Toronto's
City Builder Book Club—a book club that turns reading about city-building into an act of city-building itself—has wrapped up the reading of its first book.
The book club, a joint venture between the
Centre for City Ecology and
Creative Urban Projects (CUP), brings together readers from within and beyond Toronto who have a keen interest in city-building and want to participate in larger conversation on iconic city-focused texts. The goal of the project, according the website is "to facilitate a deeper understanding of how cities work by hosting a guided reading and discussion of books that have developed and challenged our ideas on this topic." The club officially launched in February; its inaugural book, not surprisingly, was Jane Jacobs’
The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
Here’s how it worked: Each week, the book club members would read selected chapters and have the opportunity to discuss the week's readings on
message boards,
Facebook and
Twitter.
But what is particularly novel is the reading guide system developed by the organizers. In addition to online discussions, books club members were also privy to weekly chapter analysis. Along with blog entries from members of the
Centre for City Ecology and
Creative Urban Projects, urban celebrity bloggers included former Toronto mayor John Sewell,
Margaret Zeidler, founder of Toronto's Urbanspace Property Group, and Aaron Renn, founder and writer of the popular Chicago blog
Urbanophile.
The choice for book number two hasn't been made yet, but Steven Dale, founding principal of CUP, it will be announced soon. "The response has been very very positive, [the book club] is going to keep going and new and exciting things are going to happen in the future."
The Book Club also worked with Toronto's
Swipe Books, who made sure extra copies of Jacobs' text were on-hand, and the
Toronto Public Library, which provided weekly lists of additional source material to members of the mailing list.
Writer: Katia Snukal
Source: Steven Dale, Founding Principal, Creative Urban Projects