The Globe and Mail

Toronto is an ugly city shaped by traffic engineers, risk-averse urban planners and utilitarian building contractors, according to a panel of prominent designers who brainstormed recently on the future of the city. Without a high-level commitment to visual design in future construction, Toronto will continue to be "a beige city with a branch-plant economy that suffers from a lack of identity," Samantha Sannella, president and CEO of the Design Exchange, told a rapt audience of design students attending the McLuhan International Festival of the Future. "People want to live in a city where their distant relatives from abroad will visit them and be jealous," said Will Alsop, the British architect celebrated in Toronto for his distinctly risky and non-utilitarian Ontario College of Art and Design campus. Instead, Toronto has only a few random pockets of beauty, and the building most identified as its symbol is the CN Tower, which is already close to 30 years old, Ms. Sannella said.