seems perfectly comfortable standing before a long table of elected officials twice his age, lecturing them on the importance of environmental sustainability. His message is simple but powerful: he tells his audience they are not separate from the environment—they are the environment. Natural resources are dwindling, he says, and now is the time to act.

Rhode sits on the steering committee of Transition Town Peterborough, a non-profit organization that is working toward building a self-sufficient community less dependent on fossil fuels; at this particular meeting he is outlining some of the group’s ideas for Peterborough’s municipal officials and bureaucrats. His power suit says he belongs in this boardroom—but it’s not actually where he prefers to be.

When his business there is done, Rhode slips into a comfortable pair of trousers and an old blue t-shirt and digs his hands deep into the soil. In his job as a natural gardener, Rhode works the land at several properties in Ontario. He spends his time not only designing, but also implementing edible “forest gardens” at an eco-education centre in Colborne, a farm in Cobourg, and a residential property near Belleville. His hometown, which he obviously holds dear to his heart, has hired him to maintain gardens in Peterborough.

As a five-year-old horsing around on his grandfather’s Belleville farm, Rhode couldn’t be bothered with the ins and outs of growing vegetables—he was much more interested in chasing the pigs and geese. But 12 years later, while researching agriculture for his journalism program at Loyalist College, he stumbled across a concept that would become the foundation of his future career and virtually every aspect of his life. The idea was permaculture.

“I became aware of how fragile agriculture is, and how it’s dependent on so many things,” he says. “I began to see how fragile the economy is for the same reasons. I became interested in what seemed to be a necessity. The future is uncertain—but what is certain is we need to eat.”

Rhode has applied to a master of science in integrative ecosocial design at Gaia University, a program that specializes in teaching people already involved in the “regeneration and world change fields.” Rhode is helping to organize an Ontario-wide permaculture convention to take place in Toronto in the fall, and evangelizes the principles of permaculture to just about anyone who will listen.

“The grocery store is the big box we go into and we buy our food,” he says. “There is no connection between the farm and our refrigerator. In this culture we take food for granted; it isn’t seen as the necessity it is. The way we think is fragmented and everything is disconnected, but permaculture seeks to integrate—it has a more holistic view.”

In other words, Rhode believes that putting these ideas into practice on the farm and in the garden can fix our ailing food supply; moreover, he believes permaculture can transform every aspect of our lives for the better. And he’s not alone.

So what exactly is permaculture? The term was coined in the 1970s by Bill Mollison and co-originated with another Australian academic, David Holmgren. Originally it stood for “permanent agriculture”: at a time when the burgeoning environmental movement was rediscovering ancient concepts like pesticide-free agriculture, Mollison and Holmgren bundled together these ideas into a complete design system for environmentally friendly food production.

Decades later, that design system has spread to many other fields, including architecture, economics, education, and spirituality, so that permaculture now really stands for permanent culture—a design philosophy for making every aspect of our lives truly sustainable. It advocates a dozen key principles, which include caring for the earth, caring for people, using and valuing renewable resources, integration rather than segregation, and using small and slow solutions.

Permaculture pioneer David Holmgren likens the system to a flower, with individual disciplines, the "petals," connected at the centre by a unified philosophy of sustainable design. Diagram design by David Holmgren; illustration by Dave Donald.

And if there’s one thing a permaculture advocate can’t stand, it’s waste. The throwaway, wasteful society we live in now, they say, can’t last: idling in the drive-thru to get a coffee from Starbucks, driving in our gas guzzlers the few blocks from home to the grocery store, all to purchase onions from Egypt, apples from Chile, and broccoli from Spain. Then, when we get home, it all goes in a power-sucking refrigerator to keep it from going bad.

“People often think, ‘The first thing I need to do is to change the way I move around in a vehicle or how I heat my house,’” says David Holmgren from his home in Victoria, Australia. “And those things are important. But we eat every day, and our decisions in what we eat, and how we eat, and how we get that food, are enormously powerful. Permaculture aims to redesign the whole food-production chain.”

That means more household self-reliance, such as growing some of our own food and doing some of the chores our grandparents did—food growing, canning, clothes mending, and DIY of all sorts—in order to reduce our environmental footprint and cut back on the wastefulness that has brought us to the brink of dangerous and irreversible environmental decline. Permaculture means changing more than just the contents of your fridge: it means altering some fundamental aspects of the way you live your life.

Which all seems like a bit of an undertaking, to say the least. But not to worry: permaculture is based on slow-and-steady change, starting, literally, in your own backyard.

The modern farm is an industrial marvel, a factory for growing as much food as possible in the smallest space at the lowest cost. But it can’t last: plants and animals aren’t cogs in a machine, and industrial farming is beginning to run up against some fundamental limits of nature. Drive around in the country, and you’ll pass rows and rows of monoculture crops planted horizontally. Behind the scenes, huge amounts of chemically manufactured nitrogen and phosphorous are pumped into the soil to prevent it from becoming infertile— these chemicals then leak into the groundwater and, inevitably, into the ocean. Modern farming requires about 10 calories of energy for every calorie of food produced, which means growing food isn’t actually production at all, it’s just another type of consumption.

If you wander into your nearest grocery story right now, the answer to this problem appears to be to label everything “organic.” See that well-heeled yuppie in the checkout line buying $10 organic oatmeal? Her great-grandmother would probably scoff at the label (and the cost) because the term would have been meaningless: organic was all she ever knew, and it didn’t need a fancy name. Her apples had spots on them because the chemicals and hormones that now bathe modern fruits and vegetables just didn’t exist. The “organic” label is a modern invention, a backlash against industrial farming. As a marketing tool, the word has been very successful.

But saying something is organic doesn’t automatically mean it’s sustainable. Permaculture and organic agriculture share some obvious traits, but it is possible to have one without the other. For example, those carrots at the supermarket might be labelled “organic,” but if they’re packed in a plastic bag and shipped from South America, they’re hardly environmentally friendly. You’d be better off buying non-organic produce from your local farmers’ market, because the food you buy there has less packaging and burned less gas to get to you. Similarly, you’d be better off buying the pork chop of a local free-roaming pig that got a few injections than you would that of a pig that has all the paperwork required to label it “organic,” but that lived in a barn eating processed feed pellets.

What this means, say permaculture activists, is that it’s simply not enough to throw some organic instant waffles in your shopping cart and get on with your life: it’s our responsibility to truly know what we’re eating and how it got to our plate. Individually, culturally, economically, spiritually, we really are what we eat.

The reason these questions are so important right now is that it is becoming increasingly obvious that the world as we know it is in big trouble.

The chief scientific adviser of the U.K., professor John Beddington, recently said we are facing a “perfect storm,” where shortages of water, food, and energy sources will take a devastating toll on the world. He reckons we have about 20 years.

Holmgren, however, says the storm is already upon us. “We are in a continuous economic, energetic climate crisis,” he says. “The way that unfolds will be difficult to predict, but I think most of these statements that are being made by even well-meaning people at higher levels are enormously underplaying things.”

Steve Jones, an ecologist and permaculture teacher in Wales, agrees that the crisis is already here. He has a scary name for this historical period we’re entering: “descent culture”—a perilous time of scarce resources, declining standards of living, and social breakdown. What goes up, he says, must come down.

“It is a basic law of physics and therefore inescapable,” he says. “It will change everything. It will change the way we think. The next generation will look back at us thinking we were crazy or naïve. At best we will be leaving them a world scarred by fossil fuel use and dependent on cheap energy that is no longer there. It is going to be very tough over the next few decades whilst we figure out how to respond.”

Jones emphasizes that oil is at the root of the problem. He says no other energy source can rival petroleum in terms of energy density, ease of access, and sheer usefulness.

But it is not sustainable. He doesn’t believe we’ll run out of oil entirely, he says, but “we have probably used half the available supply that is in the ground, the easy half to get hold of. So at some point, possibly quite soon, the world supply will peak, and the rate at which it can be extracted from the ground will go into a decline that cannot and will not be reversed.” Permaculture advocates say we’d be better off modifying our way of life now than waiting for nature to do it for us. Holmgren, for instance, doesn’t see much point in trying to build an environmentally friendly car when the sanest choice would be to, well, just drive less. The point isn’t to build a better rat race—it’s to get out of it altogether. We might as well accept these changes with a positive outlook, Holmgren says, because “whatever we do in the future, we’re going to have a lot more success by figuring out how to not do things than desperately trying to create ways to maintain current patterns of living that just aren’t going to work.”

The view at Yves Zehnder's Sacred Sueños farm in Vilcabama, Ecuador. Photo by Jenn Hardy.

Two-and-a-half hours walk up a mountain in Vilcabamba, Ecuador, lives a 34-year-old red-headed farmer named Yves Zehnder. He is a farmer in every sense of the word: this is no side project, and he has no additional day job. He works hard every day from sunrise to sunset (and sometimes beyond) managing the 10 hectares of land he lives on.

Fearing that his frustration with our society might turn him into an eco-terrorist, Zehnder left his home in northern Ontario 14 years ago, and five years ago decided to live sustainably in the south of Ecuador. A mere $1,400 in his bank account gave him residency and home became a tent on top of an Andean mountain. He lived in the tent for six months while he single-handedly built the adobe brick communal facilities the farm labourers now use.

At first, life at the farm, called Sacred Sueños, was hard. When he arrived at his mountainside property nothing would grow except bracken fern. The soil, because of the unsustainable slash-and-burn farming in the area, was basically infertile. In retrospect, would he have chosen land with better soil? “No,” he says. “It taught me patience and perseverance. It was an ethical decision to change poor soil into something fertile. I didn’t want to be a frivolous white boy who buys good land and has it all. This way I have been able to find solutions to big problems and share that knowledge.”

Slowly, but surely, he put permaculture’s techniques to work on the farm. For example, he uses a composting toilet. One of the permaculture principles is that in nature, there is no such thing as waste. So Zehnder has a “humanure” system, turning every bit of human feces back into soil. Once a guest uses the lovely mountainside-view toilet (a glorified bucket under a seat) he or she scoops up a coconut shell of sawdust (happily donated to Zehnder by a sawmill down the hill) and covers the mess. The last to fill the bucket empties it in the appropriate pile.

He also uses a “chicken tractor.” His five hens don’t have to do much heavy lifting, but they are penned in a large area, and their natural scratching and digging for grubs turns the soil under their feet. Chicken poop is also an excellent fertilizer that prepares the ground for plants when the “tractor” is relocated a week later.

Zehnder strategically plants trees to help him create shade during the four-month dry season and others that prevent erosion during the rainy season.

He and his partner, Jennifer Martin, keep chickens for eggs, donkeys, a horse, and goats for milk and cheese. They grow delicious native fruit like naranjillas, which often come from “volunteers” as he calls them—seeds that blossom out of the “humanure.” (He has also had the help of human volunteers who come to work on the farm.)

Yves Zehnder with Sacred Sueños' two donkeys, Bonne and Posito. Photo by Jenn Hardy.

The homemade shower is heated by a black tube coiled to attract the sun, and it has the same beautiful valley view as the toilet—which leaves everyone fighting over the opportunity to be naked outside.

Natural building is a part of the permaculture design system that often uses a material called “cob,” traditionally made of clay, sand, straw, water and earth, an easy combination to find when building a straw-bale house somewhere like Canada or the U.K. Finding straw up top a mountain in Ecuador, however, is more of a challenge. True to the system he follows, Zehnder has gone one step further with cob. He sees the use of an organic material such as straw as a waste and instead uses shredded plastic bags to bind the material together.

Though he now has much better soil, his work is far from finished. A friend has recently purchased the 40 hectares of neighbouring land, and Zehnder will make use of it for rotating pastures and reforestation. Aside from the daily chores that come with running such a large piece of land, Zehnder is building an educational centre at Sacred Sueños, where he will teach permaculture not only to rich Westerners who can make their way down there, but also to locals who can take the course with scholarships.

It’s easy to see that permaculture puts an emphasis on human manual labour. This is why critics often call it uneconomical or impractical when it comes to large-scale farming. But the manual labour is exactly what permaculture adherents like about it. For them it’s about taking your life into your own hands.

Grégoire Lamoureux is another farmer who is putting permaculture into practice. On Spiral Farm in Winlaw, B.C., where he has lived for almost two decades, Lamoureux says permaculture is “looking at design issues and implementing them in human habitat—where people live and taking into account places for every living being as well. It doesn’t exclude other living creatures.”

Growing up on a dairy farm in southern Quebec, Lamoureux quickly learned what he didn’t want to do when he grew up. He didn’t want to be involved with large monoculture farming. He first learned about permaculture in the ’80s, and now on his farm, on the western bank of the Slocan River, he grows a diversity of plants, fruits, nuts, useful trees, and vegetables, mostly for his own use. He dries and cans food to keep himself going all year round. Lamoureux teaches other people at Spiral Farm, but also takes his knowledge on the road and teaches courses across the country.

The movement has spread through such courses taught by people like Lamoureux. They are now available all over the world, adapted to different climates and skill levels. Some introductory courses are taught in a day, although there are also two-week intensive design courses that grant certificates and qualifications to teach.

A typical permaculture design course covers the essential principles and elements, as well as some hands-on experience. In the two-week course, you learn about the ethics of sustainability, building soil fertility, natural building design, waste recycling and treatment, and water harvesting, among others.

And it’s not all about back-to-the-land living of the type Yves Zehnder is doing; some courses are designed for curious urbanites. Lamoureux, for instance, teaches one for people who want to start a container garden on their balcony. “Some people feel the negative sides of living in a city,” he says. “The course can empower you to feel more comfortable where you live. People can take information home and apply the ideas.”

For Sandra Storr, who runs Romany Rest, a 120-year-old farmhouse bed and breakfast, using permaculture principles in P.E.I., it made the most sense to get her certification online. She says online study was not only economical, but it meant she didn’t have to fly across the world to do it. (Anyone who is serious about the environment, she says, avoids flying as much as possible.) Storr isn’t only concerned about reducing her carbon emissions, but reducing—period. That was her first aim when she and her husband, Fred, immigrated to Canada from Wales in 2006.

The bed and breakfast uses solar power for showers and the swimming pool. While a solar electricity system is a bit out of range at the moment, they have looked to low-tech permaculture solutions such as passive solar—renovating their farmhouse to include big windows that face the sun, and, in true DIY fashion, they made reflectors out of plywood and aluminum emergency blankets, which double or triple the amount of sunlight, and therefore heat, that enters the building. The property features 26 micro wind turbines.

Storr says her solutions are “cheap and cheerful”: she’s covered some of the non-essential windows in bubble wrap to keep heat in.

The couple rarely visit the grocery store, even to keep the B&B operating. They keep a few chickens running around and some sheep. Like Lamoureux, Storr teaches on-site and does her own bottling, canning, and dehydrating. She is most interested in beans, cooked grains, wheat, and seeds, and she keeps a root cellar. And thanks to the provincial government’s forest regeneration scheme, the property now has a hectare of new native trees in its backyard.

“I had heard of permaculture years ago, but thought of it as simply another form of gardening,” says Storr. “We already had an organic garden in Wales and I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. It wasn’t until five years ago that I realized it was about so much more—a whole system designed to mimic natural systems and function efficiently.” She explains that it was studying permaculture more intensely that taught her to bring everything together.

“When we first got here we didn’t think five acres was big enough. But, because permaculture is such an efficient system, now I think, what do we do with all this space?” In a permaculture garden, you don’t see row upon row of the same crop. The system discourages monocultures and promotes the use of vertical space. That means that permaculture gardens often end up like a chaotic mess, with plants tangled in amongst each other—the way they are in nature.

“Instead of transforming the environment to fit your needs,” Lamoureux says, “you have to use the existing environment and adapt your needs to it.”

What a lovely idea this permaculture is. Lovely perhaps, but maybe not too practical. We don’t all have the time or money to leave our lives behind and start a full-scale farm. Even if we could afford it, not everyone has a burning desire to be a farmer and live off the land. Similarly, many people living in an apartment or a house with a small garden just don’t have time to grow tomatoes. We like eating grapefruit, mangoes, and bananas year-round. We like to listen to our iPods and drink Starbucks from disposable cups. Plenty of us like our Land Rovers! This is normal life for most of us, and the general feeling is no one has the right to take that away.

And no one is taking it away—just yet. But no matter how you slice it, big changes in energy and economics are coming soon. If we clue in to the idea that capitalism, and all the wonderful things that come with it, are not sustainable as they now exist, we may be able to make small changes in our individual lives that could mitigate the crises still to come.

It may require some effort, but there are many ways to implement permaculture into your life now. Changes can be made slowly and relatively painlessly. Don’t want to grow your own food? Then why not participate in Community Supported Agriculture and buy a weekly food basket from a local farmer? Or challenge yourself at the grocery store to search for food that was produced in your own country. If it ain’t broke, don’t buy a new one. If it is broke, fix it. For too long we have lived as if we were characters in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, happily reciting, “Ending is better than mending. The more stitches, the less riches.”

To the chagrin of Greenpeace activists everywhere, not everyone actually cares about the environment. Not everyone believes the earth has a soul and we should worship her in all her glory. What most people do care about, however, is their wallets, and the truth is, virtually everything about permaculture is about saving cash. (Saving trees, seeds, and the world might come next on the list.)

Permaculture devotees generally come in two camps: the ones who see it as a kind of spiritual devotion and the ones who see it as a scientifically rigorous system.

23-year-old Sara Bresee is definitely in the first category. She learned about permaculture while going on a spiritual retreat in Spain. On top of a mountain, she lived in a teepee, sat in sweat lodges, and danced barefoot with her hippie self. While building a mandala in the garden, she met a man who introduced her to a few permaculture techniques. “I thought, ‘That’s the smartest thing in the world,’” she says. And it was something she could take back with her to her urban life in Montreal, where she is studying to be a nutritionist and a yoga teacher, and works at a raw vegan restaurant.

Bresee and her three roommates share a community garden a five-minute walk from home, where they grow their own vegetables. They also support Community Supported Agriculture, a world-wide network which gives urbanites the opportunity to support local food growers. The roommates opt for a family-sized vegetable basket, which provides them with local organic food year-round. Bresee says it is the perfect way to create community links between the city and the country.

It is this spiritual connection that interests Bresee most: “Permaculture, as a way of life, has acknowledged that no man or woman can do everything on their own, and thus community is undeniably important. This holistic view, to me, is what makes permaculture sustainable, what makes everything come together in the end.”

As a basis for spirituality, Bresee says permaculture’s spiritual message is “let’s care for ourselves, care for each other, and care for the earth. It’s simple, beautiful, and true.” Across the Atlantic, 27-year-old Faye Tomson falls into the science camp. Tomson, who is completing her masters in environmental engineering at the University of Leeds, is specializing in renewable energy and low-energy housing “in a bid to try and restore the balance,” she says.

“Working in such a field is twofold,” she says. “Not only is it useful—and necessary in the transition to a low-carbon economy—it’s also lucrative. My family has no money and is unlikely to in the near future. My dream is to earn enough to move us all away to some far-flung place away from the masses when it all goes tits up—which I don’t think is going to be very long from now.”

She jokes that she’s anticipating some Armageddon-style scenario—but she’s only half kidding. “When the shelves are empty,” she says, “people are going to fight and riot and steal and hurt each other. I want to be far away by then. With my family.” For Tomson, it isn’t only new technologies that will be important in the future, but long-lost crafts and trades like horsemanship, woodwork, knitting, sewing, and leather tanning.

“People of like minds really need to get together—leave egos at the door, and start building arks,” she says. There is urgency in her tone. “Save seeds that haven’t been messed up by companies like Monsanto, and learn as many skills as possible. Learn how to keep bees and preserve and store food for winter months. This is serious. Agriculture is dying, and the old ways have gone. We must relearn them—and fast.”

Trent Rhode can’t argue with Tomson’s desire for immediate change, although he doesn’t share her survivalist viewpoint. But while Tomson and Yves Zehnder may choose to build lives outside the city limits, right now Rhode is comfortable working in an urban setting.

“How can you be a hermit and live by yourself in the forest, when your air and water quality is affected by people on the other side of the world?” he asks. “We are not independent in that sense. We drink the same water and breathe the same air.” Rhode believes it would be possible for people to grow almost all of their own food within city limits, if all the available land were put into productive use.

“If cities were actually consciously designed to take into account all human needs through time, the possibilities would be endless,” he says. “There’s this idea that somehow human civilization is diametrically opposed to a healthy environment and that somehow we are separate from the natural world.”

His goal is to help urbanites realize that our cities are as much a part of the natural world as a beaver dam or beehive: “It’s the very perception that we are somehow separate from the environment around us, and that our actions toward the environment have no consequences to us, that leads to the creation of such destructive human habitats.”

Rhode would like to own a farm one day. But he hopes to own it collectively, with the thought that you can learn so much from other people and their experiences. Like a natural ecosystem, he says, living in a community makes everything stronger and more resilient.

“It’s exciting and energizing to be with people who understand what’s going on in the world and understand what we need to do to live in harmony and to live, period,” he says. “The most important thing is to give people hope.”

As individuals and as a society, we love our automobiles — even as we hate how they screw up our planet, our cities, and our lives. Environics Research Group, a Toronto based research firm, found that 32 percent of Canadians see their wheels as an extension or reflection of their style and image. For the other 63 percent, it’s an appliance, a tool used to get from A to B. Recreational driving may seem, in an age of climate change, to be a destructive past-time. But the auto collectors and recreational drivers aren’t the problem, just as connoisseurs of fine wine, who prize quality over quantity, aren’t necessarily problem drinkers. It’s the people who drive (or drink) all the time — mindlessly, compulsively, because they can’t help themselves — who do the real damage to themselves and others. That’s addiction — and collectively, we’re pretty close to hitting bottom. The automobile has wasted our time, choked our air, and destroyed many downtowns while spurring sprawl in the suburbs. Obviously, cars aren’t about to go away completely (though we can certainly hope they change dramatically over the next few years). But let’s never forget: the fault, dear drivers, lies not in our cars, but in ourselves.

As with all addictions, change will only occur if we want to change, both individually and collectively. This handy 12-step program for car dependency may help, but in the end only you can decide when it’s best to leave the keys at home and go another way.

Photo by Sergeo Syd

1. Accept that we have a problem

Let’s be honest: cars are cool, sexy, and fun and provide us with speed, power, and freedom. Some of them offer gorgeous styling, luxurious comfort, and advanced engineering (not to mention great sound systems). And then there are the memories. Having suffered through the motion sickness of family road trips, we finally turn 16 and start hanging out in cars with friends, reveling in our first taste of freedom from our parents, and fumbling through early experiments with sex — good times many of us spend the rest of our lives wishing we could recapture. So cars come with a lot of positive baggage. But we’ve gone too far and designed our existence around the automobile. You may hear some dreamers talk about a car-free world (see page 16). Don’t believe them. Fortunately, breaking our addiction doesn’t have to mean never driving our wheels again — a recovering alcoholic may never be able to drink again, and people who’ve given up the cancer sticks may envy the social smokers, but being an occasional driver is nothing to be ashamed about.

2. Educate ourselves about the alternatives

Sometimes the car, a really convenient device, can’t be beat for getting around. In fact, there’s no better way to whisk a gaggle of kids and their oversized hockey bags to a far-flung arena. And while high-speed trains are long overdue in this country, you’ll still want to travel to cottages, campgrounds, and mountains. But if you never go anywhere unless it’s in a car, you need to consider walking, cycling, and public transit. Sure, buses can be crowded, inconvenient, and unreliable — I thought my wife, Carmen, had stood me up on our first date, though to this day she blames Ottawa’s OC Transpo for her tardiness — but they are also economical, encourage reading, and let you feel more virtuous. Of course, these alternatives only work in places where there are stores, restaurants, and other spots worth walking to, where cyclists can travel safely and where the population density is enough to support public transit. /// 3. Start with the moSt baSic Form oF traNSportatioN — walkiNg Aside from being the most pleasant places to live and encouraging other ways of getting around, walkable neighbourhoods create better communities. It’s no coincidence that Calgary is both the most sprawled and the most conservative large city in Canada, while the two densest big cities south of the border — New York and San Francisco — are the most liberal American ones. When we live in sprawl and spend so much time cooped up in our cars, we develop strange notions about life. But when we walk around our neighbourhood we soon discover that other races, religions and socio-economic classes aren’t scary after all. Sprawl stokes fear; density fosters tolerance.

4. Admit the harm our actions have on ourselves

Every year, 1.2 million people die on the world’s roads. But even when we survive our drive, sitting sedentary behind a steering wheel is no way to go through life. Drive-through windows at fast-food joints are just the beginning: there are now drive-through pharmacies, banks, and even libraries. Meanwhile, parenting has become little more than glorified chauffeuring as we raise a generation of kids who never walk anywhere.

5. understand the wrongs of the past

Urban sprawl — dominated by cloned homes, lowslung strip malls, and clogged arterial roads — forces people to drive more and makes no aesthetic, economic, or environmental sense. Among other sins, sprawl encourages drunk driving: partiers will take the car when they live so far from bars, restaurants, and friends’ homes that walking is too daunting, public transit is too incon-venient, and taking a cab is too expensive. Decades of short-sighted urban planning have put us in this mess, and fixing the problem will take time, but we need to start intensifying our neighbourhoods now.

6. Treat others as we would like to be treated

Sure, cruising down an open highway can be a blast, but lurching along in bumper-to-bumper traffic is no fun. A tense commute is, at best, dispiriting and exhausting; at worst, it can lead to road rage, which is an extension of the increase in aggressive driving (including following too closely, travelling at excessive speeds, weaving through traffic, running stop lights) and the decline in civility on the road.

We behave differently (read: more irrationally) when we’re behind the wheel of a car, which — especially if it’s a big SUV — can create a sense of isolation and invincibility. The anonymity of riding in a living room on wheels, an extension of the anonymity of suburban life, can weaken common sense and self-discipline so much that even upstanding citizens can act in ways they never would in a grocery store lineup. “Road-ragers are an unpredictable group,” Sgt. Cam Woolley, who recently retired from the Ontario Provincial Police, told me. “They’ve timed their commute down to the last second, and if anybody goes too slow or doesn’t drive the way they’d like, they go nuts.”

7. Don’t be part of the problem

The typical commute has lengthened substantially — to more than an hour for the average round trip in Canada — as people seek cheaper homes and larger lawns. This is not just bad for air quality, it’s bad for quality of life. You’ve probably heard drivers rationalize that their commute is their only alone time: a chance to think, to listen to their favourite music, or to simply enjoy some rare silence. But if you’re like me, you want to yell, “Get a life, pal.”

8. When you must drive, do it well

Bad driving doesn’t just cause more collisions, it exacerbates congestion and increases commute times. Even a bad lane change can slow down everyone behind you. To Carlos Thomas, who runs Shifters, a school for drivers who want to learn the joys of stick shifts, the two biggest mistakes we make are not looking far enough ahead and following too closely. “The most common crash is the rear-end collision,” according to Thomas, “and it’s the most easily preventable crash.” Paradoxically, the easiest way to avoid smashing into the car in front of you is to look well ahead. When you tailgate you can’t see as far down the road so you miss advance warnings that you need to hit the brakes, and when you don’t look down the road you’re more likely to tailgate because it’s so easy to become fixated on the bumper in front of you. Seeing is crucial: Thomas says weak observation skills lead to poor lane changes, bad turns, loss of control in slippery conditions, and failure to recover after losing control. The other danger of becoming fixated on that bumper ahead is that your mind begins to wander and too often that ends badly.

Most tailgaters are cocky enough to believe they’ll have no trouble stopping in time, but the dynamics of traffic are more complex than most of us realize. In Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), author Tom Vanderbilt explains what happened when seven cars had to stop suddenly on a Minneapolis highway: the seventh car crashed into the sixth because the third car reacted too slowly — it didn’t hit the second car, but it reduced the stopping time available to those behind it. As Vanderbilt points out, tailgaters “increase their risk not only of striking the vehicle they’re following but of being struck by the car following them.”

9. Make amends to the planet

Given that we’ve located planets in distant solar systems, mapped the human genome, and put an iPod in every pocket, the inability of automakers to come up with something better than the internal combustion engine suggests they haven’t tried that hard. They’re paying for it now, but we’re going to have to pony up more than bailout money. For environmental — and geopolitical — reasons, North Americans need a revenue-neutral carbon tax. Aside from being the simplest and fairest way to make the most egregious energy gluttons pay the most, the behavioural changes would be dramatic: we would drive less often, buy smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, and insist automakers build cleaner vehicles. After the last election, the nation’s punditry pronounced the idea rejected once and for all, but what the voters really balked at was Stéphane Dion. True, there was little enthusiasm for his “Green Shift,” but the hopeless Liberal leader showed he couldn’t sell cheap gas on a long weekend in the summer. If we’re lucky, a more talented politician will prove more adept because the capand-trade schemes favoured by the Obama and Harper regimes are, as Paul Wells, the country’s smartest and funniest pundit (faint praise, I realize), described them, “massively interventionist, cumbersome, harrowingly difficult to design, prone to loopholes and investor confusion, destined to take forever to implement.” While writing about this on Inkless Wells, his blog at macleans.ca, he also asked: “If you believe climate change is real and catastrophic; that human agency can inflect its course; that Canada has something to contribute to the search for a solution; and that dawdling is no longer permissible — then what better idea do you have?”

10. Renounce free parking

When I’m hunting for a place to leave my car — all the while burning fossil fuels and adding to the traffic congestion — it never occurs to me how much space cities devote to parking. But the typical driver has a spot at home, one at work (usually bigger than the cubicle he or she spends all day in), and shared spaces everywhere, including at malls, churches, and fairgrounds. Spoiled by abundant free parking, we resist paying for it, hate looking for it, and, most of all, dread tickets. As Donald Shoup, America’s parking guru, told me, “Everybody thinks parking is a personal problem, not a policy problem.” But everybody is wrong.

A professor at UCLA’s urban planning department and the author of The High Cost of Free Parking, Shoup has a growing band of followers who call themselves Shoupistas even though the market-oriented policies he advocates could best be summed up by the battle cry, “Charge whatever the traffic will bear.” Shoup, who rides a bike two miles to campus, is convinced that free parking is unattractive, expensive (subsidizing it costs the U.S. economy more than Medicare), and encourages driving: “Parking is the single biggest land use in almost any city, and almost everybody has ignored it.” California adopted Shoup’s proposal that companies that pay for employees’ parking had to offer the cash equivalent to non-parkers. After the law passed, 13 per cent of workers took the money (most switched to car pools or public transit, though a few started cycling or walking). The harm free parking does feeds on itself: all that land dedicated to parking, which often sits empty for much of the day, increases sprawl, and that sprawl makes alternatives such as public transit and walking less feasible, which forces more people into cars, which increases the need for more parking. And so on.

11. Embrace road pricing

Although all drivers can figure out what they pay for gas, insurance, and other car-related expenses, and some may even put a value on their time, few ever think about the public cost of traffic. London has the world’s most famous congestion charge, a measure introduced by “Red Ken” Livingstone, the now former mayor. Although the aims of road pricing are largely progressive, it still remains a fundamentally market driven policy. Such policies were actually debated, decades ago, by the likes of Alan Walters, who went on to be chief economic advisor to Margaret Thatcher. These thinkers realized that when we travel a crowded road, we don’t consider the price we impose on others when we slow them down. By paying tolls, we face the true cost of our decision, reducing demand and increasing the efficiency of the roads. This makes far more sense than simply building more roads, which just attracts more traffic anyway.

12. Spread the gospel (and practice what we preach)

Although we should push the carmakers — and our politicians, who now own a chunk of them — to come up with more fuel-efficient products, even the cleanest vehicles will do nothing to fix sprawl. So we need to convince developers, politicians, and urban planners that we actually want to live in mixed-use walkable neighbourhoods. We can do that by moving to such places. And we must encourage walking, cycling, public transit, and car sharing, for ourselves and for others. Our credo should be: driving, if necessary, but not necessarily driving.

In cities around the globe, World Carfree Day is a nice little break from the everyday.

Every year on September 22, dozens of large cities shut down some of their main streets to traffic, leaving them open to pedestrians and cyclists for parties, rallies, mass bike rides, and the sort of leisurely ambling rarely seen on the crowded sidewalks of places like Manhattan and Beijing.

Illustration by Sylvia Nickerson

The idea of car-free days has been around since the oil crisis of the 1970s, but it wasn’t until 1999 that it was formally organized internationally on a specific date. The number of participating cities has grown steadily every year since then: in Prague last year, 4,000 people joined the largest group bike ride the city has ever seen. In Taipei, a swirling mass of 30,000 cyclists — city officials were expecting 3,000 — took a 16-kilometre route through the normally autothronged city core.

From Kiev, Ukraine, to Florianopolis, Brazil to Sofia, Bulgaria, they left their cars at home and revelled in the freedom of a city that was, for a day, pedestrian-friendly. “It’s a unique experience for people in car-heavy cities to get a taste of life without it for a day,” says Michael Roschlau, president and CEO of the Canadian Urban Transit Association. But it’s a unique experience, he says, “although it’s simply unrealistic in today’s world, given today’s mobility needs,” to imagine a modern car-free city.

But in a few places around the world — the list of locations is growing slowly but surely — the populace woke up on World Carfree Day, dressed, and ate their breakfast, then got on their bicycles, put on their shoes, or pulled out their bus pass, and made their way to work on streets mostly free of automobiles. Just like any other day.

These car-free and car-limited communities are scattered around the world, blueprints for the steps that larger cities can take to reduce their reliance on the automobile. These places show that it actually is possible to overcome our history and our habits and start to move away from the auto-centric planning that defines all of North America.

J.H. Crawford, an American author and urban planner who works in both the U.S. and the Netherlands, may be the world’s foremost advocate for cities without cars.

Click to see larger version. Illustration by Sylvia Nickerson

Crawford has spent more than 15 years touring carfree communities across the world. He maintains the web’s largest database of car-free information (carfree. com), as well as publishing a quarterly newsletter (The Carfree Times). He lectures on how humans can cut our ties to the car and has written two books on the subject: his first, Carfree Cities, was an examination of the world’s car-free areas and what we can learn from them. His second, released in April 2009, is the Carfree Design Manual, a step-by-step guide to designing a new city, from the ground up, to be completely free of cars.

While many urban planners see a completely car-free city as a nice ideological goal to shoot for while we try to reduce the number of cars on our streets, Crawford believes it must happen in the next several decades. “Nothing is going to be easy about this,” he says of losing our urban addiction to cars. “We’re going to be beaten by the stick pretty hard. But there are some fairly juicy carrots out ahead.”

The crux of the problem, planners agree, is that our cities are stuck between past and future. The vast majority of the urban planning done in North America was done with the car as its foremost beneficiary, and that legacy is hard to escape. Cities here were built too late to take advantage of the small streets and convoluted layout that keeps cars out of the heart of many of the world’s medieval cities and too early to benefit from the emphasis on public transit, environmental sustainability, and livability that has characterized urban planning in the last few decades.

It’s why most urban planners and thinkers scoff at the idea of turning Canadian cities like Toronto or Montreal into car-free utopias.

“Trying to eliminate cars from whole zones is tied either very tightly to medieval city centres or cities that will be purposefully designed or redeveloped in the future,” says Jim Mars, professor emeritus of urban planning at Ryerson University. “We can’t solve the problem. What we can and must do are all the small- and medium-sized things we can do to make it better.”

This problem doesn’t exist everywhere. There are cities — perhaps the most famous example being Venice — where automobiles are an afterthought and other forms of transportation, from canal to bicycle to subway and light rail transit, account for, in some cases, more than half of all trips taken by the populace.

Most of these cities are in Europe, and most were built in the medieval period. It’s a simple history lesson: cities that were not designed explicitly for cars find it a lot easier to do without them.

“Medieval urban forms are superior to everything that came before or has come since,” writes Crawford in the introduction to his new book. “Once the needs of automobiles can be neglected, a remarkable degree of design freedom arises.”

Medieval designs have provided some of the most familiar blueprints of car-free cities. The largest car-free community in the world, Fès El Bali in Morocco, is home to approximately 156,000 people, and you simply can’t use a car inside it. They haven’t been prohibited, but the city is walled off from the outside and the streets are so narrow that it is impossible to navigate through the city in a car of any size. It’s a common sight to see trucks drive up to the gated city entrance, load their wares into handcarts, and have someone push the goods into the city on foot. Crawford points out that only a special slim ambulance is able to negotiate the streets in a medical emergency.

“If you go through the medinas of North Africa,” he says, “what you will find is that most of them have always been car-free, because the streets just aren’t wide enough. That’s also what happened in Venice.

“In the places where you find fully intact medieval cities, you find few or no cars at all.”

On a database that Crawford keeps of the world’s carfree areas, nearly all of the largest ones are located in Europe or Africa, and most are the medieval core in cities where it would be, as Crawford says, “nearly impossible” to get around by car.

“You can wend your way through a broad swath that extends from Portugal all the way to Italy, where you’ll find medieval city centres that are, if not car-free, then very car-moderated,” he says.

The vast majority of the rest of the developed world, however, is already built for cars, so other solutions are needed. There are plenty of techniques that cities large and small have used to curb car use, with an eye toward eliminating them altogether in the future.

Vauban, a small community of about 5,000 people located in Freiburg, Germany, a city noted for ecoawareness, is one of those places where last year’s World Carfree Day was just another Monday.

It’s also an example of the two approaches to converting people to car-free living that Crawford calls the “carrots and sticks.”

There are, he says, two ways to get large numbers of people in a city to change their daily habits: you can offer them rewards for doing so, or you can punish them if they don’t. Vauban uses both. Upon moving there, a new resident is offered two things: a parking space and a transit pass. The transit pass is free and all-inclusive, provided the newcomer doesn’t plan to own a car. The parking space costs roughly $29,000 and is available only in a garage on the edge of their residential neighbourhood. Only about 40 percent of residents have bothered to buy one.

The end result is that Vauban had only 150 vehicles per 1,000 inhabitants in 2006. Canada, in comparison, had 559 cars for every 1,000 citizens as of a 2002 count.

“Essentially, they’re pricing,” says Mars. “The cost of having a car is the real cost of a parking space and of not having a bus pass.”

Road pricing — charging people a fee for having their cars on the road — is not only a rare point that a realist like Mars and an idealist like Crawford agree on, it’s one of the most rapidly advancing policy areas.

The idea isn’t such a new one: Singapore has had road tolls for drivers since the 1970s, Norway began charging them in 1986, and several other cities also collect them — but it was the London model that has spurred action in car-dominated North America.

In England’s capital, motorists entering the city centre must pay £8 (about $14) to the city. They can do it in advance for the entire year, either at the time (via convenience store or text message) or later (by phone or on the internet). A network of cameras records their licence plate as they enter, and there are stiff fines for those who forget to pay.

“The effects of London were fantastic,” says Crawford, noting research that shows the toll cut traffic by roughly 20 percent.

“You had a huge fight on your hands to implement it — and now you would have a huge fight on your hands, from the very same people who opposed it, if you tried to take it out.” A poll before implementation found that 40 percent of Londoners supported the idea in 2002. In 2006, that figure had risen to 60 percent, and plans were in place to enlarge the zone (which was done last February).

London was already equipped with an extensive public camera network, something most cities lack, but GPS technology is making road toll systems more attractive to congested municipalities by the day.

San Francisco is putting together a plan to present to city council this spring that would install a system to charge motorists for driving on major artery streets. New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg was close to instituting a similar plan in his city that would charge drivers US$8 to enter the most congested area of Manhattan. Lack of support killed it before it could get to the floor of the New York State Legislature last year. Toronto mayor David Miller declared last year he wanted to look at the idea, before Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty and his transportation minister voiced a categorical “no.” Miller later said he would only back a regional plan for highways, not a toll fee for entering his city’s downtown core. But the idea is gathering steam.

“Driving on streets in most cases is free,” says Roschlau, “and if something is free, the demand will often outpace the supply.

“If you ask someone what they consider before deciding to drive their car downtown, their answer will most often be Ôparking,’ because that has a real cost attached to it. If people view the cost of driving somewhere similar to the way they take into account the cost of parking, more cars get left at home.”

A large part of convincing people to leave their cars at home is convincing them to live their lives closer to home. The concept of the sustainable neighbourhood — with nearly everything you need within walking or biking distance — is the goal of many plans for car-free municipalities.

“Whenever we approve a mixed-use development that has employment and housing as well as shopping, or has government services mixed in, we’re taking a step in that direction,” says Mars. Crawford has laid out a list of 16 functions that urban planners agree are necessary to create a sustainable district (see sidebar, page 19). The problem right now is: how do we get there from here? We can provide office and retail space in the bottom of high-rises and the middle of subdivisions, but we can’t force businesses to open and stay open if they’re not turning a profit. We can try to provide a walk-in clinic in every neighbourhood, but people are still going to travel to their preferred doctor or dentist. We can’t make employers locate their offices near their employees, and that would be impossible to coordinate anyway. In short, we can build it, but they’re not necessarily going to come. “It’s impossible to make the market do what you want,” says Mars. “That’s why I’m always skeptical about sustainable developments.

“I would rather see, particularly when we’re dealing with infrastructure renewal, that a lot of that money needs to go toward transit.” But even Roschlau, head of the Canadian Urban Transit Association, knows that more transit lines won’t solve everything.

“They’re simply the backbone,” he says, pointing to the most recent census data that showed a smaller proportion of Canadians (72.3 percent, down from 73.8 percent in 2001) were driving to work, and instead more were relying on public transit, biking, and carpooling. “The numbers show that people are looking for alternatives, whether it is better access to transit, more bike lanes, carpool lanes, mixed-use developments, and sustainable neighbourhoods — they are looking for solutions.”

There are signs of light on the horizon. Last summer, Montreal closed down 12 blocks of Ste-Catherine Street to traffic from June until September. The city held festivals and parties in the street nearly every week and Ville-Marie borough mayor Beno”t Labonté showed little sympathy to motorists irked by the inconvenience. “If they get fed up with the traffic, they can use public transit,” he said at the press conference announcing the decision.

There are plans to build new cities in places like the United Arab Emirates and Jordan with public transit replacing all but the most necessary of vehicles and solar panels used to power the needs of light-rail transit. Crawford hopes his book will outline a method of building large cities neighbourhood by neighbourhood without the need for cars. It’s idealistic, yes, but he thinks North America is nearly ready for it.

All evidence points to a long, tough haul (after all, Roschlau called a mere 1.5 percent reduction in car commuters in the last census “groundbreaking”), but there are enough blocks available to us now to start building. “We are going to have to do something about it. This is not a casual issue. It’s not going away,” says Crawford. “But it took us a hundred years to get here, and it’s probably going to take us another hundred years to get out.”