A few final thoughts for the course
Our final assignment in Urban Policy was submitted nearly a month ago, but before our final wrap-up session it felt appropriate to me to put together one last blog post. Trying to make sense of the world right now certainly feels exhausting (at least to me) and personally I haven’t found the non-stop cavalcade of op-eds prognosticating on how the world will be changed forever particularly helpful in this regard. I certainly wouldn’t wager any predictions at this point as to whether a new “social contract” will emerge or whether life in big dense cities like Toronto will be changed forever. However, I thought I would share a few small thoughts anyway and I will try to keep it more personal than policy.
Firstly, a point on urban living: downtown apartments or condos are not particularly large when you have to spend 24 hours a day in them. My own experience with social distancing and stay-at-home culture has made me realize just how much communal spaces in a dense city matter. Coffee shops are often my living room, libraries my office, and parks my backyard. One of the most challenging days of this experience for me was the day that my partner and I went down to the basketball court near her apartment and realized it had been boarded up as part of the city’s closing of recreational facilities. While such a small thing, having this taken away felt like a huge blow. It also made me connect on an emotional level with how much value services like parks and recreation — services we might normally take for granted- provide to citizens. Truly, you don’t know what you’ve got till its gone.
Without these spaces, I have come to realize how different the physical structures of my urban life are from those of my friends and family who are currently living in the suburbs where they may have a backyard or more spacious homes in which to stretch out. These same thought processes have also helped me remember how truly fortunate I am. While in this course we focused more on urban policy in Ontario, and to a lesser extent the develop word more generally, in completing our book review for this course, we had a chance to think a bit about urban policy in fast-growing cities in the global south. In many of these places, the level of density, even in a place like Toronto, pails in comparison to the favelas of Brazil or shantytowns of Lagos. Social distancing in these places feels like an inconceivable task.
I’m not sure that I can wrap these small reflections into any kind of meaningful takeaways, but I will give it a try anyway. Tying things back to this class, this entire situation has been a reminder of the way that policy has a real impact. Coming from a summer internship in the Federal government, where policy is often thought of in a high-level abstract way, this course helped me to think more carefully about what policy making looks like closer to the ground. Similarly, this pandemic has reinforced that policy at all levels has a real impact and that empathy needs to be an indispensable tool for all policy students. Beyond that, who knows — but it feels like an okay place to start.
