My mom talking about her life & theory of urbanization.
27 August 2018 [link youtube]
Well, some people wrote in with disbelief at how many hours I claimed I spent with the Sega Master System in my youth… here's the woman who supplied me with those video games, and many of the other (even worse!) influences that shaped me, talking about her own (university) education (a stark contrast to my own!) and how her approach to museology links to a broader social theory of the progress of urbanization.
No, I didn't film this myself. The source of the video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_KNEM3pvV0
Youtube Automatic Transcription
[Applause]
well thank you and as you were reading the sword version of my my biography we said I don't know always feels kind of long I was thinking as I was looking at that that slide the picture of the front of the college just thinking about how continuous everything is with being a student here you you know hearing all that I don't naturally I'm reflecting what was it about University of Toronto but really especially about University College you know kind of that made me who I am and I have to say it was really my experience here that did make me who I am and I'm very very moved in this room I don't think existed exactly 90% of my time was spent in the junior common room which I would really attribute to encouraging outside the box thinking I was very lucky to come here with a lot of talented people were here at the time of just and so the idea that university education is something that you do yourself not something good teachers do for you that was pretty much a prevalent notion at that time I guess one of the highlights I think it's nice to reminisce I presume of quite a few of you are alums as I am was when one of the members you know and these were also days where a kind of Student Government was kind of like Tammany Hall you know was modeled on that kind of that kind of model so somebody who was in student government I was busy circulating a petition to stop the war in Vietnam in the in the in the new cafeteria which is now it's now a museum it's now the the Art Center that's right which we planned after thank you for that let me plant that arts hitter and he came up to me and said you know we think that you could be a very good culture director for the art the lit rag which is the student government body I think probably didn't it was so counter cultural I don't think I knew that there even was such a thing and I was just totally shocked to be asked to do something that seemed a little bit mainstream to me but I said well if you think if you think I do a good job you can put my name up for election and indeed I got elected and that was very nice because it means that my name is in gold up there in the JCR and I used to go because I changed my name and I got married which is a very interesting thing the kind of moment of passion I guess but you know to find my name and of course I was looking for Gaylord and I didn't look for Gayle Dexter it took me a long time to find it but my daughter was also on the led and my son came here as well and the first thing that I did one of the things that I did given that tremendous position is they had a financial surplus they had money they had tons of money so I proposed and it was accepted to do something called the pop art festival and I don't know if anybody here went to that but it was it was really quite huge Bob Bray who succeeded me in that position on the let the next year did one there was a couple more after that and and to give you an idea Judy there was were the days when you could invite the Minister of Culture to open a pop art festival and Judy Lamar she accepted and Junie lamarche opened the festival and it was quite hilarious we we had a great time we turned that that was then really a horrible cafeteria where people from nameless nameless high schools played bridge all day and as opposed to people and the JCR who did other things all day and they and we turned it into a we sort of you know Andy Warhol was very big with the soup cans and all that we turned it into a into into a supermarket it actually turned the whole space into a supermarket was tremendous and and that was it that that's a great memory so what did I learn from that I learned that if you had great ideas people would let you implement them now that's a simple-minded kind of thing to learn but that is the story of this crazy company that my husband and I set up called Lord cultural resources what we've learned is that when you have a very good idea that's really rooted in people's culture they'll make them happen and of course the Human Rights Museum in Ottawa example in Canada and there there are many around the world I'll talk about a few of them so I could reminisce all night but I don't think I will just say that this was I'm sure it still is Oh France well I took the past course you had to do past courses so I took the past course in French and my first year at UC at that time it was a UC course it was probably one of the the only ones that that were actually that in my program I was in history there was delivered here at UC and I don't know it was maybe good enough in French to have a Paris office I could say some other things about that and to be given this incredible honor by the French government and everything everything you said thank you really comes back to UC so I would encourage everybody to fully appreciate this wonderful College so today I'm going to talk about this this subject that interests me a lot after all University of Toronto is a great university that exists in the heart of a great city now you know Toronto had only 300,000 people I mean the whole city when I went to university it was not exactly a great city but was a pretty good City it was not yet I graduated in 68 and we hadn't yet come to 1970 which was the turning point at which in a way Montreal moved to Toronto I think that that's another Canadian story was a small city but being one of those universities that is in the heart of downtown I think indelibly made everyone aware that culture and cities are very connected you could go to many great universities in the United States including Harvard pretty much so many of them and never get the idea that the city makes a difference but that notion is completely ingrained here and so this whole relationship between cities and museums and soft power has intrigued me for some time and a couple of years ago I got a chance to write the book and and now the book exists it's not even a year old so I'm not going to go into these are where our offices are yes don't have to you kind of explained that this the map shows pretty much the dark blue is where we've done projects I think the multicultural character of Toronto and at this university always makes you think beyond the four walls of Anglo Canada I would say that that's really the big lesson of coming here and anyway that that's that piece so I also was very privileged at University of Toronto to have great professors I was in you know I studied history here and I mean some of the the total grades where we're teaching here at that time and some of them are still very good friends of mine I'm very proud to say that Natalie Davis who's considered to be one of the great historians in the world and has won that prize is still a friend I we see each other about every three months and have done so for many years so the people I studied with had a huge impact on on my way of thinking and so one of the things that burying my husband whose name I I took and I informing the company really think about a lot is what is culture anyway what is it and this is the definition that that we think is an important definition because it's stress is not the objects but the human process and it really informs our way of thinking about about culture which is the production of meaning right it's a production of meaning and so one thing becomes next most interesting is why does it change and why does it change so quickly right and somebody who organizes a pop art festival that that's a kind of normal thing to think about is why is pop art one year abstract expressionism another year formalism another decade what causes this change this constant change in culture and why is it just leaping to now which i think is what we're all living for now is why is culture today changing more rapidly than ever before there might be some historians here who would take issue with that and then we can have a discussion in the question period but it is tremendously rapid and I'm proposing in this book that there really are a couple of reasons one of course is the growth of cities and the other is has to do with technology I'm going to talk about the growth of cities aspect of things tonight hmm so I think you're pretty familiar that cities are growing they're growing everywhere Toronto is going to be a very very big city in another ten years and we have to be ready for that half the world's population live in cities which is a very big change by the way eighty five percent of the Canadian population lives in cities so we are a highly urbanized society but when but for example China it's just barely 50 percent you know we think you know that the people why are they building so many cities well they're building a lot of cities because they look at the advanced world we have an office in mom in Beijing so I'm pretty aware of some of the thinking there they see advanced countries and they think well why are they advanced oh people don't live in backward countries sighs they live in sophisticated cities so we must build cities so they build some cities that work and they build a number of cities that are ghost cities no one really wants to live there and they don't work out so well but but that's that that kind of goes with the territory after all Elliot Lake didn't work out so well and we have a some cities like Fort McMurray that aren't working so well today I'm not trying I just think we have to have a sense of proportionality about these issues but the thing that the statistic that's really interesting is that 80% of global GDP is produced in cities now that is really a crazy shift because certainly when I was studying actually I was setting economic history not just history economic historians look we were studying it was all about industry and industry is located where you have the transportation and the raw materials basically where the raw materials are is where the industry is and our cities the cities that are growing are about a different kind of raw material they're about intellectual raw material they're about what we now call the knowledge economy and and this kind of urbanization that is leading to this exponential kind of economic growth is very very dependent on what's called the knowledge economy I'm sure you're all a little tired of hearing about it but a university like the University of Toronto well particularly a great research university like this one is an enormous support for the knowledge economy and if you look this is very striking by the way the University of Toronto plus all of the hospitals along University Avenue have the brainpower a brainpower in downtown Toronto and I would throw in Queen's Park - that is really almost unparalleled in North America it is astonishing it is huge and that means that I know people I question some of aspects of Mars but the idea of the R&D come opponent the idea that you bring the biotech and the intellectual on the creative and the artist together these are very very important building blocks for a successful economy in our own city so the next slide and a little time I will speed up a little bit if talks about how does this economy change people we're different people I'm I'm I don't know what would I say my generation people graduated 68 69 70 and about there we were like the Canaries in the you know we were we were the harbingers of the of the age that we're now living in students here today are the harbingers of the next stage that I don't pretend to understand but I do understand how the knowledge economy has changed us as people the knowledge economy includes all this you know science engineering R&D finance of course Wall Street you have Dulles excuse me Bay Street you know you go down University and base streets pretty much close in there that's all part of this and very closely located remember if we think about New York which is a much bigger city it's really only NYU that's downtown yet you know Columbia is somewhere else pretty much detached the way in which University of Toronto and Ryerson and you know at George Brown to are all co-located all these brains it's really very significant I think we probably don't pay enough attention to it music culture design law a hundred years ago these professions I just didn't all professions these these types of jobs comprised about 10% of the economy this is basically Richard Florida land who is not surprisingly at the University of Toronto here we are today it's almost 50% almost not quite and what's interesting is that Toronto itself is about 45 percent very very high the percentage of knowledge workers it's right up there with two other interesting cities Amsterdam also very high Singapore also very high New York is actually lower it's about 35% if we could I think that one of the reasons why we do so well on that index is because we have had rather enlightened immigration policies now the demands of the knowledge economy are pretty interesting in terms of the workforce and here we are at the University which has two and I'm gonna get to museums but university is what's inspiring me today in the past this is a list you can read the list I love these lists you're gonna get another one this is like in the past this is what mattered this is what a worker had to be able to be and do and then today or tomorrow like today tomorrow this is what workers what really matters so it's pretty obvious physical strength that's you know my husband grew up in Hamilton that physical strength you didn't have that he was he was volatile at truvy the knowledge worker right first person and his family to go to university but today it's intellectual strength follow orders even you know when we were at university that was what the whole rebellion of the 60s was in a way about we you know we were growing up in a system of high school in public school which was which really taught you how to follow orders and yet the economy that was in the process of change really was going to demand that we be leaders you don't always know it you know but it's there it's it's in the ether and on you know organized everything is organized now it's all about the individual a friend of mine who look at sharing an office with we're thinking of reopening our London office which is a whole big story why we closed it in the first place which we shouldn't have done said that their London is projecting that in 10 years 50 percent of the people who work in London will be freelancers now I think that's a kind of a scary thing means that they won't have normal jobs and so that means different kinds of offices different kinds of more coffee shops to do your work in I'm not sure what it means so again and I'll just come down maybe one of the most important things is centralized organizations that's how we I p.m. think right and now networks everything is around networks even within the university there's a tendency to look at networks rather you still need a monolithic organization but it's networks within them so the knowledge economy has changed an enormous number of things and all those things have an impact on museums so that's really where we're getting to now which is the next list is that museums need to change some wants to change others prefer not to change and I guess I don't know if that can be said about universities too but certainly we landed in a field that has its own special resistance to change so in the past music museums were very isolated I think I can remember going to the world Ontario Museum as a kid I liked it it was this this quiet place you know you hushed voices there were many nice things about it by the way that I liked like it was free right that was one of the good parts of it then but today they're more collaborative I don't want to necessarily go through all of these but that one of the bigger changes is they used to be completely object centered what was the museum it was a place where there were objects and they had a label on the label just gave you this basic information but today their visitor centered and that that changes everything it means that they have to use technology it means that they have events and activities and and so on I think that the most important from the point of view of this talk are the last two they used to be sleeping giants they're all big I mean are all big but they're mainly big they mainly have big property and they were mainly pretty sleepy and today museums are expected to be city builders they're supposed to be part of urban regeneration building cities building consciousness and all of that and then I'm going to talk about the last one is that they were definitely remnants of hard power I have a slide about that I hope it's next and now they're slowly becoming eight engines of soft power so what do I mean if I say museums were agents of hard power well this is a photograph of the famous elgin marbles at the british museum which are very disputed do they really own them should they return them the point is that most of the historic collections of most museums not all were trophies of war or they were plundered from colonial internal you know war against Aboriginal and indigenous people right or they were the records of great men excluding women children minorities and all those other people and so that is the way in which museums were agents of hard power and our museum especially the Royal Ontario Museum that's a big part of its inheritance to the degree that the church reinforced the hard power of colonialism in China that is where those Chinese collections mainly came from look very glad that they I'm sure they were legal day with legally purchased and acquired but they are still part of that hard power equation so it's not easy to overcome an inheritance like that the big Universal museums struggle with that they're proud of their collections public likes to come and see them and they they like to justify why they should be where they are because there are always you know every day in every way or countries of origin are often asking for them back but now there is a tendency for museums to reflect soft power and I think somewhere here I do yeah that's what soft power is it's the ability to influence and attract and change agenda and persuade so museums are becoming part of the world of persuasion now clearly this National Museum that I've spent 14 years of my life working on I'm very proud of it people it's really fantastic I know everyone in Toronto thinks it should be built in Toronto but there's reasons why it had to be in Winnipeg it's a it is this is the Canada Hall but it's it is it's an example of a museum that was created around an idea and increasingly there are museums created not around historic collections but around ideas and then collections are brought in in support of those ideas so and this move toward soft-power has really been part of a a kind of evolution of museums where you know they were first you know they were a collection of objects and about I want to say 30 years ago maybe 35 the idea that museums are where the educational institutions is something that became a kind of cosa lab let me put it that way it's hard to believe but really museums didn't see themselves as educational institutions until we the last quarter century so they moved in that direction that's been a very positive thing and then there was a move I want to say in the 1990s for them to be see themselves as entertainment entertainment entertainment places right there's the museum as an experience and that was kind of coming out of the shell and then especially starting in I'd say 1997 with the opening of the Bilbao museum the Guggenheim in Bilbao the idea that museums have to be part of city branding and city building really became a very very very major trend now there is in this book if you're if you're interested we we give a whole lot of explanation of the city building role of museums okay so I wear my gun coming from I've talked about how the growth of cities has influenced museums how its influenced museums to be something more than what is it shop you know like what is this weird object where did it come from what date is that to being visitors centered to becoming part of the knowledge economy and now I just want to focus very briefly on the role in city building so you can read this faster than I can say it but you can see that they're placemaking after all what is the city you know what is New York without the people sitting at the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of right what is Toronto that's another question we get to Toronto well get into Toronto in the discussion period because there's an issue with Toronto their economic generators they generate jobs right they generate money tourists come they spend money they are choice destinations they provide the kind of cultural Commons a meeting place where different aspects of society can meet and that's a very fruitful they preserve identities heritage memory that that's very important especially in the face of change and the book goes into all of these in a lot of detail and they help people adapt to change museums are fascinating and the way they actually can help us adapt to change and that's also in the book but I want to talk about this one today because I think this is the great little dirty secret okay and I'd like to see what you think about it property values so here's a property within five minutes of where we're now seated it's the condo building going up opposite the Royal Ontario Museum on Bloor Street this condo building take a look at what it says this is the this is real it says exclusive penthouses forever protected views forever protected why are they forever protected no view in Toronto very few are forever protected because there's more and more condos going up but if you are in a building across from the Royal Ontario Museum that is forever protected nobody's going to build 15 stories on top of the Royal Ontario Museum now I've been saying for quite a long time that you know the wrong gets no benefit from this the they maintain their building some people like it some people don't like it that's just a matter of taste they have beautiful property that they look after and they keep it clean there were demonstrations in front of the room all the time for because of for other reasons not to do if they're wrong but the roms busy cleaning up afterwards and it may be everything fine but the room itself gets very little money from the City of Toronto because we know the City of Toronto has very little money and for free sex purposes and it benefits not at all from all the condos around it and everybody who lives in those condos I include myself not in this building but in another one we do benefit and now what's interesting is that over the holidays the New York Times ran an op IDI an editorial saying people should pay for their views and I am that that money should go to support if it's a park or the zoo or the wrong or frankly the University of Toronto why not I mean some of our tax money goes to pay for the BIE Business Improvement areas why not pop pop you've covered exactly the right moment why not why not pay why couldn't that be a really good stream of income for museums parks and cultural places so this is my big campaign and I think that I'm a small campaign because I'm trying to get people interested in it and I think it's well supported by economists like Thomas Piketty you know the guy who wrote capitalism in the 21st century he goes on and on about this fact that the real value as cities grow let's just think about it's not just Toronto that's growing it's not just New York that's growing if every single city in the world its cities in the its cities in India its cities in the Pakistan it's cities in Africa they're all growing some of the biggest cities in the world in fact are in Africa and where the museum is the property values are the highest that museum is paid for by tax money and some private money whatever it brings huge benefit the benefits go to developers and owners the benefits are realized over 40 50 year periods and I believe that this is really the next frontier for funding so museums have a role in a city building they're fulfilling their role pretty well but I think that they deserve to have some some support so here's a nice little example of that yeah this is what I just wanted I've never talked about this before because it's kind of something that everybody knows and nobody wants to talk about so I thought University University College this is a place where we talk about things that maybe people don't want to talk about in polite society so this is Halifax Halifax has just built the most fabulous new library right and they the top floor of that library they called the public living room and this is the view of the public living room is the one on top you can see the Citadel and the water you know this fabulous view but lo and behold what is about to happen what's about to happen and this is a he's taken from a leaflet that was passed out recently if there's going to be a condominium built which will simply take away the view and so far city council doesn't care the councillors don't care because we haven't established a kind of concept of the right to of you and the city's become more and more dense the right to a view is actually very important and it's these things so more you know anyway you get the point I had to put that in so I'm quoting Richard Florida here um he wrote the introduction to the book cities are starting we're now coming back to how do cities in so that was like a little coat off to the side maybe just a little side thing because we wanted to just come back to the point of how cities in their density and intensity are influencing museums so cities the other thing about cities is not just the growth it's not just the property values it's the fact that cities are becoming agents themselves of soft power Joseph Nye a professor at Harvard coined the phrase soft power he has a you can get a daily deluge of very interesting material from from the soft power network it's all about countries everyone knows that countries wanted you know it what is it Churchill said jaar jaar jaar is better than war war war right so that's the country aspect but in the world of cities and city power and city economic power cities are doing a lot they're doing lots for Refugees they're doing a lot for the environment more cities cities were way out ahead of countries on environmental issues and passing environmental you know my environmental frameworks and ways to operate they're out there on issues like transportation and they're also out there on issues like culture so the question is why are museums not more prominently working with cities on all these issues that's the question that we try to do it in this book so um this is a and I'm almost at the enemies I'm worried about our time I don't know how we're doing for time so yeah this isn't a real university well there's no clock um so so I wanted to give some positive examples of how museums are working with cities a to exercise soft power this is from a wonderful program that Adrienne Clarkson and John Ralston Hall saw have on the it was part of these their Institute for Canadian citizenship they give away admissions to museums to new immigrants new citizens actually to new citizens what a great thing the Toronto Public Library makes passes to museums available and when those passes become available I am told that people arrive like it's 6:00 in the morning to get them because people most PM ago cannot afford to pay if you've looked recently at what it cost to go to the IOM or the AG Oh so adapting to the change is is something that is is is important but isn't the museums that are doing this it's really important to understand this is the foundation this isn't what museums out of the goodness of their heart aren't saying gee we need to get more recognized in Toronto other cities yes not in Toronto we need to get more new Canadians in here no they're not um this is a great program at the VNA with a during refugee week don't know if we like that term but anyway they they got the ID and I think it's brilliant is to have after all collections of big museums are from all over the world people from Syria can tell us a lot about what's in the wrong you know and they can tell us in really interesting ways but the VNA has actually instituted that so they invite new immigrants or refugees to come in and take people on tours of the collections and its really exciting but museums are also great places to teach English as a Second Language fantastic places how much of that is going on how much do museums open their doors to our museum say if you're a teacher of ESL there are tons of them in Toronto many I shouldn't say times are they admitted for free into the museum to teach English as a Second Language I don't believe them and this is my last example I think you know my second last Canadian one it's the new immigration Museum in Halifax which clearly foregrounds the role of refugees it's it's a nice place we planned it you know Human Rights Museum is us pier 21 it's also us other museums of that of that ilk shall we say kind of some people might say ideological I I would say soft power and then the last example I want to give is Montreal the most unlikely place Montreal Quebec historically has not had the English tradition of museu G that we had and as a result they're inventing they're reinventing museums in the most creative way and it's very significant what they're doing I could go on that's a lecture in itself but I will just point out that the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has just built this wing which is called it's actually the Michel and went out of Hornstein pavilion and Peace Center the actual word piece is part of it it would be a place for Regis playing the museum's collections and look what's interesting is quite big visit Coates from them a powerful message for peace a reflection of the city they're there when was the last time we saw that in Toronto from a major museum I've never seen that and they've done something I think a little I won't say a little unusual which is that they've said that that they've identified public need remember I said museums are now more visitor centered so some of the needs that people have in the community mental health very big and and and so they have huge programs in this museum related to mental health art therapy using artists therapy most art historians would be horrified with the concept of artists therapy and an art museum but I think it's very interesting that they're doing it so just by way of conclusion I'd say that right now it's a moment of choice for museums is that do they want to be in a soft power embrace with cities or do they want to be sleeping giants and I think that that's a big choice for the next 15 years [Applause]
well thank you and as you were reading the sword version of my my biography we said I don't know always feels kind of long I was thinking as I was looking at that that slide the picture of the front of the college just thinking about how continuous everything is with being a student here you you know hearing all that I don't naturally I'm reflecting what was it about University of Toronto but really especially about University College you know kind of that made me who I am and I have to say it was really my experience here that did make me who I am and I'm very very moved in this room I don't think existed exactly 90% of my time was spent in the junior common room which I would really attribute to encouraging outside the box thinking I was very lucky to come here with a lot of talented people were here at the time of just and so the idea that university education is something that you do yourself not something good teachers do for you that was pretty much a prevalent notion at that time I guess one of the highlights I think it's nice to reminisce I presume of quite a few of you are alums as I am was when one of the members you know and these were also days where a kind of Student Government was kind of like Tammany Hall you know was modeled on that kind of that kind of model so somebody who was in student government I was busy circulating a petition to stop the war in Vietnam in the in the in the new cafeteria which is now it's now a museum it's now the the Art Center that's right which we planned after thank you for that let me plant that arts hitter and he came up to me and said you know we think that you could be a very good culture director for the art the lit rag which is the student government body I think probably didn't it was so counter cultural I don't think I knew that there even was such a thing and I was just totally shocked to be asked to do something that seemed a little bit mainstream to me but I said well if you think if you think I do a good job you can put my name up for election and indeed I got elected and that was very nice because it means that my name is in gold up there in the JCR and I used to go because I changed my name and I got married which is a very interesting thing the kind of moment of passion I guess but you know to find my name and of course I was looking for Gaylord and I didn't look for Gayle Dexter it took me a long time to find it but my daughter was also on the led and my son came here as well and the first thing that I did one of the things that I did given that tremendous position is they had a financial surplus they had money they had tons of money so I proposed and it was accepted to do something called the pop art festival and I don't know if anybody here went to that but it was it was really quite huge Bob Bray who succeeded me in that position on the let the next year did one there was a couple more after that and and to give you an idea Judy there was were the days when you could invite the Minister of Culture to open a pop art festival and Judy Lamar she accepted and Junie lamarche opened the festival and it was quite hilarious we we had a great time we turned that that was then really a horrible cafeteria where people from nameless nameless high schools played bridge all day and as opposed to people and the JCR who did other things all day and they and we turned it into a we sort of you know Andy Warhol was very big with the soup cans and all that we turned it into a into into a supermarket it actually turned the whole space into a supermarket was tremendous and and that was it that that's a great memory so what did I learn from that I learned that if you had great ideas people would let you implement them now that's a simple-minded kind of thing to learn but that is the story of this crazy company that my husband and I set up called Lord cultural resources what we've learned is that when you have a very good idea that's really rooted in people's culture they'll make them happen and of course the Human Rights Museum in Ottawa example in Canada and there there are many around the world I'll talk about a few of them so I could reminisce all night but I don't think I will just say that this was I'm sure it still is Oh France well I took the past course you had to do past courses so I took the past course in French and my first year at UC at that time it was a UC course it was probably one of the the only ones that that were actually that in my program I was in history there was delivered here at UC and I don't know it was maybe good enough in French to have a Paris office I could say some other things about that and to be given this incredible honor by the French government and everything everything you said thank you really comes back to UC so I would encourage everybody to fully appreciate this wonderful College so today I'm going to talk about this this subject that interests me a lot after all University of Toronto is a great university that exists in the heart of a great city now you know Toronto had only 300,000 people I mean the whole city when I went to university it was not exactly a great city but was a pretty good City it was not yet I graduated in 68 and we hadn't yet come to 1970 which was the turning point at which in a way Montreal moved to Toronto I think that that's another Canadian story was a small city but being one of those universities that is in the heart of downtown I think indelibly made everyone aware that culture and cities are very connected you could go to many great universities in the United States including Harvard pretty much so many of them and never get the idea that the city makes a difference but that notion is completely ingrained here and so this whole relationship between cities and museums and soft power has intrigued me for some time and a couple of years ago I got a chance to write the book and and now the book exists it's not even a year old so I'm not going to go into these are where our offices are yes don't have to you kind of explained that this the map shows pretty much the dark blue is where we've done projects I think the multicultural character of Toronto and at this university always makes you think beyond the four walls of Anglo Canada I would say that that's really the big lesson of coming here and anyway that that's that piece so I also was very privileged at University of Toronto to have great professors I was in you know I studied history here and I mean some of the the total grades where we're teaching here at that time and some of them are still very good friends of mine I'm very proud to say that Natalie Davis who's considered to be one of the great historians in the world and has won that prize is still a friend I we see each other about every three months and have done so for many years so the people I studied with had a huge impact on on my way of thinking and so one of the things that burying my husband whose name I I took and I informing the company really think about a lot is what is culture anyway what is it and this is the definition that that we think is an important definition because it's stress is not the objects but the human process and it really informs our way of thinking about about culture which is the production of meaning right it's a production of meaning and so one thing becomes next most interesting is why does it change and why does it change so quickly right and somebody who organizes a pop art festival that that's a kind of normal thing to think about is why is pop art one year abstract expressionism another year formalism another decade what causes this change this constant change in culture and why is it just leaping to now which i think is what we're all living for now is why is culture today changing more rapidly than ever before there might be some historians here who would take issue with that and then we can have a discussion in the question period but it is tremendously rapid and I'm proposing in this book that there really are a couple of reasons one of course is the growth of cities and the other is has to do with technology I'm going to talk about the growth of cities aspect of things tonight hmm so I think you're pretty familiar that cities are growing they're growing everywhere Toronto is going to be a very very big city in another ten years and we have to be ready for that half the world's population live in cities which is a very big change by the way eighty five percent of the Canadian population lives in cities so we are a highly urbanized society but when but for example China it's just barely 50 percent you know we think you know that the people why are they building so many cities well they're building a lot of cities because they look at the advanced world we have an office in mom in Beijing so I'm pretty aware of some of the thinking there they see advanced countries and they think well why are they advanced oh people don't live in backward countries sighs they live in sophisticated cities so we must build cities so they build some cities that work and they build a number of cities that are ghost cities no one really wants to live there and they don't work out so well but but that's that that kind of goes with the territory after all Elliot Lake didn't work out so well and we have a some cities like Fort McMurray that aren't working so well today I'm not trying I just think we have to have a sense of proportionality about these issues but the thing that the statistic that's really interesting is that 80% of global GDP is produced in cities now that is really a crazy shift because certainly when I was studying actually I was setting economic history not just history economic historians look we were studying it was all about industry and industry is located where you have the transportation and the raw materials basically where the raw materials are is where the industry is and our cities the cities that are growing are about a different kind of raw material they're about intellectual raw material they're about what we now call the knowledge economy and and this kind of urbanization that is leading to this exponential kind of economic growth is very very dependent on what's called the knowledge economy I'm sure you're all a little tired of hearing about it but a university like the University of Toronto well particularly a great research university like this one is an enormous support for the knowledge economy and if you look this is very striking by the way the University of Toronto plus all of the hospitals along University Avenue have the brainpower a brainpower in downtown Toronto and I would throw in Queen's Park - that is really almost unparalleled in North America it is astonishing it is huge and that means that I know people I question some of aspects of Mars but the idea of the R&D come opponent the idea that you bring the biotech and the intellectual on the creative and the artist together these are very very important building blocks for a successful economy in our own city so the next slide and a little time I will speed up a little bit if talks about how does this economy change people we're different people I'm I'm I don't know what would I say my generation people graduated 68 69 70 and about there we were like the Canaries in the you know we were we were the harbingers of the of the age that we're now living in students here today are the harbingers of the next stage that I don't pretend to understand but I do understand how the knowledge economy has changed us as people the knowledge economy includes all this you know science engineering R&D finance of course Wall Street you have Dulles excuse me Bay Street you know you go down University and base streets pretty much close in there that's all part of this and very closely located remember if we think about New York which is a much bigger city it's really only NYU that's downtown yet you know Columbia is somewhere else pretty much detached the way in which University of Toronto and Ryerson and you know at George Brown to are all co-located all these brains it's really very significant I think we probably don't pay enough attention to it music culture design law a hundred years ago these professions I just didn't all professions these these types of jobs comprised about 10% of the economy this is basically Richard Florida land who is not surprisingly at the University of Toronto here we are today it's almost 50% almost not quite and what's interesting is that Toronto itself is about 45 percent very very high the percentage of knowledge workers it's right up there with two other interesting cities Amsterdam also very high Singapore also very high New York is actually lower it's about 35% if we could I think that one of the reasons why we do so well on that index is because we have had rather enlightened immigration policies now the demands of the knowledge economy are pretty interesting in terms of the workforce and here we are at the University which has two and I'm gonna get to museums but university is what's inspiring me today in the past this is a list you can read the list I love these lists you're gonna get another one this is like in the past this is what mattered this is what a worker had to be able to be and do and then today or tomorrow like today tomorrow this is what workers what really matters so it's pretty obvious physical strength that's you know my husband grew up in Hamilton that physical strength you didn't have that he was he was volatile at truvy the knowledge worker right first person and his family to go to university but today it's intellectual strength follow orders even you know when we were at university that was what the whole rebellion of the 60s was in a way about we you know we were growing up in a system of high school in public school which was which really taught you how to follow orders and yet the economy that was in the process of change really was going to demand that we be leaders you don't always know it you know but it's there it's it's in the ether and on you know organized everything is organized now it's all about the individual a friend of mine who look at sharing an office with we're thinking of reopening our London office which is a whole big story why we closed it in the first place which we shouldn't have done said that their London is projecting that in 10 years 50 percent of the people who work in London will be freelancers now I think that's a kind of a scary thing means that they won't have normal jobs and so that means different kinds of offices different kinds of more coffee shops to do your work in I'm not sure what it means so again and I'll just come down maybe one of the most important things is centralized organizations that's how we I p.m. think right and now networks everything is around networks even within the university there's a tendency to look at networks rather you still need a monolithic organization but it's networks within them so the knowledge economy has changed an enormous number of things and all those things have an impact on museums so that's really where we're getting to now which is the next list is that museums need to change some wants to change others prefer not to change and I guess I don't know if that can be said about universities too but certainly we landed in a field that has its own special resistance to change so in the past music museums were very isolated I think I can remember going to the world Ontario Museum as a kid I liked it it was this this quiet place you know you hushed voices there were many nice things about it by the way that I liked like it was free right that was one of the good parts of it then but today they're more collaborative I don't want to necessarily go through all of these but that one of the bigger changes is they used to be completely object centered what was the museum it was a place where there were objects and they had a label on the label just gave you this basic information but today their visitor centered and that that changes everything it means that they have to use technology it means that they have events and activities and and so on I think that the most important from the point of view of this talk are the last two they used to be sleeping giants they're all big I mean are all big but they're mainly big they mainly have big property and they were mainly pretty sleepy and today museums are expected to be city builders they're supposed to be part of urban regeneration building cities building consciousness and all of that and then I'm going to talk about the last one is that they were definitely remnants of hard power I have a slide about that I hope it's next and now they're slowly becoming eight engines of soft power so what do I mean if I say museums were agents of hard power well this is a photograph of the famous elgin marbles at the british museum which are very disputed do they really own them should they return them the point is that most of the historic collections of most museums not all were trophies of war or they were plundered from colonial internal you know war against Aboriginal and indigenous people right or they were the records of great men excluding women children minorities and all those other people and so that is the way in which museums were agents of hard power and our museum especially the Royal Ontario Museum that's a big part of its inheritance to the degree that the church reinforced the hard power of colonialism in China that is where those Chinese collections mainly came from look very glad that they I'm sure they were legal day with legally purchased and acquired but they are still part of that hard power equation so it's not easy to overcome an inheritance like that the big Universal museums struggle with that they're proud of their collections public likes to come and see them and they they like to justify why they should be where they are because there are always you know every day in every way or countries of origin are often asking for them back but now there is a tendency for museums to reflect soft power and I think somewhere here I do yeah that's what soft power is it's the ability to influence and attract and change agenda and persuade so museums are becoming part of the world of persuasion now clearly this National Museum that I've spent 14 years of my life working on I'm very proud of it people it's really fantastic I know everyone in Toronto thinks it should be built in Toronto but there's reasons why it had to be in Winnipeg it's a it is this is the Canada Hall but it's it is it's an example of a museum that was created around an idea and increasingly there are museums created not around historic collections but around ideas and then collections are brought in in support of those ideas so and this move toward soft-power has really been part of a a kind of evolution of museums where you know they were first you know they were a collection of objects and about I want to say 30 years ago maybe 35 the idea that museums are where the educational institutions is something that became a kind of cosa lab let me put it that way it's hard to believe but really museums didn't see themselves as educational institutions until we the last quarter century so they moved in that direction that's been a very positive thing and then there was a move I want to say in the 1990s for them to be see themselves as entertainment entertainment entertainment places right there's the museum as an experience and that was kind of coming out of the shell and then especially starting in I'd say 1997 with the opening of the Bilbao museum the Guggenheim in Bilbao the idea that museums have to be part of city branding and city building really became a very very very major trend now there is in this book if you're if you're interested we we give a whole lot of explanation of the city building role of museums okay so I wear my gun coming from I've talked about how the growth of cities has influenced museums how its influenced museums to be something more than what is it shop you know like what is this weird object where did it come from what date is that to being visitors centered to becoming part of the knowledge economy and now I just want to focus very briefly on the role in city building so you can read this faster than I can say it but you can see that they're placemaking after all what is the city you know what is New York without the people sitting at the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of right what is Toronto that's another question we get to Toronto well get into Toronto in the discussion period because there's an issue with Toronto their economic generators they generate jobs right they generate money tourists come they spend money they are choice destinations they provide the kind of cultural Commons a meeting place where different aspects of society can meet and that's a very fruitful they preserve identities heritage memory that that's very important especially in the face of change and the book goes into all of these in a lot of detail and they help people adapt to change museums are fascinating and the way they actually can help us adapt to change and that's also in the book but I want to talk about this one today because I think this is the great little dirty secret okay and I'd like to see what you think about it property values so here's a property within five minutes of where we're now seated it's the condo building going up opposite the Royal Ontario Museum on Bloor Street this condo building take a look at what it says this is the this is real it says exclusive penthouses forever protected views forever protected why are they forever protected no view in Toronto very few are forever protected because there's more and more condos going up but if you are in a building across from the Royal Ontario Museum that is forever protected nobody's going to build 15 stories on top of the Royal Ontario Museum now I've been saying for quite a long time that you know the wrong gets no benefit from this the they maintain their building some people like it some people don't like it that's just a matter of taste they have beautiful property that they look after and they keep it clean there were demonstrations in front of the room all the time for because of for other reasons not to do if they're wrong but the roms busy cleaning up afterwards and it may be everything fine but the room itself gets very little money from the City of Toronto because we know the City of Toronto has very little money and for free sex purposes and it benefits not at all from all the condos around it and everybody who lives in those condos I include myself not in this building but in another one we do benefit and now what's interesting is that over the holidays the New York Times ran an op IDI an editorial saying people should pay for their views and I am that that money should go to support if it's a park or the zoo or the wrong or frankly the University of Toronto why not I mean some of our tax money goes to pay for the BIE Business Improvement areas why not pop pop you've covered exactly the right moment why not why not pay why couldn't that be a really good stream of income for museums parks and cultural places so this is my big campaign and I think that I'm a small campaign because I'm trying to get people interested in it and I think it's well supported by economists like Thomas Piketty you know the guy who wrote capitalism in the 21st century he goes on and on about this fact that the real value as cities grow let's just think about it's not just Toronto that's growing it's not just New York that's growing if every single city in the world its cities in the its cities in India its cities in the Pakistan it's cities in Africa they're all growing some of the biggest cities in the world in fact are in Africa and where the museum is the property values are the highest that museum is paid for by tax money and some private money whatever it brings huge benefit the benefits go to developers and owners the benefits are realized over 40 50 year periods and I believe that this is really the next frontier for funding so museums have a role in a city building they're fulfilling their role pretty well but I think that they deserve to have some some support so here's a nice little example of that yeah this is what I just wanted I've never talked about this before because it's kind of something that everybody knows and nobody wants to talk about so I thought University University College this is a place where we talk about things that maybe people don't want to talk about in polite society so this is Halifax Halifax has just built the most fabulous new library right and they the top floor of that library they called the public living room and this is the view of the public living room is the one on top you can see the Citadel and the water you know this fabulous view but lo and behold what is about to happen what's about to happen and this is a he's taken from a leaflet that was passed out recently if there's going to be a condominium built which will simply take away the view and so far city council doesn't care the councillors don't care because we haven't established a kind of concept of the right to of you and the city's become more and more dense the right to a view is actually very important and it's these things so more you know anyway you get the point I had to put that in so I'm quoting Richard Florida here um he wrote the introduction to the book cities are starting we're now coming back to how do cities in so that was like a little coat off to the side maybe just a little side thing because we wanted to just come back to the point of how cities in their density and intensity are influencing museums so cities the other thing about cities is not just the growth it's not just the property values it's the fact that cities are becoming agents themselves of soft power Joseph Nye a professor at Harvard coined the phrase soft power he has a you can get a daily deluge of very interesting material from from the soft power network it's all about countries everyone knows that countries wanted you know it what is it Churchill said jaar jaar jaar is better than war war war right so that's the country aspect but in the world of cities and city power and city economic power cities are doing a lot they're doing lots for Refugees they're doing a lot for the environment more cities cities were way out ahead of countries on environmental issues and passing environmental you know my environmental frameworks and ways to operate they're out there on issues like transportation and they're also out there on issues like culture so the question is why are museums not more prominently working with cities on all these issues that's the question that we try to do it in this book so um this is a and I'm almost at the enemies I'm worried about our time I don't know how we're doing for time so yeah this isn't a real university well there's no clock um so so I wanted to give some positive examples of how museums are working with cities a to exercise soft power this is from a wonderful program that Adrienne Clarkson and John Ralston Hall saw have on the it was part of these their Institute for Canadian citizenship they give away admissions to museums to new immigrants new citizens actually to new citizens what a great thing the Toronto Public Library makes passes to museums available and when those passes become available I am told that people arrive like it's 6:00 in the morning to get them because people most PM ago cannot afford to pay if you've looked recently at what it cost to go to the IOM or the AG Oh so adapting to the change is is something that is is is important but isn't the museums that are doing this it's really important to understand this is the foundation this isn't what museums out of the goodness of their heart aren't saying gee we need to get more recognized in Toronto other cities yes not in Toronto we need to get more new Canadians in here no they're not um this is a great program at the VNA with a during refugee week don't know if we like that term but anyway they they got the ID and I think it's brilliant is to have after all collections of big museums are from all over the world people from Syria can tell us a lot about what's in the wrong you know and they can tell us in really interesting ways but the VNA has actually instituted that so they invite new immigrants or refugees to come in and take people on tours of the collections and its really exciting but museums are also great places to teach English as a Second Language fantastic places how much of that is going on how much do museums open their doors to our museum say if you're a teacher of ESL there are tons of them in Toronto many I shouldn't say times are they admitted for free into the museum to teach English as a Second Language I don't believe them and this is my last example I think you know my second last Canadian one it's the new immigration Museum in Halifax which clearly foregrounds the role of refugees it's it's a nice place we planned it you know Human Rights Museum is us pier 21 it's also us other museums of that of that ilk shall we say kind of some people might say ideological I I would say soft power and then the last example I want to give is Montreal the most unlikely place Montreal Quebec historically has not had the English tradition of museu G that we had and as a result they're inventing they're reinventing museums in the most creative way and it's very significant what they're doing I could go on that's a lecture in itself but I will just point out that the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has just built this wing which is called it's actually the Michel and went out of Hornstein pavilion and Peace Center the actual word piece is part of it it would be a place for Regis playing the museum's collections and look what's interesting is quite big visit Coates from them a powerful message for peace a reflection of the city they're there when was the last time we saw that in Toronto from a major museum I've never seen that and they've done something I think a little I won't say a little unusual which is that they've said that that they've identified public need remember I said museums are now more visitor centered so some of the needs that people have in the community mental health very big and and and so they have huge programs in this museum related to mental health art therapy using artists therapy most art historians would be horrified with the concept of artists therapy and an art museum but I think it's very interesting that they're doing it so just by way of conclusion I'd say that right now it's a moment of choice for museums is that do they want to be in a soft power embrace with cities or do they want to be sleeping giants and I think that that's a big choice for the next 15 years [Applause]