With the passage of provincial legislation on April 2, 1953, the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto became a legal reality, joining together the City of Toronto with its twelve neighbouring municipalities in a regional federation. But few of the region’s 1.1 million inhabitants perceived Metro Toronto, with its combination of dense urbanization and abundant farmland, as [...]

By any measure in the rather narrow definition of today’s common currency, I am a member of the downtown elite—by which I mean I live downtown and I’m not on board with Mayor Rob Ford’s agenda. Full stop. This place I thought of as my home and the lifestyle that came with it, the ease [...]

Over the past year, federal and municipal electoral results have appeared to highlight a clash between downtown and the suburbs, with different parts of the city facing off on opposite sides of the political spectrum. At the federal level, stories of the Conservatives courting the visible minority vote emerged during the last election, with some [...]

In singling out the suburbs for "Villain" status this year, we realize we're playing a potentially divisive game. And so let's be clear about what and whom we aren't pointing fingers at, here.

Photo by Maryam S. from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. Between the 1950s and 1990s, the urbanized area of the GTA more than tripled from 193 square miles to 656. Yet, in the same time period, the population only doubled. Toronto became, former mayor John Sewell writes, “a city that resembled Vienna surrounded by Los Angeles.” [...]

Toronto poster boy John Sewell has been hard at work. Building on the research that he conducted for a 2005 lecture series, he has written a new book, The Shape of the Suburbs, that attempts to explain how Toronto’s suburban communities have spread over time and how they have shaped Toronto. Because of its insight, [...]