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Most of the 91,000 designers in Canada, including architects, landscape architects, industrial, interior, graphic and fashion designers, live and work in cities. With 25,000, Toronto is third in North America (behind New York and Boston) in the number of designers the city employs [DIAC Design Industry Study, 2004]. With so much creative brainpower at their disposal, you would expect Canadian cities to be at the forefront of urban innovation. Yes they have LEED-certified buildings and iconic architecture—but is that all it takes? Are designers really making an impact on sustainable city-building when it comes to economic competitiveness, social equality, public safety, an aging population, and reducing environmental impacts?

Most of our cities are led by utilitarian bureaucrats rather than design thinkers. We can also lay some of the blame at the feet of a design community whose members have failed to deliver a consolidated protest against the lack of representation of their profession at city hall, or the mean-spirited RFPs that don’t allow the scope, time or money designers need to deliver break-through results.

Design works on a grand scale, but its most profound benefits are experienced on a human level: beauty, accessibility, functionality and cohesiveness, to name a few. Our cities are missing design-led innovation in the public realm. A growing number of Canadian buildings are energy-efficient and environmentally designed. But when it comes to public space, we are still design-deprived. Most of our major cities lack the infrastructure and master plans that would inspire and enable design-led change at every level.

In a humble attempt to fill the void, here are five relatively low-cost ways we can use design to enrich the fabric of our cities.

Sidewalks

Sidewalks are the cornerstones of city building. Urban visionaries from Jane Jacobs to Kevin Lynch have extolled the virtues of the sidewalk as an instrument of civic engagement and safety; a place for play, economic enterprise and social convergence. Well-designed streetscapes can even help reduce violent crime. But tragically, our sidewalks are being debased and ignored.