Notebook On Cities And Culture

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 "wor