We are at the MaRs Centre at the intersection of College and University to blog Alphabet City’s “Garbage Town Hall.” As most Torontonianss know, Alphabet City is a respected publication that covers urban issues both intelligently and thoroughly. The series is published and edited by John Knechtel.

Today’s event uses structured, group brainstorming to investigate novel ways to manage Toronto’s garbage. In other words: We’re all talkin’ trash!

We will update the blog a few times during the course of the afternoon’s session.

Rod Muir, of Waste Diversion Toronto (and a candidate for Mayor), is here to help facilitate the afternoon’s event. He says:

Cost is a key driver. It costs the city $2 to $3 per home to physically pick up the garbage. Separation is a key issue and must take place. It can be diverted for recycling or burn and bury.

Our group represents an interesting cross-section of the city’s citizens. There are two design students, one industrial design Prof from OCAD, a graphic designer, an organic farmer, two MBA students who are helping facilitate the group and, yours truly.

Update 2

Here is how Toronto’s waste breaks down in terms of sources:

Private sector waste	610,000 tonnes	34%
Durham & York Regions	318,000 tonnes	18%
Agencies, departments	100,000 tonnes	6%
Small commercial	86,000 tonnes	5%
Residential collection	697,000 tonnes	37%

Total 1,811,000 tonnes

Update Three

Table one’s team consisted of the following involved citizens: Marcelo Affonso, Mauricio Affonso, Jules Goss, Charles Ritchie, Megan Griffith-Greene, Gilbert Li, Janice Keil, and Azadeh Sabour. Together, they pulled apart the key issues of trash management in the city. Their main focus: education, education, education.

Alphabet City is calling on students, activists, researchers, and concerned citizens of every stripe to come to MaRS and help us answer this most critical question for the city: what should we do about our garbage? The Town Hall will be facilitated by a team of MBA students from the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, members of the Net Impact club, which works to advance corporate social responsibility (http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/netimpact). The event will be connected live to the larger community through an on-site blog operated by Robert Ouellette of the Reading Toronto website: http://www.readingtoronto.com.

Admission to the Garbage Town Hall is free. Alphabet City no. 11: TRASH will be available at the door ($20, tax included). TRASH is your ticket for free admission to all TRASH festival events.

Is there a future for community activism in Toronto? Last night, four candidates for city council joined together in an often emotional two hour discussion about the importance of community activism to the considered growth of our city. Adam Giambrone (ward 18), John Sewell (ward 21), Adam Vaughan (ward 20), and Simon Wookey (ward 18) discussed how Queen West's "Active 18" community group is a model for citizen-based planning across the city. It was my pleasure to moderate the panel which, for the most part, maintained its political neutrality.

That does not mean, however, that this group refrained from criticizing the failings of city hall. Former Mayor John Sewell warned that politicians love being "gate-keepers." They hate to relinquish their power to citizen groups even when, in the case of Active 18, those groups do a better job of designing their community than the city's planning and urban design staff.

The evening began with Franco Boni of Active 18 providing an introduction to that group's objectives. The http://www.active18.org web site states:

Our objective is to ensure that all new development constitutes a genuinely positive and exemplary addition to the neighborhood and to the city at large.

We aspire to work as closely as possible with all facets of the municipal and provincial governments, with the land-owners and their representatives to define an order for development that is beneficial to all, now and in the future.

Against that context, the panelists responded to the following questions: "What is city hall doing right?" "What is it doing wrong?" "What lessons can all wards in the city learn from Active 18?"

What are some key quotes from the evening?

Adam Vaughan: "People who resist unplanned development are called fear mongers." "City Hall does not respect people." "City Council's job is first and foremost about land use planning. If that is not done right than everything else fails."

John Sewell: "Politicians love being gate-keepers." "City Hall as it now operates is doing nothing right." "People in communities say no first when they feel they have no power." "Citizens have good reasons why some projects should not go forward but council does not listen."

Adam Giambrone: "The OMB takes away accountability from local politicians." "More investment in the city's planning department is needed." "We need more community facilitators and more tools to help community groups plan their neighbourhoods."

Simon Wookey: "When city hall under Mayor Barbara Hall took some zoning restrictions off a district [King Street between Spadina and Bathurst] the developers made significant improvements to the neighbourhood." "We have to do more to get people to vote in municipal elections." "We do not learn from the city's past successes."

Many thanks to the audience and the panelists who together contributed to what was an informed, passionate, and inspiring evening. The Toronto Society of Architects deserves praise for organizing the event and for contributing to the conversations about design in our city.

By Gary Michael Dault

The Toronto-based artist known simply as Rupen was born Rupen Kunugus in Istanbul in 1960. He came to Canada when he was nine, and became a Canadian citizen in 1974.

Although he is not yet, I suppose, a household name, Rupen is a very good artist. He is also an art gallery director, his gallery—one if the smallest in the city—consisting of the two storefront windows of his house at 506 Adelaide Street West. Rupen has been running this mini-conservatory of a gallery—which bears the accurate and therefore eminently sensible name of Natural Light Window—since 1997. He is Natural Light Window’s sole Curator, responsible for all 72 cubic feet of its exhibition space, and he shows others peoples’ work there—not his own.

He does, however, show his work in other galleries. The reason I’m writing about him here, in fact, is that I think his latest exhibition, running at Antonia Lancaster’s funky, outback OFFTHEMAPGALLERY on Lansdowne Avenue, is an excellent one: formally and conceptually exciting, cleanly devised and imaginatively installed and, in the end, highly satisfying.

The exhibition is called either Urban Reflector or Urban Reflections (it is listed in different places under both names) and is informed by Rupen’s love of bicycles. Last year, he curated an event-and-exhibition called Life in the Bike Lane, which involved a mass bicycle ride by assorted artists from the art gallery complex at 80 Spadina Avenue to OFFTHEMAPGALLERY, at the end of which, the bicycling artists contributed to an exhibition there of works relating to bicycle culture.

OFFTHEMAPGALLERY is such an elemental little place—really little more than a concrete block garage out at the back (through the garden) of Antonia Lancaster’s house (I’ve written about it before in Angle of Incident # 12)—that not everything will show well there: but Rupen’s new work does.

Urban Reflectors is so called because it involves the artist’s having crafted four shaped, neatly routered and black-painted wall-mounted objects which, as with all of Rupen’s superbly crafted works, are presented in forms that, while highly generalized, nevertheless seem curiously reminiscent of something or other [I remember a beautiful series of Rupen works which consisted of smoothly finished, wall-mounted, wooden plaque-like things which, after your having adjusted their scale in your mind, turned out to be based on the shapes of guitar picks]. In this case, the sculptures are long paddle-like objects that could be wheel-less skateboards if it weren’t for the fact that they are asymmetrical. The pieces turn out to be, in fact (I had to be told this), shapes based, morphologically speaking, on forms derived from bicycle reflectors.

The four “reflector” forms are hung on the brick and concrete block walls in rhythmically subtle ways, relating insistently to one another and, in the end, energetically animating the whole space. They suck up light like voracious blotters, and, to that end, are generously and even strenuously illuminated by some charmingly basic light sources (one per work) that are, in themselves, sculpturally engaging.

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