The Shape of the City: Toronto Struggles with Modern Planning

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.

So long, Frank Lloyd Wright. John Sewell has passed judgment on the
North American Dream: the little ranch house in the suburb is a
doghouse. Sewell says nay to long, looping street plans; nay to
expressways instead of public transit; and double nay to developers who
get too cosy with politicians on megadevelopments.

In well-paced and clear-headed chapters, Sewell traces the modernist
movement that gave Toronto some of its greatest development disasters.
Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, whole communities were destroyed
under the banner of “urban renewal.” Streets disappeared or were
truncated by high-rise towers. Priceless historic buildings were
obliterated and replaced by disposable edifices. On the fringes of the
city, thousands of acres of prime farm land were swallowed up by
sprawling subdivisions.

If ignorance and greed were the only driving forces, the dismal results
would have been understandable, but many of Toronto’s worst
developments were built with the best intentions and nearly unlimited
resources. Regent Park, St. Jamestown, Moss Park, Jane–Finch, and
Flemingdon Park were all hailed, at the ribbon-cutting stage, as “the
ideal communities” of the future. Today their names are synonyms for
neighborhood catastrophes. According to Sewell, modernist construction,
or “the suburbanist approach,” is a process based on clearance,
mysticism, and experimentation.

The major flaw in this book is that it does not provide a context for
the reader to understand why modernism possessed the souls of
Toronto’s politicians and planners in the first place. Sewell does not
mention the appalling slum conditions that existed in many parts of
Toronto from the mid-19th century right up until the 1950s. He also
fails to explain why neosuburban sprawl is still the hottest type of
housing on the market. You can fool all of the people some of the time,
but the Don Mills experiment is about to turn 50.

All in all, a fine book that starts in mid-subject and too often sounds
like a sermon being preached to the converted.