Mr. Bedford, Toronto's chief planner, has just returned from Barcelona, the New Jerusalem of urban design. He flops into an armchair. It's as great as what has been written about it. Throughout the developed world, big cities are jolting themselves awake, struggling to raise their profiles in a ruthlessly rivalrous global economy of information technology, planetary finance, innovation and creative and cultural activities. Quality of life is the magnet.
Urban design is the siren temptress.
No city has reinvented itself like Barcelona. Its waterfront freeway has been buried under a new landscape of bike lanes, pedestrian paths, boulevards and open-air restaurants. It has breathed new life into its parks and art galleries and museums, vanquished its old railway and industrial sites. Barcelona, to begin with, did not have much money. But it had the launchpad of the 1992 Olympics and the Catalan region's powerful, reawakening identity after the long Franco dictatorship.