One aspect of Toronto's the financial crunch has been the panicked ideas for raising new revenues or sloughing off costs.
There is no shortage of opportunistic business concerns exploiting this panic, or politicians and bureaucrats to front for them.
Among the more brazen of these opportunists are the advertising industry. The ineffectual hysterics of their 'public space' opponents makes for amusing political buffoonery. What is not amusing is that we will be stuck with these Ad biz monstrosities all over the city for a long time. But there is no public will to do anything serious about it.
There is nothing wrong with moderate advertising. And Toronto was not Paris by Lake Ontario before the ad salesmen showed up. It is a drab, brown and grey city.
There is an obvious solution for the problem of regulating public advertising.
ad wars
The ad biz has exploited the concentration of power in the mayor and executive council, and the disempowerment of the citizens, to muscle their way into public space. It is being called "the great sidewalk sale" or "the selloff of public space".
In the transit system, there have always been ads above the inside windows of buses and along the sides, and billboards along the subway platforms.
There has long been advertising on benches and bus shelters. There has long been resistance to large American style billboards. Resistance to the big video billboards is even more hysterical.
Resistance increased when they started painting whole city busses, and installing video screens on the subway platforms. The painted busses looked ridiculous. But after the monster screens were downsized and included some useful information, resistance to them declined. There is not much to look at in a subway tunnel; a little advertising actually brightens the scene.
The city bureaucracy has the idea that if the city got advertising companies to pay for the city's street furniture, then the city could get free benches, garbage cans, and bus shelters, and have someone else handle the maintenance. It could collect a little money from the advertising sales.
There has been great resistance to the new garbage cans but we got them anyway. They are sunk into the concrete, poorly made, and designed to be billboards rather than trash receptacles. The collection doors keep falling open into the roadway, creating a great hazard.
Next we got the 'megabin', fortunately only as a test. They blocked the view completely and were useless as trash receptacles. The test is over and the megabins are gone.
But the ad biz keeps rolling onward. Now we have trucks that roll around the congested downtown all day, making nitrous oxide and distracting drivers with advertising.
The city bureaucracy recently announced the results of a 'design competition' and recommended one company's ad space cum bicycle posts and newspaper boxes over the others. The public had little chance time to respond before it was rammed through the executive committee.
The options are laid out as a choice of company A, B, or C, all with very similar designs. There is no option presented for managing public space in a different way.
the art and science of advertising
Most people are not bothered by moderate advertising. They would rather see a brightly coloured advertisement in front of them than a bare, grey wall.
Advertising does fill a social and economic function. You might notice that much advertising is better done and more pleasing than the dreck that goes around it. The trouble is when it becomes excessive.
As a rule, advertising is good if it does not distract drivers, does not obstruct views of more critical things, and it is where there is nothing better to see. It must be regulated.
This is why ads facing the roadway, and ads on buses or on billboard trucks, are bad; they distract drivers.
There are so many entities wanting to communicate a message and a very limited amount of media through which to communicate. Crowding destroys the effectiveness of all advertising.
There are only so many 'clean' ad spaces around. An ad does not look good, and is not very effective, when it is half hidden behind a tree, or another advertisement.
Sometimes advertising is poorly done or in poor taste, but there is not that much of it; ad companies carefully monitor the effectiveness of their ads.
The ad business would be better if there was some independent regulating mechanism.
other arguments
Another result of disorganised city government is that there is nobody to enforce sign laws. 'Illegal' signs and billboards are proliferating.
The city's artists want spaces in which to inflict their masterpieces upon us. Graffiti artists are the most obnoxious about this, howling about 'freedom of expression'.
People want to put up posters. Posters can get excessive. The city's efforts to ban or restrict posters keep getting shot down by the courts, because it tries to simply ban, rather than regulate.
A problem with posters is that many, even most, of them are for commercial concerns. There are companies that put up posters for pay, who are known to interfere with people trying to advertise community events.
Public space must be public, but it cannot be free. There must be some system of regulating it for the public good. This would make practical public bulletin boards on each block, which many voices have called for.
solution
If a private company can make money supplying the city's street furniture and selling advertising on it, then the city can make money doing it itself and keeping all the profit,not just a percentage.
The city should be able to incorporate a street and transit advertising and public furniture corporation in the same way it incorporates a housing corporation or a utilities corporation. If it is not able to do this, possibly due to provincial antimunicipalism, it must be made able to do it.
Shall we call it TSTAPFC? It should have a monopoly over all advertising or 'artistic' display in public places. It would have the money to enforce its monopoly.
It would design whatever public furniture is needed, using public consultative planning methods to adapt everything to local needs and 'pattern languages'.
It may intersperse paid advertising with work contributed by local artists. It would be the 'censor' of all this brilliant effort. No doubt, also the object of invective for what it allows as well as what it refuses.
It would allow advertising put keep it reined in, and keep more objectionable forms out. It could buy and maintain public furniture out of advertising revenue, and probably still return a profit to the city treasury.
It would maintain whacking big bulletin boards wherever people want them. It would have resources to track down people who are abusing these boards, or posting notices in inappropriate places, and force them to desist.
It could even operate the network of public pay toilets which are in each company's proposal, and which would make Toronto a much more liveable and civilised city.
This takes getting rid of the idea that nothing can be done in the city unless a private company can make money off it. It is the public which should make the money from the use of public space.
This takes the citizens of the city finally taking control of their city government back. That is not happening any time soon.
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