And while I can appreciate the concerns of elitists like Hume I would suggest the emphasis should be on street crime, panhandlers, bloated city staff levels, debt charges, council pictures and I could go on and on and on......
What you said about the designs
Street furniture designed to offend
April 09, 2007
Christopher Hume
Toronto Mayor David Miller wants us to believe he's committed to the idea of Toronto, the clean and beautiful.
If so, he should ensure that council refuses all three proposals for street furniture sent to the city last week.
The schemes were submitted by a trio of large media companies that would design and manufacture the furnishings in return for a portion of the advertising revenues they generate.
None of the entries – from Astral Media/Kramer Design, CBS Outdoor/Elements and Clear Channel/Zeidler Partnership – is worthy of being on the streets on Toronto. Indeed, they would only make a bad situation worse and set back the cause of cleaning up the city by years.
In all cases, the problem begins with the designs themselves: They are inappropriate, disconcertingly trendy, overdone and overpowering. They would only increase the rampant commercialization of the public realm.
Enough already. Yes, we know that advertising will be ubiquitous in a city as impoverished as Toronto, but there comes a point of diminishing returns, when less is more.
The city is inundated with ads and the last thing we need is to make a bad situation worse.
Interesting, too, that at least two of the three bidders – Astral Media and CBS Outdoor – are deeply implicated in erecting illegal billboards throughout Toronto. According to some estimates, between 1,500 and 2,000 outdoor ads at any one time are in violation of the law. The media companies know exactly what they're doing, but there's too much money to be made for them to bother with such niceties as legalities.
Councillor Joe Mihevc says they operate "in a rogue manner."
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