O n this day, March 6, in the year 1834, the problem started.

Perhaps it is uncharitable to view the incorporation of the City of Toronto as "the problem," but there you have it. The record shows – and if history is not your drug, feel free to disagree – that the act proclaiming the creation of this City with a capital "C," born of the town of York, foretold a preoccupation with regulation and order and things specific while all but ignoring the creation of the city as a glorious cause.

Glorious cause? Yes. In the pursuit of which this newspaper has chosen this day, this anniversary of the passage of the original City of Toronto Act, to spur readers to rise up. This is your call to arms to lead the political dialogue in the months ahead right to election day, Oct. 25. My City; Your City. The conversation starts now.

We've come a long way from 1834. Yes, 19th-century victualling houses required regulation. Swimming at the docks demanded curtailment. Licences needed to be issued, not least for "auctioneers, butchers, cartmen and cartage, hawkers and peddlers, all persons exhibiting for gain or profit any puppet-show, wire-dance, circus-riding, or any other idle acts or feats which common showmen, mountebanks, circus riders or jugglers usually practice or perform."

Only between the selling of pickled fish and the enforcement of the sweeping of chimneys and well before the seizing of spoiled meat (a strong commercial taint runs through much of the act) does one find the omnibus mandate "to provide for the permanent improvement of the said City and the Liberties thereof, in all matters whatsoever, as well ornamental (sic) as useful." Well, there were almshouses for the poor.

It isn't much.

The city was left to define itself, ornamentally and usefully. Incrementally it attended to – or failed to attend to – matters of health and social equity and housing and transit and the environment and the waterfront while making decisions as to whether, or not, a swim in a public pool on a hot August night will be free or carry the unconscionable economic penalty of a loonie charge.

That's a position point in My City. Is it a bone of contention in Your City?

Do you care? You must. Only from this foundation will we then be able to argue: What do we want the city to be?

More precisely: What do you want it to be?

Be passionate. It is time to get ahead of the strategically placed episodic pronouncements of the various mayoralty candidates.

With the assistance of the Internet we are democratizing this municipal election. Our dedicated web-based initiative launches with 30 city-smart bloggers, an internet spandrel that will spark adulation and anger. Both of those responses we like. Indifference? Not so much. Don't care for what you're reading? Then apply to be a blogger too: We're accepting applications.

Opine. Report. Send us a video. Argue your case. Good ideas will be looped into bigger projects and broader platforms. Thinkers, dreamers and doers will be afforded their moment. Reader surveys will assist in prioritizing topics for future stories. No kidding: the sky's the limit.

Ideas big. Ideas small. We want them all. Enrique Penalosa, mayor of Bogotá a decade ago, included this in his definition of a good city: "When sidewalks can accommodate at least two wheelchairs right next to each other." I love that.

Some will say we are idealistic.

With that we will not argue. As the great Scot and 19th-century city planner Patrick Geddes wrote, idealism and "matter of fact" are inseparable: "Our daily steps are guided by ideals of direction, themselves unreachably beyond the stars, yet indispensible to getting anywhere, save indeed downwards."

Downwards is where we do not want to go.

The city creaks into gridlock and stasis. The gap between rich and poor: wider. The cities agenda, which once gained national traction, is diminished by harsh economic realities and, perhaps, a lack of resolve. The city's finances teeter under the pressure of structural deficit, which raises the cry in some quarters for more outsourcing, more privatization, more service reductions. We're going to be hearing a lot of that in the weeks to come. Carve and cut: electoral platforms built on taking away as opposed to the inviolate belief in what must be protected.

Little wonder it is so much easier to see what we have lost rather than what we have gained. There is loss in My City. I recall those days a quarter century ago when I would write to the comforting pa-dunk of a puck against the rink boards in the schoolyard across from my home. That rink has been gone a long time now. So too the city-tended winter skates on Grenadier Pond, a warming moment where families, regardless of means, would gather on Sunday afternoons.

My husband and I stare at the bill for waste disposal and wonder, what's better? What have we gained, he asks? I have gained an awful lot of time sitting on the King streetcar, and that's not a good thing.

There have been improvements on the waterfront. That is true. There has been progress in recycling. A full-service bank anchors the rebirth of Regent Park, an arrival spurred, ahem, by this very newspaper lamenting how the banks had bailed on servicing the poor.

Is that Your City?

Who's Your City?

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How does Your City present itself to the world?

There are many moments one could choose to pinpoint the nadir of Toronto's attempts at self-definition. Yes, this matters. Tourism matters. Identity matters greatly. Yet let us recall June, 2005, when the city branded itself as "Toronto Unlimited," a marketing exercise that stands out for all the wrong reasons – for its bland, meaningless slogan and for the dreary, institutional logo that came with it. "It is a mindset impossible to shake," was one of the city's pitch lines, which only invited disagreement.

No spark. No soul. Nothing like the stirring I (Heart) NY campaign, created in the wake of that great city's brush with bankruptcy, when the teachers union agreed, if necessary, to use their retirement funds to backstop loans to the city. Is it a horrible thought to imagine that Toronto has to face a greater crisis in order to come to terms with itself?

Today we are not ardent. We are too often plain vanilla. Promises to deliver an integrated street furniture program to put a handsomer face on the city have met with disappointing results. New street signs pop up in the neighbourhood, blue and white and topped with a school book etching of city hall. Earnest, funless and utterly lacking in charm, culture and character.

The neighbourhood is not city hall, which is home to schoolyard taunts and wall-to-wall dysfunction. The neighbourhood is the best thing about the city. It is the locus of that "social mobilization" to which city thinker David Pecaut would refer. Clusters of energy and brainpower and enthusiasms.

In My City we would not rename The Junction.

In My City we would advertise Junction art galleries to the world.

Perhaps you disagree.

Patrick Geddes defined a city thusly: "A city is more than a place in space; it is a drama in time."

You are its players. Starting today, the stage is yours.

Related links:

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