When La Sem Patisserie & Cafe opened Toronto’s first outdoor licensed patio in 1963 on St. Clair Ave. West, city officials didn’t know how to process the application. The public health department even wondered why anybody would ever want to eat outside. In patio-obsessed Toronto today this seems silly and absurd, but some of what motivated that resistance in 1963 still exists.

We travel to cities far and wide for experiences we seem to love but resist at home: Specifically, a particular kind of looseness in the public realm that is difficult to reproduce here, though this is a place now populated by people from around the world. For years, Toronto has struggled to allow even simple street food beyond the hotdog, while you can feast from an endless buffet of stalls as you walk in many other places.

On a recent trip through a few European cities, I found myself noting things we couldn’t have in Toronto, like patios without fences. Here, we seem to live in fear that tables and chairs will take off like a High Park capybara if they’re not penned inside a compound, or that if a Pinot Grigio isn’t properly corralled it might start a civil insurrection.

The ease with which cafes and restaurants in much of Europe and elsewhere can set up tables just outside, across the street, or on any little bit of space they can find would defy a number of Toronto bylaws. People also live in apartments above those patios by the score, as others eat and drink late into the evening below, often on smaller residential streets. Public life is not just confined to big, busy avenues, but is found in smaller, more intimate spaces, too.

It would be interesting to see a Venn diagram of people who’ve posted pictures of scenes like this on their social media accounts while on vacation with those who would oppose such things if they were proposed on their own block at home. Given the amount of protest that patio proposals sometimes get in Toronto, a large overlap would not be surprising.

While swimming last week at one of Berlin’s many urban lakes, I saw a bathing-suit-clad woman walking down a waterside laneway carrying two pints of beer as a police car on routine patrol slowly drove toward her. The Torontonian in me instinctively sensed trouble — she’s busted — but this was Berlin, so the cops just smiled at her as they passed.

I’ve argued that Ontario’s archaic and puritanical drinking laws mean that those with their own back yard can enjoy a drink outdoors, while everyone else must pay a premium to do so on a patio or at a special event.

Booze aside, the widespread embrace of public spaces as a communal living room, whether setting up chairs outside a front door or strolling in a square or promenade, is a deep part of many cultures. However, as I walked around Rome, Lausanne and Berlin, marvelling at the street scenes, I started to think about my grass-is-always-greener travel thoughts, and how Toronto has its own kind of evolving looseness toward public spaces too.

On warm weekend days, parks such as Trinity-Bellwoods, Morningside and Sunnyside become jammed with picnickers, and the big lawns in each are a sea of people that matches some of the great, well-used European parks I’ve visited.

Back in Berlin, they have a great culture of swimming and sunbathing in various states of dress at their many lakes. In Toronto, living in a neighbourhood close to Lake Ontario can make this a possibility; during last year’s late summer heat waves, Toronto’s beaches, many of them flying the Blue Flag to demonstrate it meets an international standard of cleanliness and amenity, had crowds even on weekdays.

Though our antiquated ferry system makes it difficult to get there quickly, Hanlan’s Point has also evolved into one of Toronto’s loosest public spaces, its clothing-optional designation giving it a European feel, and its happy, libertine spirit unlike anything I’ve encountered in North America this side of Vancouver’s Wreck Beach.

Another version of loose Toronto is its tolerance for marijuana smoking in public. Downtown or in the suburbs, the smell of weed wafts though the city streets and parks like in no other city I’ve been to, not even famously pot-friendly places like Amsterdam.

In such an officious place, it’s an interesting aberration, though not everybody has enjoyed the same access to this tolerance: a 2017 Toronto Star investigation revealed a “startling” racial divide as a substantially higher proportion of Black Torontonians had been arrested for possession of up to 30 grams of marijuana between 2003 and 2013 than white citizens. As with who gets to use public space without harassment of various kinds or arbitrary stops and police checks, Toronto remains an unequal place.

Curious, too, is the proliferation of cannabis shops here over the past couple years along Toronto’s retail strips. As Canada is about to legalize marijuana, these shops, which saw waves of police raids, often with charges later dropped, will likely disappear or reduce in number, making this brief era a remarkable kind of wild-west retail in Toronto.

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At the same time as I crave the loose urban life of other cities, I’m glad Toronto tries to achieve certain standards of accessibility in the public realm, so people with mobility devices can enjoy them, too.

Toronto isn’t Europe, and perhaps that’s a good thing, but we’re not as uptight as we might seem.