Letters

To the one who has seen this city change

You were here before some of these towers, maybe before most of them. You've watched this city try things — some that worked and got forgotten, some that failed and got repeated. Which means you're holding something this project cannot function without: you remember what actually happened.

Can we say the thing plainly? This city has gotten worse at being old. Not medically — there are good people working on the body. Worse at the other part: at having a place for you at the table that isn't a folding chair near the exit. Somewhere along the way we started treating age as a logistics problem, and it shows.

We think that's exactly backwards, and we're building as if it is. The plans we're writing put elders where working memory belongs: in the rooms where things get decided, in the circles where things get taught. Not as a courtesy. As infrastructure. A city that doesn't consult its own memory repeats itself, and this one has been repeating itself for a while now.

So the invitation, in your size: tell us what you watched fail, and why — before we rebuild it with better fonts. Teach one thing you know to one person who doesn't; we're building the rooms where that happens, and they're empty without you. And if you've buried people, loved badly and well, started over late — you know things about loss and beginning again that no research program can generate. We can only receive them.

You are not this project's audience. You're its archive, and half its faculty. The seminar starts whenever you write: tell us one thing this city forgot, at the address on this site — or invite us into your hall, and we'll bring the notebook.

— The Unknown Soldier · uniteTOlove · Toronto

To the one who chose this city

At some point — last year, or thirty years ago — you did one of the hardest things a person can do: you left a world you understood and started over in one you didn't. Everyone around you mostly has no idea. They see the accent, not the engineering.

Here's what we see: you've already done the thing this whole project is trying to do. You built community from nothing, because you had to. You know how a neighbourhood holds people together — you watched it work, somewhere, in a place these plans have never been. You are, quite literally, the imported expertise on the exact problems this city says it can't solve.

So we won't insult you with a welcome mat. This is a job offer, unpaid and important: the plans we're building are full of ideas borrowed from the places people like you came from — ways of organizing blocks, feeding many from little, keeping elders close, celebrating properly. We got those ideas from research papers. You got them from your grandmother. One of those sources catches what the other misses, and we know which is which.

Two things you should know about this house before entering it. What's said here stays out of the wrong hands — the help you seek and the work you give never route to anyone whose job is doors and papers; that's written into the foundations, not the pamphlet. And nobody here will ask you to perform gratitude. You pay rent in this city; it's yours.

The invitation is the same one every neighbour gets — read something, check something, show up once — plus one only you can answer: what did your first home know that this one hasn't learned yet? Start there. Correct us, by name, where we got your patterns wrong — the page that thanks you for it is real, and it means it. Bring the thing only you know.

— The Unknown Soldier · uniteTOlove · Toronto

To the one who's fifteen

We'll keep this short and we won't pretend to be your friend.

You've noticed things the adults keep being surprised by. That most of what you're told to care about is a scoreboard someone else invented. That the city was designed by people who forgot what it's like to be young and broke in it. That the future everyone keeps warning you about is apparently your job to fix, using homework.

Fair. All of it. So here's what this actually is, no decoration.

Some people in this city are building a plan for how it could work better — all of it, housing, food, the lake, the way decisions get made — and they're doing it in the open, with every claim checkable, so nobody has to trust anybody. You can read the whole thing tonight. You can find the mistakes; there's a page that thanks you for it, and it isn't sarcastic. If you're the kind of person who wins arguments in your head at 2 a.m., there is finally a place to put that.

And it's not all reading. What's being planned — games in every neighbourhood where nobody gets picked last because nobody gets picked; a fair where you meet the robots before they meet your job; ways to make something this year, an actual thing, a track or a film or a machine, and ship it where people see it — all of it needs people who'll show up early, break it, and say what's broken. That's a real role. Historically it's the whole role: every movement that ever mattered ran on people your age who were told to wait their turn and declined.

Nobody here will hand you a lanyard and call it power. But the plan is public, the mistakes are findable, the rooms are being built, and your generation inherits every outcome on the scoreboard — which makes you the least optional person in this whole story.

No turn to wait for. The site's open now. Break something of ours and show us.

— The Unknown Soldier · uniteTOlove · Toronto