Historical Perspectives on Toronto Planning

Among the most surprising discoveries I made in the course of researching Toronto’s planning history is how little ‘bulldozing’ was planned, let alone done, in the city’s march towards modernization. The notion that postwar planners wanted to clear away the entire inner city and replace it with something new, modern, and efficient has become so deeply rooted in contemporary urbanism that anyone who questions it is likely to be – and I speak from experience – not opposed but misunderstood. Such is the hard shell around intellectual orthodoxy.

It is true that many influential politicians and administrators in Toronto – one cannot speak of planners having much importance before the mid-1950s – were concerned about the condition of the city’s older districts in the years before and after the Second World War. What to do about it, however, they did not know because they were as parsimonious as they were concerned. But the city also had social reformers striving to improve housing conditions for the poor, and these two concerns, when joined, gained enough strength to spawn what became known as “urban renewal”, a program that, with generous federal government funding, became a major force in postwar urban planning and administration. This is well established, and not really open to question. What research has opened my eyes to is how modest and circumspect Toronto’s urban renewal program was. Read the rest of this entry »