Planning Toronto

Paris is famous for romance. Chicago, the blues. Buenos Aires, the tango. And Toronto? Well, Canadas largest urban centre is known for being a city that works a remarkably livable metropolis for its size. In this lavishly illustrated book, Richard White reveals how urban planning contributed to Toronto becoming a functional, world-class city. Focusing on the period from 1940 to 1980, he examines how planners shaped the city and its development amid a maelstrom of local and international obstacles and influences. Based on meticulous research of Torontos postwar plans and supplemented by dozens of interviews, Planning Toronto provides a comprehensive and lively explanation of how Torontos postwar plans city, metropolitan, and regional came to be, who devised them, and what impact they had. When it comes to the history of urban planning, the question may not be whether a particular plan was good or bad but whether in the end it made a difference. As White demonstrates, in Torontos case planning did matter just not always as expected.