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Reviewed by:
  • Toronto Sprawls: A History
  • Philippa Campsie (bio)
Lawrence Solomon. Toronto Sprawls: A History. University of Toronto Press. xiv, 122. $45.00, $19.95

This historical overview of Toronto’s expansion offers a thesis intended to be ‘provocative’: that suburban sprawl, far from being an unintended consequence of government actions, was a deliberate, long-standing public policy to disperse the urban population. To be sure, other urban researchers have concluded that twentieth-century fiscal and land-use policies have fostered low-density development at the urban periphery. Moreover, history has shown that private-sector utilities (hydro and transit in the early twentieth century; broadband in the early twenty-first) find it more profitable to serve well-populated compact communities than sparsely populated low-density ones, whereas public-sector utilities expand to serve people wherever they live, thereby leading to inefficiencies. But Solomon goes further, suggesting that a heavy-handed policy of urban dispersion was foisted on an urban population that accepted it reluctantly, as its only hope of obtaining affordable housing.

Solomon, drawing extensively on the archives of the Empire Club’s speaker series, finds no shortage of speeches by politicians and leading civil servants fulminating against the dangers of high-density city living and extolling the benefits of expanding the region’s infrastructure to peripheral areas. Many speeches date from the first half of the twentieth century, when slum tenements still crowded the centre of the city, and wartime and Depression-era housing shortages had caused acute overcrowding downtown.

Unfortunately, this slim volume does not provide enough evidence to make the case for government-induced sprawl. Solomon tends to speak of ‘governments’ without considering the complex interactions among federal, provincial, regional/county, and municipal governments that produced the Greater Toronto Area’s current urban form – not to mention the ways in which these different levels of government sometimes worked at cross-purposes. He has little to say about the role of speculators and developers. And he undercuts his argument with descriptions of the ineffectiveness of some government policies, such as [End Page 358] the largely unsuccessful attempt to encourage Second World War veterans to settle on smallholdings outside the city.

Nevertheless, in drawing attention to public policies that have fostered the sprawl that the Ontario government is now trying to rein in, Solomon has made a helpful contribution to the debate. His discussion of the anti-apartment-building bias that developed in the first half of the twentieth century – a bias that still runs deep in Toronto – and its connection to notions of ‘social purity’ is well worth reading.

The book contains no maps – a serious shortcoming. Non-Torontonians may be unfamiliar with place names such as Mimico and Forest Hill, and even native Torontonians may find it hard to recall the precise location of townships, counties, and boroughs that have since disappeared. Researchers seeking to substantiate Solomon’s ideas would also be at a disadvantage, since many quotations are cited partially or informally, and some are not documented at all. There are also a few inaccuracies, such as the characterization of the Parkway Belt in the Design for Development Plan of the 1970s as a ‘greenbelt’ – it was intended from the beginning to serve as a utility corridor, which it does to this day (although most of the rest of the plan was never implemented).

Perhaps the most ‘provocative’ idea occurs at the end of the book, where Solomon offers some suggestions for public policies to slow sprawl, including the replacement of market value assessment with other forms of taxation. This discussion concludes with the comment, ‘These changes would bolster Toronto’s tax base but deprive some suburbs of an important proportion of their tax base, nudging them toward the suburbs’ former role as downscale, working-class districts able to provide their residents little beyond basic services.’ At a time when Toronto has traced many social problems to ‘priority neighbourhoods’ –districts in the inner suburbs with many low-income households but inadequate social services – this comment certainly goes against emerging notions of socially responsible planning and development. Perhaps sprawl is not the Greater Toronto Area’s biggest problem after all.

Philippa Campsie

Philippa Campsie, Centre for Urban...

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