The Changing Social Geography of Canadian Cities

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

“Cities are social and geographical prisms for the societies in which
they have evolved.” This statement, taken from Ley and Bourne’s
introductory chapter, sums up the essence of this textbook on social
geography. People often tend to think of cities in monolithic terms. By
applying a scholarly prism, the editors break up the hundreds of diffuse
factors that give each city its unique character. The result is a view
of Canadian cities through a spectrum of history, geography, economics,
population, vision, stupidity, and luck.

This book is almost encyclopedic in its scope. There are fascinating
chapters, such as one where UBC’s David Ley outlines the relationship
between Vancouver’s Board of Trade and the mayor’s office. Another
chapter, by UBC’s Daniel Hiebert, examines the fragmenting effect
prosperity had on Toronto’s immigrant Jewish community in the 1930s.
Yet for a work that goes into such detail about its subject, the editors
do no such justice to their contributors. The names and university
affiliations of 29 contributors are mentioned, and nothing else. Unless
readers happen to know these contributors, and what kind of bias they
bring to their viewpoints, they are left to take all these chapters at
face value. For example, only readers of John Sewell’s latest book,
The Shape of the City, will know what standards Sewell is using when he
declares the Toronto housing complex Flemingdon Park to be a failure. In
this same work, Len Evenden (Simon Fraser University) and Gerald Walker
(York University) declare the same housing development a “success,”
but do not tell the reader why.

If cities are social prisms, then so must be the books written about
them. To be fair to the reader, Bourne and Ley should identify the
spectrum.