Planning Toronto is a comprehensive and lively exploration of how Toronto’s postwar plans came to be, who devised them, and how they shaped the city.
Description
In this lavishly illustrated, meticulously researched book, Richard White analyzes the city’s planning and how it contributed to Toronto becoming a functional, world-class city. Focusing on the critical period from 1940 to 1980, he examines how planners sought to shape the city and the region amid a maelstrom of local and international influences and obstacles. Planning Toronto offers the first comprehensive explanation of how Toronto’s postwar plans – city, metropolitan, and regional – came to be, who devised them, and what impact they had. As this definitive history reveals, planning matters – though perhaps not always as expected.
Awards
- Winner, Fred Landon Award, Ontario Historical Society 2016
Reviews
[White’s] exhaustive account spans from the 1940s, when Torontonians embraced government-led solutions for servicing a rapidly urbanizing country, to 1980, by which time citizens were firmly entrenched at the centre of the planning process. Balancing academic rigour with readability, Planning Toronto is the definitive history of Toronto area urban planning. Teasing out remarkable nuance in some well-known events, White also pushes readers to reconsider what they already know—or don’t—about the city’s urban development in those decades.
- Kevin Plummer
Planning Toronto is an extremely useful teaching tool for urban designers, planners, and administrators and for those doing more in-depth research on planning in Toronto.
- Tanu Sankalia, University of San Francisco