Changing Toronto


Book Description

"With an eye for global forces, this panoramic account revolves around a focus on social, spatial, and environmental justice in the city, offering a lively riposte to both dull academicism and theatrical boosterism." - Kanishka Goonewardena, University of Toronto




Streetcars and the Shifting Geographies of Toronto


Book Description

When looking at old pictures of Toronto, it is clear that the city’s urban, economic, and social geography has changed dramatically over the generations. Historic photos of Toronto’s streetcar network offer a unique opportunity to examine how the city has been transformed from a provincial, industrial city into one of North America’s largest and most diverse regions. Streetcars and the Shifting Geographies of Toronto studies the city’s urban transformations through an analysis of photographs taken by streetcar enthusiasts, beginning in the 1960s. These photographers did not intend to record the urban form, function, or social geographies of Toronto; they were "accidental archivists" whose main goal was to photograph the streetcars themselves. But today, their images render visible the ordinary, day-to-day life in the city in a way that no others did. These historic photographs show a Toronto before gentrification, globalization, and deindustrialization. Each image has been re-photographed to provide fresh insights into a city that is in a constant state of flux. With gorgeous illustrations, this unique book offers an understanding of how Toronto has changed, and the reasons behind these urban shifts. The visual exploration of historic and contemporary images from different parts of the city helps to explain how the major forces shaping the city affect its form, functions, neighbourhoods, and public spaces.




Changing Canada


Book Description

Changing Canada examines political transformations, welfare state restructuring, international boundaries and contexts, the new urban experience and creative resistance. The authors question dominant ways of thinking and promote alternative ways of understanding and explaining Canadian society and politics that encourage progressive social change. They examine how the evolution of capitalism is producing new types of transformations and new forms of resistance, and show that aspects of the state and the wider society are being contested. They also discuss the often paradoxical or contradictory effects of various social forces, such as the liberating but also constraining features of new communications technologies, new employment norms and new household forms.




The Changing Face of Canada


Book Description

Canadian society is rapidly changing. This concise, up-to-date volume masterfully captures this change. Edited by two of Canada's leading demographers, Roderic Beaujot and Don Kerr, this book is an exciting entry in Canadian population studies, drawing from a variety of disciplines, including sociology, geography, economics, history, and epidemiology. The Changing Face of Canada is an essential text for demography courses across the country. Each reading has been meticulously edited and concisely ordered into five essential sections: fertility mortality international migration, domestic migration and population distribution population aging population composition Vital issues include: the role of immigration in Canada's future; the deteriorating economic welfare of immigrants; globalization, undocumented migration, and unwanted refugees; Aboriginal population change; implications of unprecedented low fertility; and the astonishing demographic transformation of Canadian cities.




How We Changed Toronto


Book Description

By the mid-1960s Toronto was well on its way to becoming Canada's largest and most powerful city. One real estate firm aptly labelled it Boomtown. Expressways, subways, shopping centres, high-rise apartments, and skyscraping downtown office towers were transforming the city. City officials were cheerleaders for unrestricted growth. All this "progress" had a price. Heritage buildings were disappearing. Whole neighbourhoods were being destroyed -- by city hall itself -- in the name of urban renewal and high-rise developers. Many idealistic, young Torontonians didn't like what they saw. At a time when political activism was in the air, they engaged in local politics. Recently graduated lawyer John Sewell was one of many. He joined his friends working for local residents in areas targeted for demolition by city hall. Others were fighting the Spadina expressway, planned to push its way through the city to the lakeshore. Still others were saving Toronto's Old City Hall from demolition. This was the modest start of a twelve-year transformation of Toronto, chronicled in John Sewell's new book. Bringing together a fascinating cast of characters -- from cigar-chomping developers to Jane Jacobs and David Crombie, from a host of ordinary citizens to some of the world's most innovative architects and planners -- Sewell describes the conflict-filled period when Toronto developed a whole new approach to city government, civic engagement, and planning policies. Sewell went from activist organizer, to high-profile opposition politician, to leading light of a bare reform majority at city hall, to become Toronto's mayor. Along the way he sparked the rethinking of an amazing array of old ideas -- not just about how cities should grow, but about race relations, attitudes toward the LGBT community, and the role of police. His defeat in the city's 1980 election marked the end of a decade of dramatic transformation, but the changes this reform era produced are now entrenched -- in Toronto, but in other Canadian cities, too. How We Changed Toronto is the inside story of activist idealists who set out to change the world -- and did, right in their own backyard.




Changing Social Geography of Canadian Cities


Book Description

The contributors to this volume demonstrate the richness and diversity of the social landscapes and communities in Canadian urban centres, emphasizing changes which occurred in the period from the mid 1960s to the early 1990s. The nineteen non-technical and integrative essays include reviews of the literature, empirical studies, and discussions of policy issues. CONTENTS Introduction * The Social Context and Diversity of Urban Canada -- David F. Ley and Larry S. Bourne Part One - Patterns: People and Place in Urban Canada * Evolving Urban Landscapes -- D.W. Holdsworth * Measuring the Social Ecology of Cities -- W.K.D. Davies and R.A. Murdie * Demography, Living Arrangement, and Residential Geography -- J.R. Miron * Urban Social Behaviour in Time and Space -- D.G. Janelle Part Two - Contexts: Social Structure and Urban Space * Migration, Mobility, and Population Redistribution -- E.G. Moore and M.W. Rosenberg * The Emerging Ethnocultural Mosaic -- S.H. Olson and A.L. Kobayashi * Work, Labour Markets, and Households in Transition -- D. Rose and P. Villeneuve * Housing Markets, Community Development, and Neighbourhood Change -- Larry S. Bourne and T. Bunting Part Three - Places: Selected Locales * Integrating Production and Consumption: Industry, Class, Ethnicity, and the Jews of Toronto -- D. Hiebert * Past Elites and Present Gentry: Neighbourhoods of Privilege in the Inner City -- David F. Ley * From Periphery to Centre: The Changing Geography of the Suburbs -- L.J. Evenden and G.E. Walker * The Social Geography of Small Towns -- J.C. Everitt and A.M. Gill Part Four - Needs: Social Well-being and Public Policy * Social Planning and the Welfare State -- J.T. Lemon * The Meaning of Home, Home Ownership, and Public Policy -- R. Harris and G.J. Pratt * Homelessness -- M.J. Dear and J. Wolch * Geography of Urban Health -- S.M. Taylor * Changing Access to Public and Private Services: Non-family Childcare -- S. Mackenzie and M. Truelove * Cities as a Social Responsibility: Planning and Urban Form -- P.J. Smith and P.W. Moore




Family Change and Family Policies in Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States


Book Description

This is the first volume in a series intended to report on the evolution of family policies in Western welfare states (and to compare current provisions). The developments are presented in the context of a report on family change for each of the countries, and with a view of the economic, political, and institutional climates in which they occurred. Topics covered in this book include family formation and current structural patterns, families and the division of labor, the income of families (earnings, taxation, transfer programs), and also the political and institutional contexts for family policy. An extensive bibliography is provided.




Changing Women, Changing History


Book Description

Changing Women, Changing History is a bibliographic guide to the scholarship, both English and French, on Canadian's women's history. Organized under broad subject headings, and accompanied by author and subject indices it is accessible and comprehensive.




Changing Neighbourhoods


Book Description

In recent decades growing inequality and polarization have been reshaping the social landscape of Canada’s metropolitan areas, changing neighbourhoods and negatively affecting the lived realities of increasingly diverse urban populations. This book examines the dimensions and impacts of increased economic inequality and urban socio-spatial polarization since the 1980s. Based on the work of the Neighbourhood Change Research Partnership, an innovative national comparative study of seven major cities, the authors reveal the dynamics of neighbourhood change across the Canadian urban system. By mapping average income trends across neighbourhoods, they show the kinds of factors – social, economic, and cultural – that influenced residential options and redistributed concentrations of poverty and affluence. While the heart of the book lies in the project’s findings from each city, other chapters provide critical context. Taken together, they offer important understandings of the depth and the breadth of the problem at hand and signal the urgency for concerted policy responses in the decades to come.