Here is something that seems to be a paradox. 

When you walk down any busy street in Toronto, you see a uniquely urban array of contradictions. You see maddening and fascinating. Exciting and terrifying. Funny and sad. Loving and cruel. Graceful and awkward. Friendly and forbidding. New and old. Beautiful and ugly.

You see generous. You see imaginative. You see bold civic spirit. But you don’t have to go very far to see small-minded and parochial and selfish.  

Toronto is as cool as can be. It’s as square as possible. It’s a hopeless place. It embodies great aspirations. It is a place where culture flourishes. It is a place that is short-sighted about supporting its own artists and cultural institutions. Toronto is rich in its diversity. It is a place that is divided by its differences. It’s a place that celebrates its architectural heritage. It’s a city that bulldozes it at the earliest opportunity.

Toronto is inherently contradictory. Complexity is in its DNA – and much of the city’s energy and creativity derives from this tumble of beliefs and ideas, images and facts, hopes and anxieties, successes and failures. As a result, the very least that can be said about the great urban experiment of Toronto is that it is interesting. There are too many stories unfolding here for it not to be. 

Now. Here’s the paradox.

Many people who would agree that Toronto is, at the very least, interesting, have the idea that its history is not. They don’t think of  Toronto’s past as maddening. Or fascinating. Or exciting. Or terrifying. They don’t think of it as sad. And they sure don’t think of it, ever, as funny. Toronto’s history often seems to have been cut off from the dynamic, troubling, inspiring, worrisome, ambitious, flawed and immensely enjoyable city in which we live and work and play. History, here in the city of Toronto,  has often been imagined to be something that exists apart from the complexity of the present. It often seems as if contemporary Toronto fell from the sky.

So, how can this be? How can a city that is complex, and diverse, and energetic, and dynamic come out of a past that is none of these? How can an interesting city be born of a dull past?

The answer, of course, is that it cannot. The notion that such a thing is possible is not a paradox. It is a mistake. Our present and our future are cut from the same cloth as our city’s past – and it is on this single idea that the Toronto Project is based. We will explain who we are, and what we will become, by telling the stories of who we have already been. And today, in the digital realm, we can tell these stories more vividly, more entertainingly, more colourfully, and more comprehensively than we have ever been able to tell them before. Of course, history is long ago. But it is also yesterday. And by tomorrow it will be today.