[Maydianne Andrade] We are used to thinking of cities as static, solid entities and yet they aren't. They contract, they grow and they evolve.

[Meric Gertler] Cities have faced these challenges in the past, right? Spanish flu. Bubonic plague. They've always come back bigger and better than ever and I think they will, again.

[Andrade] I am Maydianne Andrade and from the University of Toronto, this is The New Normal.

[President Gertler] I was born in Edmonton but my family moved to Toronto when I was about two. I then kind of grew up in and around Toronto for grade school and high school, was an undergrad at McMaster, did graduate work at Berkeley and Harvard and then came back to Toronto for my first - and turns out only - academic appointment at U of T.

[Andrade] Professor Meric Gertler is an economic geographer, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, an appointee to the Order of Canada and the 16th president of the University of Toronto.

[President Gertler] Toronto as a city was a pretty staid, straight-laced Victorian place back in the fifties, sixties. It started to get a little more interesting, say like late sixties and seventies and certainly, you know the last couple of decades of the 20th century. And since then, of course it has become such a dynamic place culturally. So diverse, so interesting and such a world city because of immigration.

[Andrade] One of the only good things I think about the pandemic sort of writ large is the disruption that is forcing us to rethink how business as usual maybe isn't the best thing to go back to.

[President Gertler] I think that's, that's so true Maydianne. And we see that in our own business, obviously, in the university where, you know, we've all been forced to figure out how to use these remote teaching tools and make them work. But now we're thinking, well, gee, you know, even when we can get back into the classroom, let's think about how we can continue to use these tools to change the way that we teach. So there's a ton of innovation that is tumbling forth now across the university on all three campuses.

Same is true in the city. And think about how quickly restaurant owners kind of adapted to the new realities, the new normal, to coin a phrase. You know, first of all, you know, with the patios that we saw just kind of blossoming across the city with of course, much more successful and extensive takeout and delivery options. But also the way that we've used our streets, you know, where we've effectively expanded sidewalks to make more room for pedestrian use, sidewalk seating, outside restaurants and that sort of thing.

We've appropriated car lanes for bicycles. So more active transportation, you know, shut down major thoroughfares on weekends. And we've done so with remarkable speed that no one thought was ever possible in a city like Toronto. Or, you know, to use another example that's close to home: rolling out express bus lanes in those neighbourhoods where people did have to travel to work every day and where, you know, the quality and the frequency of public transit service was just way below standard and was forcing people to get onto overcrowded buses, which imperiled their health. You know, so we've seen the rollout of these kinds of pretty low-tech innovations that have challenged the status quo really quickly. And so I think it has been in that sense, a bit of a positive experience for us to show that we can actually change much more quickly than we thought was capable. And after it's all, you know, said and done, and the dust has settled, we will want to hang on to a lot of these changes.

[Andrade] One of the things I really wanted to talk to you about is, is some of your, scholarship on tacit knowledge. And I just found it fascinating to go back and look at some of your papers and just think, wow, these issues have always been, um, important and relevant but the connotation changes completely in our current context. I wonder if you could start by just sort of giving a lay person's definition of tacit knowledge and why it's important for sort of institution building and city successes, things like that.

[President Gertler] Yeah, well, I guess the simple way of defining tacit knowledge is, it's knowledge that's difficult to articulate in written or symbolic form and it's often opposed to explicit or codified knowledge as a kind of binary. One of the reasons it's difficult to articulate in written form is because in part we're not even aware ourselves of what it is that we know. It's often equated with know-how that is acquired through experience or through observation. And for that reason, people have pointed out that in order for tacit knowledge to be shared most readily, most successfully, this is best done locally, it's best done in person. So a classic example might be teaching somebody how to swim. You know, you could, you could send somebody a set of written instructions and say here, follow this, jump in the deep end, go to it. But, you know, I think we would all agree that it's more effective to demonstrate swimming on the spot, in person, and then have the student copy your technique and go through a sometimes painful process of trial and error and make sort of improvements real time to the student's technique. That's a good example of: You can share as much as you know, but there are other things that you don't know that have to be acquired through experience.

The individual who's most closely associated with the concept of tacit knowledge was an eminent scholar, a kind of a polymath named Michael Polanyi. Now that name might ring a bell because he's John Polanyi's father and he taught at the University of Manchester for many years and then later became a fellow at Merton College in Oxford. Later in his career, he developed this sort of fascination for the philosophy of science, the philosophy of knowledge. And in 1966, he published a very famous monograph called the Tacit Dimension, which was kind of rediscovered sort of 30 years later. It was around this time sort of, you know, the last decade of the 20th century, the first decade of this century, people began to realize that innovation is actually a team sport. It's also become apparent that, that sort of team sport nature of innovation transcends the boundaries of individual firms or research organizations, that it involves the flow of knowledge across the boundaries of the individual firm, a lot of collaboration and knowledge sharing that drives innovation.

A famous former Torontonian named Jane Jacobs, who was an eminent kind of urbanist, lived in the Annex neighbourhood in downtown Toronto, published a famous work that that argued that cities like Toronto that have diverse urban economies actually have a long-term economic advantage because interesting things happen when knowledge spills over from one sector to another. When something that is kind of routine and well-established in one industry or one sector becomes known to somebody in another sector where it might be revolutionary. Or where, when you combine knowledge from two different sectors, it leads to breakthrough insights and ideas.

I think the other thing, coming back to innovation, is that although employers have claimed that employee productivity went up in the early wave of the pandemic, it's not clear that this is sustainable over time. Or to put it in a different way, I think the downside of distributed working, for innovation, is something that perhaps we haven't fully appreciated. It's difficult, for example, to have these unplanned, serendipitous encounters with colleagues around the proverbial water cooler. A lot of the teamwork that we have is coasting on or resting on social capital that we have built up over many years, a lot of interaction, a lot of face-to-face interaction, which has engendered trust and understanding and mutual respect. I think it's hard to maintain that over time. So what does the long-term hold? I think that the pandemic has told us that we can work from home more effectively perhaps than we thought. And so I think some work-from-home activity is likely to persist in the future, but of course, let's remind ourselves that is not available to everyone. Even in the midst of the pandemic, the midst of the second wave, there are a lot of people who have to leave home every day to work. So work from home for them is a luxury that's just beyond their reach.

[Andrade] Maybe I'll just touch on that again. Some statistics came out recently that suggest that perhaps around 83 per cent of reported COVID cases are actually in Black and Brown communities in Toronto. And those are also...

How do we solve the entrenched challenges of equity in our city? COVID weaves a thread that unites communities because in a pandemic, what affects some affects all. These are the super wicked problems of our generation.

[President Gertler] Pandemic has indeed accelerated and accentuated a lot of trends that were present before the pandemic but have become much more stark since the pandemic hit. We see increasing income inequality and polarization that often has a geographical expression in the city. So there's certain neighborhoods where, you know, racialized communities are very present and they have borne the brunt, disproportionately, of a lot of the risks and a lot of the dangers that have emerged during the pandemic. It's exposed the fact that they're systematically underserved in terms of access to public health or public transit as we were just saying a few minutes ago. So, you know, it has made us all much more aware of these divides. And I think the university has a really important role to play here. We have a role to play in documenting these inequalities, these trends, analyzing them, understanding them and helping policymakers and the lay public understand the existence of these problems and their roots, but also to help devise policy tools to address these challenges.

The university has always been committed to access and we have an uncommonly diverse student body, not just culturally, but economically as well. Fifty per cent of our domestic undergraduates come from families with pretty modest means and receive needs-based financial aid. That access agenda is going to become even more important for us in the future to make sure that both young adults, as well as, you know, more mature learners are not systematically excluded from higher education opportunities. And again, all three of our campuses have engaged so actively and so intentionally in outreach activities, something they were doing well before the pandemic hit. But the importance of that kind of work I think is just highlighted even more.

[Andrade] Communities are interconnected individuals and cities are interconnected communities. Finally, we can see a day approaching when we can renew those connections.

What's the first thing you're looking forward to doing when we're allowed to gather in person again?

[President Gertler] Gosh, well, I'm a geographer so I can say this honestly: I miss travel. You know, I love to travel. I just think it is so important as a way of developing mutual understanding across cultural and political divides. And the world really needs that right now. Right? We really need to find ways to bring people together and I think that the kind of mutual understanding that comes from spending time interacting with people from different backgrounds, not just locally but globally, it's going to be so important.

[Andrade] Great. Thank you so much Meric. It's good timing cause my son's down making a snack and I'm starting to hear glasses and stuff in the kitchen, which will bleed into our interview.

[President Gertler] Right! Working from home.

[Andrade] I am Maydianne Andrade. This is The New Normal.