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Councillor Davis Gets It Right |
UPDATE:
October 2006 |
The City has released the RFP for the Coordinated Street Furniture Program! Click here to read it (5MB PDF file) Come to our open campaign meeting: Thursday, October 19th, 7pm - 9pm Metro Hall (King & John), Room 310 |
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| The
City has embarked on a process called the Coordinated Street Furniture Program.
Inspired by good intentions to beautify our streets, the project has turned
into the biggest public space sell-off we've seen so far and might as well
be called the Sidewalk Privatisation Program. Historically, public space in Toronto has been the recipient of investment and care. But in the last decade, City Councillors have set their sights on our streets as a source of private revenue by selling the sidewalks to advertising companies. With a stated mandate to "increase revenue for the City," the new project will clearly take us further down the road of a privatised streetscape. What does this mean for us? Aside from more advertising on the streets, it also ensures the continued trend of substandard street furniture on our streets. The City's experiments with advertisation so far have been a disaster. From the OMG Silverboxes, to the Astral "Info Pillars" to the Eucan MegaBins, we have seen the same story over and over: the products are designed primarily as billboards and then, as an afterthought, turned into poor excuses for garbage cans or information pillars. The advertisers' needs come first, and the public's needs come last. Safety, accessibility and functionality all suffer in the race to create the most intrusive "in-your-face" advertising. So far, we've seen ads on info pillars, garbage cans and benches. The new proposal puts everything else on the auction block. The plan is to get one ad company to design and produce ALL of our street furniture. The report lists possible items that could be included in the deal: phonebooths, light poles, new benches, mailboxes, flower baskets, fire hydrants, street signs, traffic lights, bicycle racks and more. Although not all of these items would have ads on them, none have been ruled out. Either way, all would be designed by an advertising company, and the City would expect to get them all for free. And as we've seen already, you get what you pay for. Although the plan uses all the right language about "elevating and celebrating Toronto's urban beauty" and even calls for fewer ads, the outcome is clear: "increased revenue" means more ads. And selling the streets to ad companies, instead of investing money into new infrastructure means a further decline in the design, placement, functionality and aesthetics of our street furniture. |
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| WHAT CAN I DO? |
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1 |
Click here to learn more about the TPSC's concerns with this program |
| 2 |
Speak
out! |
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Keep in touch! |
4 |
Join
us! Come to our next Sidewalk Sale planning meeting: Thursday, October 19, 7:00-9:00 Metro Hall (King & John), Room 310 |
Project Co-ordinator:
Jonathan Goldsbie
jonathan@ publicspace.ca
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