The flaneur, as conjured by the French poet and decadent Charles Baudelaire, is the consummate pedestrian, a perfect idler, and passionate spectator. As one who strolls the streets, drinking in the city, driven by wanderlust, and utterly stress-free, the flaneur sounds like the exact opposite of the 50,000 students who bounce purposefully from Bloor to College, from Spadina to Bay. The buzzing St. George campus, a microcosm of Toronto, reflects the city’s potential and its challenges: a large and diverse population who know little about each other, keep to ourselves, and feel lost outside our own neighbourhoods, should we venture out at all. We have places to be and papers to write. We do not have time to, as Baudelaire put it, “set up house in the middle of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite.”
Landing at U of T is like going down the rabbit-hole into Wonderland, if you get over the initial disorientation. The vast campus is a headache to navigate for newcomers, and unnecessarily so. Recall your first days here, or the number of times puzzled visitors have stopped you for directions, only to find you’ve never heard of “79 St. George Street, Part A.” The U of T website does offer a searchable campus map, along with a map of where to find food, though at press time the wireless hotspot map is down. If you know where you have to be beforehand, do your homework, and keep your nose to the campus map, you’re usually set.
That kind of painstaking preparation doesn’t make for adventure, or for a welcoming atmosphere. As a public space within the city, U of T should be accessible to students and civilians alike. A few small additions can go a long way: posts that point the way to major hubs, as they do at UTSC; street furniture to take advantage of wide open spaces; more big maps on street corners; signage to guide pedestrians to buildings whose locations don’t match their street address.
By upper year, most students can get from A to B. “I’ve discovered shortcuts,” says Rachel Anderson, who has worked as a patroller for three years, closing buildings, and ushering out dawdlers. Her walkabouts have made the campus a lot smaller: “When I was in first year, it was such a mission to get from Sid Smith to Vic.”
A taller order is feeling like you belong on campus—all of campus. We learn by going where we have to go: to lectures, labs, and tutorials, to the hallways and classrooms we know. It’s easy to stick to paths forged by necessity, to find watering holes nearby and to defend them. The walls sheltering the Munk Centre from the rest of campus might be forbidding to outsiders, but they provide a cocoon for the tight-knit community of grad students who live there. Faculty and college lounges encourage the small-town vibe that more intimate universities foster, where everybody knows your name.
A home base, whether by academic department or college affiliation, is essential to putting down roots on campus. But if students stop there, we never get to experience the advantages of a big school that bleeds into downtown. The university, like the city itself, provides space for people to commingle, says Frank Cunningham, a philosophy professor and a senior advisor at U of T’s Cities Centre. “Anonymous recreation,” he says, “allows people to spend time with others who aren’t necessarily their family and friends.”
Ideally, public space allows citizens of all stripes to socialize and exchange ideas. In practice, our centuries-old campus doesn’t exactly offer equitable access. For students with a disability, confusion is compounded. Joeita Gupta, who has a visual impairment, says she has trouble making her way around poorly lit buildings, especially when there is no Braille on anything. “Not many places are wheelchair accessible—general accessibility is quite a problem,” she says, adding wryly, “it’s difficult to get to theAccessibility Office at Robarts. It took me a couple of tries.”
While construction shows visible effort—build more wheelchair ramps, build a new student centre—Gupta says the U of T administration’s attitude needs fixing up, too. “How campus space gets to be used, and who pays for the campus space, reflects on the priorities of the university administration,” she says, citing the Centre for High Performance Sport, an elite training facility that will be built on Devonshire Place, as an example of misguided priorities. Gupta is an exec of the Association of Part-Time Students, whose office will be demolished to make way for CHiPS. “Should the university be making a commitment to high-performance sport or its students?” she asks.
As undergrad enrolment skyrockets, U of T is running out of real estate. For students’ day-to-day lives, overcrowding has never been more apparent, especially for those who stick to their quarters. Cunningham, who has been a prof here since 1967, never felt uncomfortable anywhere on campus. “I could count on having a lot in common with people I ran into,” he says. “Any two profs any place in the world are going to have an enormous amount in common. We can grouse over deans and presidents.”
Students also have something in common, but that ensconced feeling can take a long time to develop. “The first two years are extremely overwhelming. You don’t know where you’re going all the time and almost intimidated to go anywhere else but where you have to go,” says Sarah Patton, now in her fourth year studying Geography and Urban Studies. Sarah adds she wouldn’t imagine going to a library other than Robarts, or another college café, because she doesn’t officially “belong” there. More greenery and hangout areas for commuters, she says, would give her a greater sense of belonging.
It helps to have the keys to your own little piece of U of T. Gayathri Naganathan, president of the Tamil Students’ Association, spends a good chunk of time at the club’s office in the Sussex Club House at 21 Sussex Ave., which hosts over 50 student groups. Late Wednesday evening last week, she and a dozen others were holed up there, prepping for the next day’s rally. “The office is always accessible even when other campus buildings are closed, and it’s a welcoming and familiar environment,” says Naganathan. “I feel at home in certain parts of campus, but this was a feeling that I’ve had to cultivate over the last couple years. It has more to do with the people I spend time with than the space itself.”
According to Cunningham, it’s easy to feel comfortable here, provided you have an at-ease mindset. “If you approach the campus like tourists approach trips, it will never become familiar to you,” he says. “Public places are places where you should be able to go without any particular purpose.”
Upper-year Urban Studies students I interviewed also brought up the prospect of places that don’t serve a direct function. “More neutral places, in buildings that aren’t specific to colleges or faculties, might encourage more blending,” says Stephanie Valente.
“The space at U of T, because it’s so busy, is heavily programmed,” Benjamin Sulky adds.
“So much space is crowded,” Isabel Ritchie chimes in. “The cafeteria feels busy, people are moving in and out […] What we need are generic spaces with some sort of appeal for people, flexible spaces that still can draw people in.”
As for enticing students to areas that aren’t “neutral,” Ben says, “It’s hard to see top-down changes. It comes down to what students do.”
Cunningham points to time as the major limiting factor for belonging at St. George Campus. “No matter how attractive public spaces are made, you’re not going to have people making use of them if they don’t have leisure time.” Spare time is tough to come by for jet-set commuters, and campus-dwellers cite the rez effect: life’s necessities are a stone’s throw away, so there’s no reason to wander, to poke into weird nooks and crannies. But campus exploration doesn’t have to take hours on end. It starts with something as small as stepping inside a building you pass by every day, or taking the long way to class, if you’re so inclined. The street furniture proposals on the next two pages offer a few ideas for the kind of space U of T can become.
Having a pedestrian-friendly campus means more than showing how to get from A to B—though that would be a good start. What we need is a space that is open, accessible, and encourages our intellectual wanderings.
Read on.
