It’s the perennial question for major cities hoping to up their game when it comes to attracting money, talent and brains. What works?

At a recent special lecture on the topic at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, one audience member voiced what appears to be an obsession in this city of cranes: ever-increasing density in city cores is crucial to fostering vitality.

The speaker, noted U.S. urban thinker Michael Storper, who holds academic appointments in Los Angeles, London and Paris, suggested that it’s not that simple. He noted that the average density of greater southern California, which is struggling with a decades-long decline, is more than that of the San Francisco Bay area, and that Silicon Valley is very spread out. Instead, Storper’s talk focused on the far more nuanced factors that have helped the San Francisco Bay area vault to the front ranks of global business centres over the past 25 years. Mostly, these factors focused on co-operative, consistent interactions among different types of professions, social classes, political viewpoints and competitors.

So, what do cities where the top business talent talks to each other look like? New York, one of the densest cities in North America, mostly confines its tall buildings to particular corridors: more than 100 neighbourhoods are protected by historic designations, many in that anthill, Manhattan. City planners in London carefully review development applications to ensure views of Saint Paul’s 17th-century dome are preserved. Let’s not even talk about Paris, where gigantic sums are being spent to rebuild transit and residential corridors to accommodate a rapidly swelling population from many parts of the world.

Instead, Toronto appears to be embracing unrestrained density with something like religious fervour. The results of this latest wave of “build it or bust” mania – Toronto has more highrises than any other North American city except Manhattan – mostly have not been good.

Tower-laden Liberty Village, a sad misnomer, was built in the previous decade to accommodate the waves of younger adults streaming into Toronto’s city core; parts of it are already known among that demographic as inaccessible and drug-afflicted.

The central waterfront and nearby CityPlace are forests of banal glass condos. The word “pincushion” comes to mind. The historic warehouse entertainment district is the site of several towering condo-construction sites that are in danger of obliterating the character that drew new businesses and residents in the first place.

There’s not even much space around the base of most of these dreary monoliths rising, it seems, at every other major intersection. The latest tower trend, clunky podiums, crowd out street life and turn arteries into featureless, glass-walled tunnels.

However, if you need a spot to air and share your thoughts, there are a few open spaces left. Take a stroll across the graceful, wide-open plazas of the Toronto-Dominion Centre, built in the late 1960s to herald Toronto as a capitalist mecca. There’s even some natural grass and places to sit in between these dignified towers that still embody the city’s business aspirations. A great place to mull over your latest, industry-altering concept and discuss it with a colleague – or competitor.

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