Going Downtown: Reflections on Urban Progress

Peter Martin is a senior projects editor at the University of Ottawa
Press.

David Lewis Stein, son of immigrant parents, grew up in downtown
Toronto. He left, returned, and became The Toronto Star’s urban
affairs columnist. Along the way, he wrote acclaimed novels and picked
up a Master’s degree in urban planning. Stein has almost as much
contempt for planners as Jane Jacobs has. He sees cities, and especially
his own, much as Fernand Braudel does—they are where civilization
happens.

By virtue of his day job, writing an influential column for the local
newspaper, Stein came to know the major players on the Toronto scene:
politicians, developers, and citizen advocates. By virtue of his
location—as an Annex resident—he came to know and understand (he was
one of them) the motives of people who wanted to preserve urban
neighborhoods. And, by virtue of his extraordinary intelligence, he came
to understand, even to empathize with, the motives of all the players on
the urban scene.

Going Downtown is part memoir, part social history, and part sociology.
In it, Stein rummages through his files and tells the stories of the
Spadina Expressway, of David Crombie’s height bylaw, of John
Sewell’s failure, and of Arthur Eggleton’s success. The reader is
left yearning for more.