NOW Magazine Holds Newspaper Box Art Contest
On the left is NOW Magazine’s new newspaper box art contest.
On the right is what will happen to Toronto’s newspaper boxes if the City of Toronto’s “street furniture” plan gets approved.
Mayor Miller is on record as calling newspaper boxes on the sidewalk the “privatization of public space.”
True, both newspapers and outdoor advertising companies rely upon advertising to make a profit.
But newspapers and ad companies are very different.
See, newspapers send people to City Hall to scrutinize what the Miller administration does. Those people are known as journalists. Outdoor advertising companies also send people to City Hall to scrutinize what the Miller administration does. Those people are known as lobbyists.
David Miller just doesn’t understand public space and he doesn’t understand privatization either. His “street furniture” plan would mandate the intermediation a multi-national advertising company between journalists and public space.
We’d like to be able to look accross the street and see what papers we can pick up.
When we look at the newspaper boxes on the right we think “state control of media.” And if anybody wants to start a new newspaper, after our bureaucrats allow truck and car rental boxes to fill-up those “corrals,” I guess they’re out of luck.
What do you think will “elevated and celebrate Toronto’s urban beauty?” Any of the corporate cookie-cutter designs on the right or what our local artists will produce on the left?
Sadly, the only reason newspaper boxes clutter the sidewalk is because Mayor Miller’s bureaucracy has not enforced the laws protecting sidewalk widths. And who’s responsible for enforcing those laws? The same Transportation Services bureaucrats behind the “street furniture” project.
April 6th, 2007 at 10:33 am
And Eye Weekly is coincidentally holding a contest to “build a better wastebasket” (albeit one for indoor use).
April 6th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
I disagree that having “communal newspaper boxes’ is necessarily a bad idea. The present jumble of boxes with many broken or unfilled is a real eyesore and provided there’s a mechanism to allocate the individual boxes I think this is better. The sample ones on Dundas at Yonge actually look pretty good to me. Also, many of the boxes are NOT newspapers at all but are used by purely advertising publications, Condos, Rentals etc.
April 6th, 2007 at 1:12 pm
There is always a debate about whether the auto-trader or condo mags derserve to have space on the street with the Star and Now et all. You will never get everyone to agree. I personally would limit them to dailies and locals like Now. That would cut the clutter in half.
April 6th, 2007 at 4:35 pm
I think you have this slightly incorrect. Now, as a leftist publication, would presumably be editorially opposed to the “privatization” of the streetscape, yet here they are canvassing for cheap labour to redesign their privatized newspaper box. (Meanwhile, the fiendishly homely and irksomely long-haired Michael Hollett flies business to SXSW every year.)
The street-furniture design you show is actually the multi-publication structure B, a simple corral for existing boxes. To be more fair to the contenders, you’d have to show their designs for their all-new structures A.
Newspaper boxes cannot conceivably be said to improve the diversity of the streetscape. The Globe and the Tubby are owned by broadcasting conglomerates, and even the Star owns a TV station. I don’t think the Auto Trader needs a box. Perhaps it’s really, really important for the gay or Italian papers to have their own boxes in some neighbourhoods. Maybe. But that is not an argument for a zillion different boxes on every major corner.