History of Toronto Future

In the wake of a dispiriting Toronto municipal election, it's bitter-sweet to read Dusty Bookcase's exploration of a 1967 book that projected what Toronto could be in 2067.

This would be a city of skyscrapers measuring up to a mile in height, many built on artificial islands formed by dumping landfill into Lake Ontario. Each of these buildings would be self-contained communities,

McLorg called for covering 145-square miles of Toronto with 2300 transparent fibreglass and plastic cupolas. These would be held aloft by internal air pressure, and tethered to the ground by hollow cables that would drain off rainwater and melted snow

[Torontonians] will be able to grow oranges in their back gardens, watch roses bloom in December and cherry trees blossom in February; when they can play golf and tennis all winter, count on the same fifteen minutes to get to the office in January that it takes in July, buy a topless convertible for their wives, laugh when the heating bill arrives, and hang up their snow shovels for ever.

History of planning Toronto's wildernesses

Toronto historian planning historian Richard White considers An Enduring Wilderness by photographer Robert Burley, and how the parks and wild spaces Burley presents in his work are the products of a long history of deliberate planning initiatives.

Like many Torontonians, I know these ravines as an occasional walker of their paths. But I know them also as a planning historian. And these ravine parks are unmistakably the product of planning, having been conceived by Metropolitan Toronto planners in the 1950s as the city expanded out into its rural hinterland. Their planning pedigree has long been obscured by the ineradicable urban myth (thankfully, not repeated by Wayne Reeves in his essay in the book) that they exist on account of Hurricane Hazel, the storm that inundated the Toronto region with nearly a foot of rain over two days in October 1954, to devastating effect. The storm certainly expedited implementation of the parks plan. It prompted the local conservation authority to purchase much of the region’s flood-prone ravine land, forestalling any future development of it, and then to put most of this land – at least that which lay within the boundaries of Metropolitan Toronto – into the hands of the Parks Department for development into public parks. But the idea of ravines as public open space pre-dated Hazel.

Book Notes: Robert Vipond on one world, one school

Rob Vipond teaches political science, including Canadian constitutional matters, at the University of Toronto.  He has also been a parent at the local Toronto public school, Clinton Street Public School.  One day the principal said to him, You are interested in history, aren't you? and drafted him for a school history project.


Well, it grew. Vipond's recently published Making A Global City: How One Toronto School Embraced Diversity explores a century and more of the impact of urban diversity on one city school, and how that one school has dealt with it over the years.  Early in the twentieth century there was "Jewish Clinton." By mid-century there was "European Clinton." More recently it's been "Global Clinton."

Vipond created a research course on Clinton Street School, so his book is data-driven.  But he acknowledges he's not a scholar of education, or multiculturalism, or urbanism -- it's still the story of his daughter's remarkable ordinary school as well as a treatise in Canadians dealing with the promise and problems of immigration and diversity. Timely!

Historians against heritage?

Tear down these walls?

At Active History, urban historian Richard White argues that it is because he is a historian that he opposes most forms of heritage preservation regulation in cities.

Why then do we want to preserve and inhabit the homes that Edwardians built?

First of all, we do not, really. Owners of these charming old houses knock out walls to create fewer bedrooms (for smaller households), build bathrooms on every floor, increase the size of water-supply pipes, park (multiple) cars on front and back yards, build decks for al fresco dining, punch holes in walls for windows, insulate like mad, re-wire to permit greater electricity consumption, and so on – all of which is permissible because Heritage Conservation District designation, according to provincial law, prohibits the alteration of “any part of the property, other than the interior.” So the truth is that we want our houses to look like, but certainly not to function as, they did a hundred years ago. As a historian who knows and cares about the past this all seems a little dishonest.

History of multicultural cities

What is the most multicultural city in the world?  There is a whole industry in Toronto devoted to supporting its claim, but it is hotly contested by Vancouver.  Melbourne, Frankfurt, Birmingham, and Singapore probably don't even notice. Then there are Miami, Los Angeles, and New York.

University of Toronto Press has recently published Multicultural Cities: Toronto, New York and Los Angeles, by Mohammad Abdul Qadeer, who teaches at Queen's in Kingston.  He has some ground rules:

Cities that do not promote civil rights to diversity are not multicultural even if people of different cultural origins live there....They are multi-ethnic without being multicultural.

Multiculturalism, he posits, "is the combination of cultural diversity with a common ground of values and institutions." You need confident, assertive minority communities, not just (potentially marginal) immigrants and expats. Qadeer argues that to be a contender for multicultural status, a city needs to exist within a strong democracy, with strong guarantees of civil rights, and a resulting culture of (at least) tolerance and accommodation. Cities have always attracted diverse minorities. They have rarely been multicultural.

And multiculturalism is a set of political/societal choices, not just a byproduct of mobility or prosperity.

Published in March. I haven't found much in the way of reviews yet.

History of Housing: why it cost $1M to get into the Toronto housing market

Paul Godfrey

I've been reading How We Changed Toronto, the political memoir of former one-term Toronto mayor and permanent civic-reform advocate John Sewell.  I suspect he may have wanted to call it How We Saved Toronto , and he could have made a case for that.

Sewell's very readable story celebrates the success of the late '60s upsurge against the idea that the only role of city planning was to enable the development industry to makes as much money as possible. It turned out that protecting neighborhoods, preserving and reusing existing buildings and streets, promoting non-automotive transit, encouraging downtown living, and other Reform proposals  -- all wildly unorthodox in the development-oriented civic politics of the day -- really were good for cities.  (Richard White pushes back against some of the extremes of this view in his recent Planning Toronto, showing that planning was not quite so new an idea as the 60's reformers believed.).

A couple of hundred pages into his book, Sewell makes a case that quite early on, he moved from saving downtown to looking at broad regional planning. On that front his defeat was comprehensive.

There was a thing called the Toronto Centred Region Centred Plan.  One of its tenets was resistance to permitting wide-open urban expansion north of Steeles Avenue.  (For non-Torontonians, Steeles is a nondescript street that marks the northern boundary of Metro Toronto.  Academic types may know it best as the northern edge of York University.)  The Plan's idea was there was lots of room for infill development south of Steeles, and providing services running endlessly north would be expensive and wasteful.  New urban clusters farther north would become possible, but simple endless suburban expansion would be discouraged.

The development industry, obviously, preferred a free hand and space to develop.  Paul Godfrey, chair of Metro Toronto when Sewell was mayor of the city of Toronto, sided with the developers, and Godfrey won. In the mid-1970s water, sewage, and other essential public infrastructure were extended north of Steeles. Endless suburban sprawl erupted.  Today the real northern boundary of Toronto is not Steeles Avenue but Lake Simcoe, a hundred km farther north.

So, lots of new housing for the growing population?  Sure, but it is almost all extremely low-density suburban housing, which means there is not nearly as much of it as there might be, and it is all relatively expensive because it is spread so thinly and is expensive to service.

Sewell has numbers.  In the early 1970s, density in central Toronto was 82 people per acre. York had 58, East York 49, North York 33, Etobicoke 30, Scarborough 30.  That is, Central Toronto has nearly triple the density of the suburbs.

The developers' victory north of Steeles meant that the low density pattern would continue forever. There would never be enough housing, and it would always be expensive.  The situation now set for the future -- that is, a few people will have very expensive spacious detached homes, and most people will live in fairly expensive apartments or equally expensive homes in remote suburbs forever -- could have been replaced by more people living in a much greater quantity of affordable single-family homes, in a much more livable urban environment, perhaps.

Never happen now.

 Active History on Sewell on Toronto

Update, May 31:  I was dubious about this post as soon as it was up, suspecting it was wildly simplistic even for a blog post. But it seems inappropriate -- and maybe impossible -- to make a blog post disappear, so I let it live.  Now I'm grateful to Andrew Stewart of Strata Consulting for adding nuance and context in the nicest way:

I appreciated your “History of Housing” blog the other day -- a very important issue, and not just an historical one. Although I understand what you mean when you say “The developers' victory north of Steeles meant that the low density pattern would continue forever.” It sounds a bit like “the end of history” – something I hope is a turn of phrase rather than prophetic.

Urban sprawl is certainly an historical pattern in Ontario that shows only superficial signs of slowing, despite the Greenbelt Act. Developers and land speculators still have the upper hand, with local councils willing to accommodate to their interests and political donations. In his Toronto Star commentary the other day, Tim Grey of Environmental Defence convincingly opposes the developers’ argument that the Greenbelt causes higher house prices.

A new generation may yet reverse the sprawl trend – people like Jennifer Keesmat, Toronto’s head of planning, though it’s places like Brampton and Barrie that are the problem now. The Province’s Growth Act addresses the problem, but not strongly enough. There is opportunity for every citizen to influence the revision of this all-important Growth Act, now under way (until end of September).

On the whole, I'm rather encouraged to stick with my newly formed counter-intuitive notion that sprawl itself causes housing scarcity and high cost. Andrew, I think I meant forever mostly in a geographical sense -- ever moving outward.  But you are right to urge optimism about a reversal.

Visual history of Toronto

Pretty amazing, this City of Toronto time-lapse of the expansion of Toronto 1902-2002.  Time and the city sure speed up after about 1950.  

H/t: Historian Daniel Ross's twitter @dgrthist

Book Review: "a refreshing new interpretation of urban planning in Toronto"

For this book review, we thank Daniel Ross, a PhD candidate in urban history at York University and an editor of ActiveHistory.ca (find him there & at historiandanielross.com).

Richard White, Planning Toronto: The Planners, The Plans, Their Legacies. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2016. 450pp. incl. notes, illustrations, bibliography.

Reviewed by Daniel Ross

In this study Richard White examines Toronto’s efforts to plan the urban environment from the Second World War through to the 1980s. As the subtitle suggests, he is interested not just in the plans—fascinating as they are in their own right—but in the people who made them, and the impact they had on the city. Planning Toronto does not ignore broad social and economic trends like postwar reconstruction or inner-city gentrification, but like other planning histories it is above all about ideas: notions of how cities should be, imported from abroad and adapted to local circumstances with varying degrees of success. Well-researched and readable, White’s book provides a clear and compelling account of past planning initiatives, as well as some useful insights for students of today’s debates over the urban future.

Planning, White emphasizes, was slow to take root in Toronto. Municipal regulation of development—building heights, setbacks, neighbourhood zoning—was well-established by the early 1900s, but the idea of something more visionary was viewed with suspicion by the city’s mostly conservative political establishment. It wasn’t until the mid-1950s, and the obvious infrastructure demands created by the expanding suburbs, that the city established a planning system. Actually, not one system, but several; one of the strengths of Planning Toronto is White’s clear differentiation between the urban agendas of three layers of government. Metro Toronto, by far the most dynamic of the three, occupied itself with facilitating and sustaining urban expansion, making major investments in public transit, sewers, parks, and—perhaps most famously—roads and expressways. Faced with an aging inner city, the City of Toronto sought to renew and modernize, but also to protect. Not to be outdone, in the early 1960s the Ontario government launched its own initiative in planning at scale, the mostly-ignored Toronto-Centred Region.

A veritable blizzard of plans, and all within a fifteen-year period that surely ranks as Toronto’s planning moment. At no time since have we dreamt so big, or had such unshakeable faith that urban problems could—and should—be solved by public expertise and modern technology. By the early 1970s both Metro’s expressway network and the city’s urban renewal program had encountered crippling citizen opposition. Resistance to expropriation of property widened into a larger political critique of the whole planning enterprise, predicated as it was on placing public goals ahead of the interests of affected communities. Perhaps those goals—efficient automobile circulation, modernization of housing stock—needed to be rethought, too. While this is often described a victory for democracy, the author argues that it also reflected a return to Toronto’s tradition of conservative localism.

As this observation suggests, White is offering readers a refreshing new interpretation of urban planning in Toronto. He resists portraying modernist planners as heavy-handed technocrats, instead emphasizing the ways they adapted planning theory to local conditions, for example by rejecting aggressive urban renewal (although too late for the neighbourhood that became Regent Park), or linking expressway plans to the expansion of rapid transit. That latter point is an important one. If in 2016 Toronto seems incapable of making decisions about badly-needed transit infrastructure, it is in no small part because we no longer have the strong planning institutions we had fifty years ago. The community-engaged model that replaced metropolitan planning has many strengths, but the ability to pursue collective goals despite local resistance is not one of them.

Another important theme of Planning Toronto is that planning’s reach almost always exceeded its grasp. Even in the heyday of Metro Chairman Fred “Big Daddy” Gardiner, many more plans were made than were implemented. As White admits on page 5, planning was never “the sole, or even the prime, creator of the city’s physical form.” Many of the most recognizable results of Toronto’s growth, including streetcar suburbs full of million-dollar homes, downtown skyscrapers, and around 2,000 concrete slab apartment towers, were built with little or no public planning oversight. Demographics, real estate markets, and private initiative have always mattered just as much to the city’s development as comprehensively-planned futures. That point is also made in another recent survey, Christopher Armstrong’s Making Toronto Modern: Architecture and Design, 1895-1975 (McGill-Queen’s, 2014). Both authors would probably argue that Toronto’s conservatism and respect for the market have served it fairly well in the past; whether that will remain the case is a different matter. Anyone interested in Toronto’s struggles with planned and unplanned growth, past and present, should pick up Richard White’s book.

Spacing on Toronto urban history, the town hall and market

A 1985 model of the town hall and market, built at Ryerson U.

On the anniversary of the incorporation of the city of Toronto in 1834, Spacing, the lively Canadian mag on urbanism, blogs a detailed account of Toronto's first ever city hall  (NOT the clamshell one by Viljo Revell)

The article itself is almost historic. Toronto man-about-heritage Stephen Otto first wrote it in 1985 as text for an exhibit catalogue that was never published. (Know the feeling?  What's in your filing cabinet?) Since archaeological explorations were undertaken last summer on the surviving footings of the building, it's new too.

From the outside the market structure resembled nothing so much as a defensible farmstead of the Middle Ages – one erected in straight-forward style using “staring red brick” as the writer Anna Jameson described the favoured local building material. Great wooden gates closed the wagonways after market hours, and below the second storey the long exterior side walls were broken only by narrow “loopholes” that ventilated the butchers’ stalls.

History and Policy

Not a Picasso.  A Toronto regional planning concept, 1970

Richard White's Historical Perspectives on Toronto Planning considers a difficulty for historians: getting their work out of the "antiquarian interest" box and into the policy-making one

The study has plenty of merit, and I have no reason to question its factual observations, but like so much work done by Toronto urban analysts it lacks historical perspective. Toronto’s history is not unknown, and more is being written all the time – Neptis has itself commissioned historical studies, perhaps the only urban research body to have done so – but it always seems to end up in the ‘history’ box, to be brought out and viewed only for antiquarian purposes. Historical analysis rarely informs present-day discourse. But it could, and it should.

White's new book is upcoming from UBC Press.

Cool Toronto photos

Torontoist, the Toronto city blog, recently ran a selection of photos of the city as she was in 1856.

The whole run is well worth browsing through.  But where is the traffic?

History of Jane Jacobs

It's the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Jane Jacob's first and still most renowned city book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Her editor Jason Epstein recalls the context here, particularly Jacobs's part in the epic battles against the freeway developments and "urban renewal" led by highway czar Robert Moses.  The story is also told  in a lively journalistic account by Anthony Flint, Wrestling With Moses.

Epstein and Flint both allude to the re-evaluation of Moses and Jacobs lately going on. Architectural historians Kenneth Jackson and Hillary Ballon have recently argued that Jacobs's preservation of neighbourhoods like Greenwich Village and SoHo has mostly led to extremes of gentrification, so that only the very wealthy can live in them (Not, evidently, a problem for Epstein, who now lives in a building where Moses intended a freeway ramp), and that infrastructure such as roads, bridges, parks and pools of the kind Moses provided in abundance are, after all, essential to the modern city.  But that seems no more than a qualification; the influence of Jacobs remains immense.

Jacobs, always an activist and organizer, wanted above all to be a writer -- a fact integral to her decision to move to Toronto in 1968.  Given the centrality of Jacobs to the New York development battles -- which were far from over when she decamped -- both Flint and Epstein seem unsure of just how to deal with that part of her biography.

(image: inspiringcities.org)