Cities are their streets. Great cities are those with great streets. Other things matter, of course — parks, buildings, transit — but it's streets that bring a city to life, that make it a place people choose to live, visit, work, play . . .

Streets have different roles. Some connect us; others, conversely, keep us apart. Streets are what enable us to organize space and bring order and coherence to what would otherwise be arbitrary and chaotic. At their best, streets are both a destination and the way to get there. They don't just make cities possible, they define them, give them form and create their character. They are a city's circulatory system, its largest arteries and its smallest capillaries.

Streets have also become the forgotten element in our efforts to create a livable city. In Toronto, the focus is on parks, housing, towers and transit; streets are left to fend for themselves. At the same time, however, streets are under more pressure than ever as the historic dominance of the car is challenged by other groups, namely cyclists and pedestrians. The car has wreaked untold damage on our streets as well as our cities. Its needs are at odds with those of the urban environment. Cars are quick. Cities are slow. Cars want highways, fast roads that run as straight as possible with as few interruptions as possible. City roads, by contrast, must accommodate not just vehicular traffic but the activity that unfolds along its edges, the shops, restaurants, museums, malls, schools, cafes, courts . . .

Now cyclists are clamouring for a piece of the street. They want their own lanes. Then there are the parkers; they demand places to park their cars whenever and wherever they want. Pedestrians want wider sidewalks. That doesn't leave much room for drivers. This means a lot of contested space on a typical four-lane road in Toronto. Indeed, our city's streets have become a battleground where a generational struggle for mobility is playing out.

Just last week, a group of suburban councillors launched a rearguard action to stop the reintroduction of streetcars on Queen St. (Because of construction, buses have temporarily replaced streetcars.) Two Etobicoke representatives suggested that buses could be the better way. They go with the flow and, unlike streetcars, don't slow traffic. Their argument was nonsense, but from their suburban perspective understandable; for them streets really are just a way for cars to get to the mall and back. This is perhaps the essential difference between city and suburb; in cities, streets are a destination, a means of getting around and the repository of urban experience. In suburbs, streets are for cars and trucks, and if necessary, buses.

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The truth is that street-building is a lost art in Toronto, and probably North America. This city's most successful streets are our legacy from the 19th and early 20th centuries. For the most part, the modern city relies entirely upon this civic inheritance for whatever claim it can make to greatness. Newer communities, from Mississauga to Markham and beyond, have yet to build a single great street.

As Jane Jacobs noted in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, “The pseudo-science of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success.” The reason, of course, is that they are focused on cars not people.

That has started to change in recent years, but despite overwhelming evidence, Toronto remains on the wrong side of history. A year after installing temporary bike lanes along a short stretch of Bloor St., the city will decide this fall whether or not to make them permanent. Though a remarkable 75 per cent of local residents support the lanes, it's anyone's guess what the city will do. Council may approve the lanes, but it won't be easy.

Unsurprisingly, Toronto's most vibrant streets — Queen, College, Bloor — are generally narrow car-slowing thoroughfares lined with unspectacular buildings between two and six storeys tall — hardly the stuff of vehicular convenience. The major interruptions in these mostly intact streetscapes are largely the result of clumsy modern interventions beginning in the 1950s and '60s. Decades later in what's now Vertical City, we still have difficulty making buildings work at street level. Architects are slowly learning, but have yet to master the skills of contextualism. They prefer the silence of the vacuum and ignore the public realm whenever possible.

Through it all, the streets of Toronto are still the city's route to the future. They remind us of what has been lost, but also of what remains to be regained.

Christopher Hume’s column appears weekly. He can be reached at jcwhume4@gmail.com