Colin Marshall

At the University of Toronto, Colin Marshall talks with Mark Kingwell, professor of philosophy and author of such books as A Civil Tongue: Justice, Dialogue, and the Politics of Pluralism, The World We Want: Restoring Citizenship in a Fractured Age, Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City, and most recently the collection Unruly Voices: Essays on Democracy, Civility and the Human Imagination. They discuss how the “ongoing argument” that is Canada manifests in Toronto; the University of Toronto’s thorough integration into the city itself; why outsiders think of Toronto as a kind of idea of the city made concrete; the many parallels between Toronto and Los Angeles, including the derision both cities draw; a “walking city” as a city where you can walk not just in but between places; where the Torontonian’s perception of distance doesn’t quite match the geography, as in the crossing of the Don Valley; what got him thinking about the city as a problem of consciousness; the “great stumbling block” of the “world class” designation, which probably means nothing; how to use philosophy and cities as nexuses of subjects, and the benefits of dispensing “mind candy” like Simpsons references in the process; public spaces from the impossible-in-this-century Central Park to the counterintuitively functional Nathan Phillips Square; the Toronto sub-industry of assigning grand names to alleys; quasi-public private space, and how the nicer you dress, the more of it you find; America’s legal piety versus its misbehavior; Canada’s respect for authority versus its explosions of passive-aggression; what you don’t see when you walk through Toronto, such as any element of the erotic; this city as “a whole bunch of silver medals that add up to a pretty nice tally”; the distinction between politeness (which he doesn’t actually find among Canadians) and civility; why Torontonians think Rob Ford became mayor; whether a city needs a center, and whether that center must be a public space or a monument of some kind; what it means that the CN Tower represents Toronto; and whether Toronto will keep playing its role as the “real archetypal city.”

Download the interview here as an MP3 or on iTunes.