Justin McElroy is a Vancouver-based journalist and author of the new book Searching for the Best Place on Earth: 52 Countries in 52 Weeks.
In October, 2023, a few months before I left Vancouver to travel the world for a year, I was in city hall listening to Mayor Ken Sim argue for increased housing density around rapid transit stations. In response to a question of whether any budgeting or planning had been done, Mr. Sim answered with a sentence that has loomed over the city for more than two generations.
“We’re talking about building a world-class city.”
In many ways, it’s a benign, calorie-free phrase. There’s no real way to quantify what makes a city “world-class,” and there are no tangible benefits if everyone agrees that a city has indeed become that. But at the time, I was about to embark on a quest to visit 52 countries in 52 weeks, focusing mostly on cities, including 44 of the top 50 cities in the annual ranking by Vancouver consulting firm Resonance.
So when Mr. Sim said that phrase, I said to myself, “well, I’m travelling to almost every world-class city on Earth next year. I’ll figure out what one actually is, and see how we measure up.” Instead of just wandering old towns and quirky neighbourhoods, I would consider housing affordability and overtourism and retail diversity. On trains and tubes I could research each city’s transportation system and how well it managed congestion. While going to museums and city squares I could think about how a country expresses its distinct culture and history while trying to remain forward-thinking and vibrant.
From 2016: Toronto, you’re a world-class city. Now stop talking about it
Interestingly, the idea of a “world-class” city seems to be a Canadian invention, which began over a very Canadian worry about what others might think about a landmark new building.
“Those who want to believe that Toronto has outgrown the narrow, self-satisfied Hogtown of the past to become a cosmopolitan, world-class city wince at the mention of the tower,” wrote a reporter in the Ottawa Citizen in 1976, the day before the CN Tower opened to the public.
The CN Tower under construction in Toronto in July, 1975.
It’s the earliest use of the term that I could find on the website newspapers.com – which has full archives of more than 29,000 newspapers around the world. From there, the phrase started appearing in Canadian newspapers every so often, usually about Toronto.
But it quickly spread around the globe in the 1980s, becoming an aspirational goal used by politicians, marketers, and urban planners to denote what a city could or should be, often tied to building that new megaproject or bringing a global festival to town. Arguably, nowhere has it had more resonance than in Canada’s two biggest English-speaking cities: In both Vancouver and Toronto, “world-class city” has been used seriously and sardonically so many times that it had long lost any meaning to me.
For the record, I did not plan to travel the Earth as a year-long exercise to give meaning to an overused turn of phrase.
Before my trip, I had reported on city politics for a decade, and was fascinated by all the ways that cities come together in a coherent whole or devolve into frustrating paralysis or chaos. But I’d never travelled outside Canada and the U.S. as an adult.
After 149,000 kilometres, 111 trains, 74 nights in hostels, 47 art galleries, six continents, and only one time being scammed by a fake taxi driver, the things I learned about great cities will not surprise most seasoned travellers. In most wealthy countries the city centre is dominated by car-free walkways, bustling town squares and rapid transit stations; in Canada the car still reigns supreme. Patios, plazas and alleyways in much of the rest of the world are filled with public activities and private enterprise that generally get regulated or ticketed out of existence here. Every city is trapped to some degree by its geography, its political culture, and the planning norms of the time when it exploded in population.
There are some areas where Canada’s top cities stood out – Toronto’s incredible diversity has few comparisons, and Vancouver’s endless activities you can do on a mountain or on water become more impressive when you realize just how rare that is in a big city anywhere else on Earth. The virtues of politeness, tolerance and rule of law are embedded in our urban DNA in a way you realize doesn’t happen automatically once you navigate a truly chaotic city like Cairo, a truly autocratic one like Beijing, or a truly techno-class-based one like Dubai.
Luxury hotels overlook the Nile River in Cairo on Thursday.KHALED DESOUKI/AFP/Getty Images
Generally speaking, though, when you go to big city after big city for an entire year, with each city adding another point of comparison with the rest you’ve visited, you realize the areas where Canada’s world-class obsessed cities struggle to keep up with the rest of the world.
You see it in debates over public space that would seem quaint in much of the world: Toronto’s municipal and Ontario’s provincial governments have feuded over waterfront land, park preservation and bike lanes, while Vancouver’s municipal government has spent four years piloting three different streets to be car-free without committing long-term to any of them.
But nowhere is the discrepancy between world-class ambition and reality more clear than affordable housing. European cities often have huge amounts of publicly owned housing, Eastern Asian cities often have medium and high-rise housing spread across the city, and cities in countries with illiberal governments certainly have faults, yet can also have edicts to ensure virtually all people have a roof over their head regardless of means.
Vancouver has world-class density of human suffering in the Downtown Eastside that few other wealthy cities would tolerate.Isabella Falsetti/The Globe and Mail
That’s not the case in Toronto, and especially not the case in Vancouver. In the 52 countries I went to, comprising virtually all of the wealthiest countries on Earth, I didn’t see any other neighbourhood with as many clearly struggling unhoused people crammed into one highly accessible place as Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, just two blocks from the apartment I’ve rented for the past decade.
The longer that reality sat with me, the worse I felt. My city has world-class mountains and world-class sushi and world-class glass towers reflecting a world-class public waterfront. We also have a world-class concentration of human suffering, visible in a way that every other wealthy city on Earth has decided is not how its most vulnerable residents should live.
The population is shrinking in pockets of Vancouver and Toronto. What if we put more housing there?
So after a year of thinking about it, here’s my definition of a world-class city: one where all of its residents can live and get around with reasonable comfort, with a mix of interesting things to experience that are uniquely tied to the city’s culture or geography.
And while both Vancouver and Toronto can – and will – continue to argue whether they’re world-class or not, I can tell you that neither of them is my pick.
After all, there’s a place in this country with a unique culture, plenty of diversity, vibrant public spaces, good transportation options, and with rents significantly more affordable than Vancouver or Toronto.
Montreal hasn’t spent a lot of time in the last 40 years wondering if it’s “world-class.”
But then again, if you truly are, then you probably don’t need to ask.