Stay Away From The New Furniture
“The customer is always right” means jack shit when you have a monopoly. And when you’ve just been awarded a 20-year exclusive contract for all street-level advertising in Toronto a city your brochure touts as having “the largest concentration of consumers in the country!” you can apparently also afford to appear controlling, paranoid, and contemptuous of the very people whom you’re about to ply with free alcohol in an effort to win their trust.
Wednesday night at the Toronto Film Studios, Astral Media Outdoor held a special “cocktail party” open house for Business Improvement Areas (BIAs) from across Toronto to show off full-scale prototypes of the new street furniture elements bus shelters, public washrooms, that kind of thing they will soon be rolling out.
As the contract allows the city, and by extension BIAs, to install and maintain their own street furniture items outside of the scope of the program, and grants city councillors a de facto veto on the placement of any particular items within their wards, getting the business community onside is crucial; Astral’s brochure advises advertisers that they “target residents of Toronto right where the action is, where they work, play and shop.”
But the purpose of a BIA is to establish a unique local brand or identity, something to distinguish one neighbourhood from another, to add particular sparks or flourishes that, in their own ways, enhance the interstitial spaces of a community.
This would seem antithetical to the prospect of adopting transit shelters, garbage bins, benches, multi-publication news boxes, information pillars, postering kiosks, public washrooms and bike racks that are identical to those found throughout the city; once you factor in the national and international advertising campaigns that adorn certain items, your Business Improvement Area may as well be in any neighbourhood in any city in the country or the English-speaking world. An acquiescence of selfhood is not a proposition to be taken lightly.
Which is why the Old Cabbagetown BIA brought me along. I’m a campaigner with the Toronto Public Space Committee; I advocate for public space at City Hall, with a particular focus on out-of-home advertising and street furniture.
The Cabbagetown BIA has its own Public Space Committee, a microcosmic version of the TPSC, dedicated to tackling the challenges of elevating Cabbagetown’s public realm towards the ideals of sustainability and inclusivity. Its founder and chair, Maggie O’Connor, had a few months earlier brought me in as a sort of advisor, to offer feedback and recommendations regarding what sorts of street furniture might or might not be appropriate for the area.
Along with BIA Chair Paul Dineen and Coordinator Doug Fisher, Maggie and I took a cab down to Eastern and Pape from the BIA’s Carlton-and-Parliament offices. When we arrived, we were directed inside Studio 1, where we were greeted by the models previously on display at City Hall and a table staffed by three chipper young women, outfitted in identical yellow shirts as part of Astral’s nonsensical “Follow the yellow brick road to a new Toronto” theme.
As we were about to cross the curtained threshold into the showroom we were abruptly stopped by a bespectacled French-Canadian, like a taller and more intense Stéphane Dion. His nametag read “Luc Sabbatini.” He is the president of Astral Media Outdoor. I recognized him. As was immediately evident, the converse was also true.
Tags: acquiescence, advertising campaigns, amp, astral media, bench, benches, bike racks, boxes, bro, bus shelters, business improvement area, city councillors, cocktail party, consumers, element, elements, fisher, flourishes, free alcohol, furniture, garbage bins, improvement areas, international advertising, interstitial spaces, new furniture, onside, pace, pillar, publication news, rust, selfhood, street furniture, target, threshold, toronto film studios, transit shelters, urn, whRelated posts
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