With little prodding, Toronto has become the meeting place it was named for, where people from around the world have settled, and a youth culture of rockers, wiggers and ravers can hang out and chill. All of this should add up to a happy cohabitation, except that the city is under attack by the Goths. We have them to thank for the medieval negotiations leading toward the redevelopment of Union Station. The Goths are ramming through the expansion of the Toronto Island Airport. And the Goths are robbing the city of its waterfront.

By Goths, I am not imagining the students of the 1990s who trudged along the streets in oversized black coats and powdered faces. They were a welcome entertainment. The Goths I refer to consist of a band of modern-day businessmen and mandarins, whose primary motivation is to guard their turf, and operate outside of the interests of the urban electorate. They dress in suits and carry leather briefcases. Strangely, they remind me of the Visigoths, who grabbed what they could for themselves during the sacking of Constantine's Roman empire.

Back then, the plundering came from outside the frontiers. The sacking of Toronto, however, comes from inside and outside the city's borders. The federal government refuses to bring a new financial deal to help save Toronto from its urban decay. The province has decided it can no longer commit funds to help bring down the Gardiner Expressway. Within the ranks of the city, Mayor Mel Lastman continues to sell out the interests of a livable, healthy city to privilege the financial gains of private developers.

Even the Toronto Economic Development Corp. (TEDCO), a city agency that owns about 60 per cent of the 1,000 acres lying fallow in the Portlands, is considered by some to be the worst enemy of the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corp. The revitalization corporation's chair, Robert Fung, has asked that all long-term commitments for public land on the waterfront be frozen until its approval is granted.

But only two days ago, the board of TEDCO met and agreed to lease 43 acres of the Portlands to the Sequence film/media complex. Without a master plan for the waterfront solidly in place, or the city's official plan for that matter, the development could be pushed through as a vast parking lot for trucks with an anonymous-looking building box attached to it. How Goth is that?

I was cheered by the remarkable schemes that emerged last week during The Toronto Waterfront Design Initiative.

For the hundreds who attended the Harbourfront Centre presentations, there was reason to believe in the city all over again. Teams from France, the Netherlands, the United States and Canada converged on the city for three days to walk along our lake's edge and contribute beautiful, workable ideas for a vast new waterfront community.

The city's urban-design department and the Waterfront Revitalization Corp. jointly organized the Design Initiative. The six invited teams from around the world, and asked to critique the master plan drawn up one year ago by the revitalization corporation. By Thursday night, they presented not only an enlightened, occasionally painful, critique of the master plan but also dozens of images that provide us with the first compelling reasons to transform the waterfront. For this we thank Antoine Grumbach of Paris, Fred Koetter of Boston, Erick van Egeraat of Rotterdam, Urban Design Associates of Pittsburgh, Ken Greenberg and Jack Diamond of Toronto, as well as the countless local architects who collaborated.

Five fundamental ideas emerged last week:

The public space that matters is blue, not green. This was the sharp insight drawn by architect Diamond, who recommended with many of the other invited architects that meaningful public space cannot be reduced to providing gargantuan blobs of green space. He sees that as a knee-jerk reaction to the debacle of Harbourfront, as planners for the revitalization corporation have felt enormous pressure to hand over the green goods -- there are about 500 acres worth of amorphous parkland set down in the current waterfront master plan.

Similarly, the city's revised official plan features a huge central park in the Portlands, and other parks for the East Bayfront. But a lakeside boardwalk measuring five metres wide, stretching from Bathurst Quay to the Portlands, could provide more significant public space.

Bring people and beautifully designed buildings to the edge of the water. In the hands of a certain kind of developer or master planner, the Portlands and the areas west of it might become a continuum of residential and commercial towers. The invited architects considered the hypothesis, tested it and resisted it.

Instead, they drew a rich diversity of housing and commercial types -- garden-courtyard apartments, industrial warehouse walkups and even water pavilions. Small, intimately scaled blocks were drawn into the scheme for the lower Portlands by Urban Design Associates of Pittsburgh in collaboration with John Ellis of the San Francisco-based Dan Solomon Architects. They found inspiration in the neighbourhood of the Beaches as well as Miami.

Allow something grand to happen. Paris urban designer and architect Grumbach imagined Cherry Street as the main thoroughfare into the Portlands. To the east of it, however, there could also be a monumental boulevard, forested on one side, with clear views to the waterfront from the Don River. In one of their schemes, Urban Design Associates extended the Don River through the Portlands so that it could empty freely into the open harbour.

Simplify the current waterfront masterplan. During the three-day session, there were serious challenges to the master plan by the Waterfront Revitalization Corp. In that plan, by consulting architect Michael Kirkland and urban planner Tony Coombes, no task is considered too small to undertake. The Gardiner Expressway is not merely brought down to a multilane boulevard but is buried, cut into trenches, and, in the east end of Toronto, raised up on the railway berm. In that case, said Greenberg on Thursday night, leave the Gardiner alone -- the alternative is worse than what we have now.

Kirkland has also raised the streets and bridge crossings of the Portlands by five metres -- a massive piece of infrastructure -- so that cars don't have to park underground next to the water table. There are ways to get around underground parking, as demonstrated by Ellis. Besides, if the Portlands is intended as a community of the future, it should be thoroughly connected to subways and light-rail transit.

Start now. Van Egeraat, founder of Meccano Architects of Rotterdam, insisted that Toronto can start tomorrow to improve its waterfront. "Instead of fixing plans, fix a mindset," he said. Turf wars are for Goths. Insist, instead, that those dedicated to the waterfront must sign on to some simple design guidelines: Open clear views to the water by demolishing all above-ground parking garages that stand in the way; prioritize pedestrians; retain the special archeology and artifacts of the site. Reduce the scale of public spaces. Smaller, beautifully designed spaces are better suited to a northern climate.

Too bad Lastman never attended any of the design sessions, nor Paula Dill, the commissioner of urban-development services. Joe Pantalone was the only politician from Toronto with enough sophistication to attend the presentation. Nobody of significance showed up from the federal and provincial governments.

Long ago and far away, the Visigoths and the Huns were on the loose for more than 300 years. In comparison, the Goths have wreaked havoc in Toronto in a fraction of that time. Resist putting on the mourning dress of sackcloth, and sprinkling your head with ashes. Something compelling has happened to this city. Wouldn't it be nice if it could go down in history?
lrochon@globeandmail.ca