Toronto, Canada

Toronto, Canada

2.6 million city est. pop. 2012; 9 million metropolitan area est. pop. 2012 Toronto, the capital of the province of Ontario, is the municipal core of Canada’s Greater Golden Horseshoe region. Due to the efforts of provincial and local governance and civic society, the region has a history stretching back to the 1950s of making sustainable choices with respect to green space conservation—including a major greenbelt—and regional and community planning.

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oronto is a city within a very large, very diverse urban region in south-central Canada. The city itself is an amalgamation of several historical cities and towns, with a population of 2,615,000 in a land area of 630 square kilometers (Statistics Canada 2012). It has a continuous public waterfront trail along the shoreline of Lake Ontario, a ravine system that provides green space, a transit system, and a bike-friendly culture. The city has a strong commitment to tolerance and social welfare, complementing the provincial public health care and federal welfare systems. The city diverts from landfi ll much of its organic waste through yard waste collection and a household green bin program and successfully diverts recyclables. Making sustainability a part of everyday life and decision making is a challenge, but Toronto is moving in the right direction. Toronto is the core of the Greater Golden Horseshoe region, named for its shape as it encircles the northern edge of Lake Ontario. The region has a population of 9 million (which is almost one-quarter of the entire population of Canada) and is expected to grow to 11.5 million by 2031 due to Toronto’s role as Canada’s gateway city for international in-migration (Ontario Ministry of Infrastructure 2006). This makes it by far the largest urban region in Canada (ahead of Montreal and Vancouver) and one of the largest urban regions in North America 300

in population after regions centered in New York, Mexico City, and Los Angeles. As a rapidly growing region, sustainability concerns such as sprawl and affordable housing, commuting and traffic congestion, income inequality and distribution of services, natural system conservation and water quality, and farmland conservation and food security are high on the public agenda. To tackle these issues, in the fi rst decade of the twenty-first century the provincial government created a 728,500-hectare greenbelt to protect source water, natural heritage systems, and agricultural land, along with a growth plan to direct population and employment growth to designated urban nodes served by an ambitious expansion in the road and transit system.

History Toronto has grown from a center of First Nations gathering, trade, and settlement into modern Canada’s hub for the banking and fi nancial sector. (In Canada, First Nations refers to aboriginal peoples who are neither Inuit nor Métis.) Founded as the British colony of York in 1763, it is unique in its inland location on the Great Lakes system—the world’s largest freshwater system— with direct access to the Atlantic Ocean through the Saint Lawrence Seaway. It is located in one of the most southern, fertile, and temperate zones in Canada. With Toronto at its center, the city-region has been planned and developed in a horseshoe-shaped arc close to the shoreline of the lake and northward along Yonge Street (which is said to be the longest road in the world and stretches from the center of the city on Lake Ontario to Lake Simcoe at what is now the urban-rural fringe of the metropolitan area in the north). Th is northern line of development along Yonge Street intersects with the Oak

TORONTO, CANADA

Ridges Moraine, a significant landform in an otherwise flat topographical region. The moraine is a large glacial deposit dubbed the “rain barrel” of Toronto, which is underlaid by extensive aquifers and overlaid by the headwaters of the rivers flowing through the city to the lake (Bocking 2005). By the late 1980s the city’s sprawling suburbs resulted in pressure to conserve the moraine, culminating in the creation of the Greenbelt in 2006. The Greenbelt builds on a history of landscape-scale protection in southern Ontario: most significantly the protection of the Niagara Escarpment (the granite shoreline of a prehistoric lake) that began in the 1970s—now a World Biosphere Reserve—and the planning for water management within all watersheds through conservation authorities that began in the late 1950s. The Greenbelt encompasses both the 190,000-hectare Oak Ridges Moraine Conservation Plan area and the 195,000-hectare Niagara Escarpment Conservation Plan area, with the rest of the land designated as Protected Countryside for conservation of the natural system and agricultural system. In addition, strong greenlands policies in the comprehensive plans of regional and local municipal plans provide a great deal of natural system protection.

Economy and Society Toronto historically has had strong economic ties to the United States, which continues to be its largest trading partner (followed by Asia and the European Union). Toronto has been and continues to be a major manufacturing center in spite of global shifts in goods production that have reduced its automotive manufacturing base. It has a strong knowledge-based economy centered on finance, real estate, and business services. Its agricultural industries also make a strong contribution to the region’s economy. Toronto is one of the most demographically diverse places in the world, with people from over two hundred countries speaking more than 170 languages (Toronto, City of 2008). The challenge has been to create a livable environment for this diverse population, and although Toronto is not without its struggles, it is generally seen to be a safe and tolerant city. Many new immigrants live in relative poverty and face barriers to finding skilled work despite being highly educated. They are concentrated in a ring of 1960s-era suburbs—where access to transit and to stores and services is a problem—in the “in-between city” between the older, more well-to-do pre-war suburbs and the newer suburbs of the outlying areas (Young, Wood, and Keil 2011; Hulchanski 2010; United Way 2011). Where once Toronto had one of the best subway systems in the world, now the city is considered to be quite poorly served (in terms of mode, routes, and funding) due to lack of ongoing investment.

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LiveGreen Toronto is a major sustainability initiative by the city’s Environment Office. The initiative promotes a wide range of behavior changes for residents and businesses, including reduction of automobile commuting, incorporation of green roofs, improving stormwater management, and encouraging the community through grants and events to adopt sustainable behaviors (Toronto, City of 2012). Waste reduction has been very successful in the city. Toronto’s main landfi ll started to reach capacity in the 1990s, and the search for a new strategy triggered years of debate over what to do with the city’s solid waste (Walker 1995). Although a new landfi ll site was fi nally announced in 2007, the effect of the debate has been a dramatic reduction in the amount of waste sent to landfi ll, with half of all residential waste already diverted through composting and recycling (Toronto, City of 2011). Toronto has strong civil society groups and a typically progressive city government making a difference in sustainability issues, including addressing climate change, improving transit and housing, providing immigrant settlement services, funding food banks, and participating in local planning. Nongovernmental organizations such as the Toronto Environmental Alliance, the Center for City Ecology, and Evergreen shape the civic agenda and engage residents in city building (McBride and Wilcox 2005).

Planning and Development Toronto was the home of the famous urbanist Jane Jacobs, who championed the city’s livability in the 1960s at a time when US cities were being abandoned for the suburbs. Jane Jacobs wrote Th e Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) in reaction to the evisceration of New York City in the 1950s by the slum clearance and expressway building led by US urban planner Robert Moses (Caro 1975). She came to Canada to avoid her sons’ pending conscription into the Vietnam War, settled in Toronto, and soon became involved in stopping the Spadina Expressway, a major highway that would have sliced through what are now some of Toronto’s most sought-after leafy neighborhoods (Alexiou 2007). Jacobs passed away in 2006, and her legacy is commemorated every year on the fi rst weekend in May through Jane’s Walks, an initiative that encourages residents to explore their neighborhoods and meet their neighbors (Jane’s Walk 2010). The city is also known for being part of the fi rst metropolitan region in North America to create a coordinated plan for its thirteen cities: in 1954 it built the structure of roads and transit that still shapes the region today. In the 1970s the areas surrounding metropolitan

302 • THE BERKSHIRE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SUSTAINABILITY: THE AMERICAS AND OCEANIA: ASSESSING SUSTAINABILITY Toronto were organized into regional municipalities: York, Durham, Peel, and Halton regions each has its own comprehensive plan for contiguous growth within designated urban service areas to limit sprawl in rural areas. In 1998, through provincially mandated amalgamation, Metro Toronto and its cities became the City of Toronto. Don Mills was planned in the 1950s as a self-contained suburb of the city of Toronto and the first of its kind in North America. It was the model for a generation of suburbs built at highway interchanges with bull’s eye concentrations of apartment-style housing and shopping centers in the middle surrounded by decreasing densities of housing organized around elementary schools and a park system with industrial buildings at the outskirts. Don Mills is now being reimagined with the redevelopment of the central shopping mall into a contemporary lifestyle center that introduces through streets, a pedestrian orientation, and new condominium housing. Older single detached bungalow homes on generous lots are being rapidly turned over into very large homes and intensification of employment areas is occurring. Since 2000 Toronto has experienced a condominium boom, from eight-to-ten-story mid-rises along designated avenues to thirty-to-eighty-story high-rises. The tall buildings are changing the face of the downtown area of the city. On one hand they exemplify sustainability by concentrating people in the existing downtown area and making use of existing infrastructure. On the other, they raise concerns about the long-term livability of high-rise neighborhoods due to poor urban design, isolation of superblock projects from the rest of the city, and the lack of family-sized units. At the same time there are established, leafy neighborhoods of homes built in the pre-war era served by streetcars. The centers of suburban cities in the region are also experiencing revitalization through condominiums and new retail formats—for instance, the City of Mississauga is in the process of changing from one whose city center is defi ned by a shopping mall to a vibrant, walkable, highdensity urban core. In many ways Toronto is a model of sustainability for the rest of the world in its tolerance for social and cultural diversity, conservation of green spaces and ecological function, economic prosperity, and strong governance. Laura TAYLOR York University See also Architecture; Canada; Detroit, United States; Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River; Mobility; New York City, United States; North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA); Public Transportation; United States; Urbanization; Vancouver, Canada

FURTHER READING Amati, Marco, & Taylor, Laura. (2010). From green belts to green infrastructure. Planning Practice and Research, 25(2), 143–155. Alexiou, Alice Sparberg. (2007). Jane Jacobs: Urban visionary. Toronto: HarperCollins. Bocking, Stephen. (2005). Protecting the rain barrel: Discourses and the roles of science and the roles of science in a suburban environmental controversy. Environmental Politics, 14 (5), 611–628. Caro, Robert A. (1975). The power broker: Robert Moses and the fall of New York. New York: Vintage. Hodge, Gerald, & Robinson, Ira M. (2001). Planning Canadian regions. Vancouver, Canada: UBC Press. Hulchanski, J. David. (2010). Th e three cities within Toronto: Income polarization among Toronto’s neighbourhoods , 1970–2005. Toronto: Cities Centre University of Toronto. Retrieved May 11, 2012, from http://www.urbancentre.utoronto.ca/pdfs/curp/tnrn/Th ree-CitiesWithin-Toronto-2010-Final.pdf Jacobs, Jane. (1961). Th e death and life of great American cities. New York: Vintage. Jane’s Walk. (2010). Homepage. Retrieved May 11, 2012, from http:// www.janeswalk.com McBride, Jason, & Wilcox, Alana. (Eds.). (2005). Utopia: Towards a new Toronto. Toronto: Coach House Books. Ontario Ministry of Infrastructure. (2006). Growth plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe, 2006. Toronto: Queen’s Printer. Retrieved May 11, 2012, from https://www.placestogrow.ca/index.php? option=com_content&task=view&id=9&Itemid=12 Ontario Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing. (2005). Protecting the greenbelt: The greenbelt plan. Toronto: Queen’s Printer. Retrieved May 11, 2012, from http://www.mah.gov.on.ca/Page189.aspx Statistics Canada. (2006). 2006 Census: Portrait of the Canadian population in 2006: Subprovincial population dynamics. Retrieved May 11, 2012, from http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2006/as-sa/97-550/p14-eng.cfm Statistics Canada. (2012). Census profi le: Toronto. Retrieved May 11, 2012, from http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/ 2011/dp-pd/prof/details/page.cfm?Lang=E&Geo1=CSD&Code1= 3520005&Geo2=PR&Code2=35&Data=Count&SearchText= Toronto&SearchType=Begins&SearchPR=01&B1=All&GeoLevel= PR&GeoCode=3520005 Taylor, Zachary Todd, & van Nostrand, John. (2008). Shaping the Toronto region, past, present, and future. Retrieved May 11, 2012, from http://www.neptis.org/library/show.cfm?id=86&cat_id=11 Toronto, City of. (2008). Backgrounder: Release of the 2006 Census on ethnic origin and visible minorities. Retrieved June 18, 2012, from http://www.toronto.ca/demographics/pdf/2006_ethnic_origin_ visible_minorities_backgrounder.pdf Toronto, City of. (2011). 2011 waste diversion. Retrieved June 18, 2012, from http://www.toronto.ca/garbage/pdf/2011-graph.pdf Toronto, City of. (2012). Toronto Environment Office. Retrieved June 18, 2012, from http://www.toronto.ca/teo/index.htm United Way. (2011). Poverty by postal code 2: Vertical poverty, declining income, housing quality and community life in Toronto’s inner suburban high-rise apartments. Retrieved May 11, 2012, from http:// www.unitedwaytoronto.com/verticalpoverty/report/introduction/ Urban Strategies Inc. & Hariri Pontarini Architects. (2010). Tall buildings: Inviting change in downtown Toronto. Retrieved May 11, 2012, from http://www.toronto.ca/planning/tallbuildingstudy. htm#study Walker, Gerald. (1995). Social mobilization in the city’s countryside: Rural Toronto fights waste dump. Journal of Rural Studies, 11(3), 243–254. Young, Douglas; Wood, Patricia Burke; & Keil, Roger. (Eds.). (2011). In-between infrastructure: Urban connectivity in an age of vulnerability. Vancouver, Canada: Praxis (e)Press. Retrieved May 11, 2012, from http://www.praxis-epress.org/availablebooks/inbetween.html