Ed Keenan’s book, Some Great Idea, is a short, autobiographical attempt to get a handle on this difficult-to-define city through his experience growing up in Riverdale and Scarborough, and reporting on the city for Eye Weekly, The Grid and Yonge Street Media. It was published last month.
 

The former innovation and jobs editor at YSM sat down with Bert Archer to discuss the book, YSM's influence and why Toronto's messiness and diversity makes it strong. 
 

Your epigraph is a quote from Benjamin Disraeli that you take your book's title from. It calls London's "great idea" commerce, Rome's "conquest," and Paris' "manners." You call Toronto's "diversity." But isn't diversity one level down from those other ideas? They may be means to ends, but diversity seems like a means to other means.
 

Well, it sort of depends on how you apply the term "diversity." I think the diversity of meanings attached to the term is one of its benefits as an organizing principle, incidentally. In many ways, I think diversity can be a good quality in and of itself: the large number of things to do and see, food options, building choices, cultural backgrounds, industries, types of buildings, even types of neighbourhoods--that diversity is an excellent quality in and of itself, because it makes the city an interesting place to live.
 

But you're also right that diversity is a means to an end in other ways: the more diverse the voices around a decision-making table, the better the decisions will be. Different people and ideas rubbing up against each other will help create even better ideas. A diversity of industries will protect a city against the ebbs and flows of any given industry (and attract the many different types of people who work in various industries), and so on. 
 

So I don't think it's a lesser idea. It may be in some ways a different kind of idea, but I think it may be an even better one for that. 
 

You mention about ideas and industry, an area you covered for about two years for Yonge Street. How does this under-reported aspect of the city fit into its great idea?
 

I was the Innovation and Jobs editor of Yonge Street for a couple of years after it first launched, and I was astounded at the amount of activity that was happening under that banner. At first, we were in the wake of global recession, yet you couldn't swing an iPhone on the streets of Toronto without hitting a new company that was expanding, or launching some exciting new product, or both. And I think that the way the city's business sector -- and the innovations of its institutional sector like universities and hospitals -- works is such a vital part of how the city grows and functions, and how we experience it. Most of how the streetscape feels is a result of how businesses and landlords work with the material of the city; much -- or most -- of what winds up being fascinating about a city is a result of people doing business with each other; and the type and quality of jobs available to people who live in Toronto is determined by the number of businesses thriving in whatever industries take root in the city.
 

In my position at Yonge Street, in particular, it was really interesting to see how a place like MaRS, for example, could again take the strength of the city's different sectors--our research hospitals, universities, the base of entrepreneurs and tech geniuses--and match them up together to incubate new businesses that improve both the city and the world, ensure we have cutting edge thinking right here, and again, open up opportunities for different careers and types of work. 
 

In a much less futuristic sense, a lot of Toronto's economic strength and stability has already come from the range of industries that already function here. And some of it's best city building ideas, too, like the formation of Business Improvement Areas, which I wrote about for Yonge Street. Those have had transformative effects on a lot of neighbourhoods and they were invented by merchants getting together to solve local problems. 
 

I agree that this whole vast area is kind of under-reported -- the stories and conflict are maybe less obvious than a debate at city hall -- but this is some of the fundamental stuff that makes the city excellent, and, as elsewhere, I think diversity is a huge part of how the business ecosystem functions and helps the broader city ecosystem function.
 

In your book, you mention several people and organizations whose growth you wrote about in your time here. Is there one who made it into the book or who didn't that you think epitomizes Toronto's particular brand of topsoil? 
 

Well, one that I wrote about a few times here that I didn't feature all that prominently in the book is the app development shop Xtreme Labs, and especially their spin-off arm Extreme Startups (formerly Extreme Venture Partners). Their approach of finding good people with good ideas, starting with small investments to build things quickly and test them out, of putting a lot of smart people into an environment together and seeing how the collaboration and competition spurs them to achieve even better results--all of these things are both great in and of themselves and, I think, show how Toronto works (and can work) in other ways at its best.
 

They've succeeded in really helping to build an app development sector here that is among the five most active in the world. And at various times I've asked people associated with Xtreme what about Toronto contributed to that success, and they've pointed out that the starting point for their success was the amount of talent coming out of local universities, the desirability of Toronto as a place to live, and Toronto's status as a business and communications hub already. What used to be missing was a culture of venture capital and tech entrepreneurship, so they helped create it themselves. 
 

You devote most of your book to the role of mayors in the city, spending the most time on Miller and Ford. When it comes to things like development, innovation and what we call "civic impact," how important can, or should, a mayor be?
 

This is an interesting question, and the answer is complicated. In Toronto, a big part of a mayor's policy success -- which can have a huge influence on all those areas you mentioned--depends on his or her ability to get city council to agree. And if a mayor can lead council, then together they can make big changes to the environment businesses work in, the neighbourhoods people live in, the kinds of activities, profile, and success a non-profit can enjoy. It's easier -- a lot easier -- to see positive changes happen quickly if the institutional support from the mayor and council is there. But a lot can happen without the cooperation of the mayor -- we saw that under Mel Lastman, for instance, and sometimes the organizing and community building that help the city thrive really take off in opposition to the mayor. Sometimes, it seems, it takes the threat of a bad policy to wake people up to the need to rally behind a good one. 
 

In a different way, the mayor does a big role of just setting the tone, defining, through the profile of the job, what subjects are up for debate, and helping people imagine what their city is and should be, or could be. I think to some extent the blossoming of Toronto as a city where green innovation, urbanism, and city building were qualities associated with the city under David Miller were a result of his emphasis on those things. The way he spoke about them, and his own initiatives in those directions at city hall, inspired others to think about the city that way, and led to them taking actions (large and small) to make those more defining parts of the city. Rob Ford has, I think, focused the discussion in the city more directly on a few subjects -- his own vision is less grandiose and expansive, and that has led some activists to strongly react against him to reassert their vision of the city, but it's also led to others narrowing their impression of what Toronto is or can be, and look at more modest goals.
 

That all sounds pretty complex, messy, even. You end the book saying that it looks like from here on in, we'll have to improvise, echoing what you wrote earlier in the book that, in Toronto, "messiness is kind of our thing." Could it be that our messiness is a little like Homer Simpson's beer, the cause of and solution to all our problems?
 

Ha. That's not a bad way of putting it. As you note, I think Toronto often works best in the places that are messy -- think of a neighbourhood like Kensington Market, or a process like the killing of the Spadina Exressway. But it does lead to a lot of conflict, like the messy business of pitting bikes versus cars or downtown versus suburbs we've seen recently. And things can tend to drag on for a long time because they're in such a mess. But that's democracy. And diversity. Both are inherently messy. But I think there's a saving grace for the city in the long run in that the messiness leaves all these problems out in the open, rather than sweeping them under the carpet. Because they stay there where we fight about them, we eventually find solutions to them, or at least an equilibrium we can all live with. Not sure if that's exactly like beer, but I like it.