Constructing urban expertise: Professional and political authority in Toronto, 1940-1970

Journal of Urban History

Volumn 33, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 51-76

  Bocking, Stephen ^a  

^a TRENT UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

Flood control; Infrastructure; Planning; Technical expertise; Urban environmental history

Indexed keywords

FLOOD CONTROL; METROPOLITAN AREA; URBAN HISTORY; URBAN PLANNING; URBAN POLITICS;

CANADA; NORTH AMERICA; ONTARIO; TORONTO;

EID: 33749566762     PISSN: 00961442     EISSN: 15526771     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0096144206290265     Document Type: Article

References (79)

1. James Lemon, "Toronto among North American Cities: A Historical Perspective on the Present," in Victor Russell, ed., Forging a Consensus: Historical Essays on Toronto (Toronto, 1984), 323-351.
2. Christopher Hamlin, A Science of Impurity: Water Analysis in Nineteenth Century Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Joel Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective (Akron, OH, 1996); and Martin Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore, MD, 2000).
3. Joel Tarr, "Disputes over Water-quality Policy: Professional Cultures in Conflict, 1900-1917," in J. Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink (Akron, OH, 1996), 159-178; David Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers, and Air Quality in America, 1881-1951 (Baltimore, MD, 1999); and Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (Cambridge, UK, 2001).
4. See, especially, Martin Melosi, "Sanitary Engineers in American Cities: Changing Roles from the Age of Miasmas to the Age of Ecology," in M. Melosi, Effluent America: Cities, Industry, Energy, and the Environment (Pittsburgh, PA, 2001), 225-237.
5. Joel Tarr, "The Metabolism of the Industrial City: The Case of Pittsburgh," Journal of Urban History 28 (2002): 511-545.
6. Anne Whiston Spirn, The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design (New York: 1984); and Stanley K. Schultz, Constructing Urban Culture: American Cities and City Planning, 1800-1920 (Philadelphia, 1989).
7. Mary Corbin Sies and Christopher Silver, eds., Planning the Twentieth-century American City (Baltimore, MD, 1996); for an overview of these ideas in Canadian cities, see Alan Artibise and Gilbert Stelter, "Planning and the Realities of Development: Introduction," in A. Artibise and G. Stelter, eds., The Usable Urban Past: Planning and Politics in the Modern Canadian City (Toronto, Canada, 1979), 167-175; see also Jill Grant, "Planning Canadian Cities: Context, Continuity, and Change," in Trudi Bunting and Pierre Filion, eds., Canadian Cities in Transition: The Twenty-first Century (Don Mills, Canada, 2000), 443-461.
8. John D. Fairfield, "The Scientific Management of Urban Space: Professional City Planning and the Legacy of Progressive Reform," Journal of Urban History 20, no. 2 (1994): 179-204.
9. Schultz, Constructing Urban Culture.
10. Samuel P. Hays, "Value Premises for Planning and Public Policy: The Historical Context," in Explorations in Environmental History (Pittsburgh, PA, 1998), 24 - 40; Paul Barrett and Mark H. Rose, "Street Smarts: The Politics of Transportation Statistics in the American City, 1900-1990," Journal of Urban History 25, no. 3 (1999): 405-433; and Raymond A. Mohl, "Stop the Road: Freeway Revolts in American Cities," Journal of Urban History 30, no. 5 (2004): 676-706.
11. Ari Kelman, A River and Its City: An Environmental History of New Orleans (Berkeley, CA, 2003); and Jared Orsi, Hazardous Metropolis: Flooding and Urban Ecology in Los Angeles (Berkeley, CA, 2004).
12. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York, 1961).
13. Bruce Seely, Building the American Highway System: Engineers and Policy Makers (Philadelphia, 1987).
14. Sies and Silver, Planning the Twentieth-century American City.
15. Humphrey Carver, Houses for Canadians: A Study of Housing Problems in the Toronto Area (Toronto, Canada, 1948), 25-28.
16. James Lemon, "Toronto among North American Cities: A Historical Perspective on the Present," in V. L. Russell, ed., Forging a Consensus: Historical Essays on Toronto (Toronto, Canada, 1986), 323-351.
17. Kent Gerecke, "The History of Canadian City Planning," City Magazine 2, nos. 3, 4 (Summer 1976): 14-14; see also Grant, "Planning Canadian Cities."
18. J. P. Maher, "Two Reports to City Planning Board, 1942," as quoted in Wayne Reeves, Visions for the Metropolitan Toronto Waterfront, II: Forging a Regional Identity, 1913-68 (Toronto, Canada, 1993), 9-9.
19. Walter Van Nus, "Towards the City Efficient: The Theory and Practice of Zoning, 1919-1939," 226-246; Peter Moore, "Zoning and Planning: The Toronto Experience, 1904-1970," 316-341; and Thomas Gunton, "The Ideas and Policies of the Canadian Planning Profession, 1909-1931," 177-195, all in A. Artibise and G. Stelter, eds., The Usable Urban Past: Planning and Politics in the Modern Canadian City (Toronto, Canada, 1979); and James Lemon, "Plans for Early 20th-century Toronto: Lost in Management," Urban History Review 18, no. 1 (1989): 11-31.
20. Toronto Planning Board, The Master Plan for the City of Toronto and Environs (Toronto, Canada, 1943).
21. Moore, "Zoning and Planning," 334-334.
22. Toronto Planning Board, Master Plan; see also Reeves, Visions.
23. John Sewell, The Shape of the City: Toronto Struggles with Modern Planning (Toronto, Canada, 1993), 55-60.
24. Harold Kaplan, Urban Political Systems: A Functional Analysis of Metropolitan Toronto (New York, 1967), 44-44.
25. Albert Rose, "A Critique of Metropolitan Government in Toronto: 1953-1965," in Planning 1965 (Chicago, 1965), 5-22. On the postwar urban environment generally, see Rome, Bulldozer in the Countryside.
26. For an excellent discussion of the history of planning and sanitary engineering in postwar Toronto, see Richard White, Urban Infrastructure and Urban Growth in the Toronto Region, 1950s to the 1990s (Toronto, Canada, 2003).
27. Gore & Storrie, Consulting Engineers, "Toronto and York Planning Board Report on Water Supply and Sewage Disposal for the City of Toronto and Related Areas," Series 40, file 227, Record Centre 107792-3, September 1949, p. 7, in City of Toronto Archives.
28. Philip Wichern, "Metropolitan Reform and the Restructuring of Local Governments in the North American City," in Gilbert Stelter and Alan Artibise, Power and Place: Canadian Urban Development in the North American Context (Vancouver, Canada, 1986), 299-299.
29. Metropolitan Toronto Planning Board, Official Plan of the Metropolitan Toronto Planning Area, draft, 1959, in City of Toronto Archives.
30. Timothy Colton, Big Daddy: Frederick G. Gardiner and the Building of Metropolitan Toronto (Toronto, Canada, 1980), 156-156.
31. Ibid.
32. Eli Comay, "How Metropolitan Toronto Government Works," in Planning 1965 (Chicago, 1965), 26-26.
33. Kaplan, Urban Political Systems, 65-67.
34. Appendix C: Address Given by the Chairman of the Metropolitan Council at the Inaugural Meeting of the 1954 Metropolitan Council, January 12, 1954; and Minutes of Metro Toronto Council, 1954, in City of Toronto Archives.
35. Address Given by the Chairman, 4.
36. Metro Toronto, Corporate Planning Division, "Metropolitan Toronto: The Changing Context 1953-1993," Discussion paper, September 1993, pp. 12-13, in City of Toronto Archives.
37. Rose, "Critique," 6-11.
38. Melosi, Sanitary City.
39. Fenco-Harris, Functional Report on the Don Valley Parkway to the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto (Toronto, Canada, 1955).
40. On the technocratic ideology of highway design generally, see Louis Ward Kemp, "Aesthetes and Engineers: The Occupational Ideology of Highway Design," Technology and Culture 27 (1986): 759-797; Barrett and Rose, "Street Smarts" and Seely, Building the American Highway System.
41. On provincial highway planning, see Ontario, Annual Report of the Department of Highways, 1958 (Toronto, Canada, 1958).
42. Ross Patterson, "The Development of an Interwar Suburb: Kingsway Park, Etobicoke," Urban History Review 13 (February 1985): 225-235.
43. Colton, Big Daddy, 163-163.
44. Leonard Gertler and R. W. Crowley, Changing Canadian Cities: The Next 25 Years (Toronto, Canada, 1977), 290-290.
45. Paul-André Linteau, "Canadian Suburbanization in a North American Context Does the Border Make a Difference?" Journal of Urban History 13, no. 3 (1987): 252-274.
46. Carver, Houses for Canadians, 62-69.
47. Ibid., 38-43.
48. Gerecke, "Canadian City Planning," 14-15; and John Sewell, Shape of the City.
49. John Sewell, "Don Mills: E. P. Taylor and Canada's First Corporate Suburb," City Magazine 2, no. 6 (January 1977): 28-38.
50. Macklin Hancock, "Flemingdon Park, A New Urban Community," in Leonard Gertler, ed., Planning the Canadian Environment (Montreal, Canada, 1968), 207-207.
51. Quoted in Sewell, "Don Mills," 31-31.
52. Carver, Houses for Canadians, 43-43.
53. Hancock, "Flemingdon Park," 226-226.
54. Ibid., 210-11.
55. Ibid., 214.
56. Humphrey Carver, Compassionate Landscape (Toronto, Canada, 1975).
57. Humphrey Carver, Cities in the Suburbs (Toronto, Canada, 1962), 60-62.
58. For an early statement of these views, see Alan Coventry, "An Ontario Experiment in the Conservation of Resources," Industrial Canada, July 1939, 131-133; and Arthur Richardson, A Report on the Ganaraska Watershed: A Study in Land Use with Plans for the Rehabilitation of the Area in the Post-war Period (Toronto, Canada, 1944).
59. Arthur Richardson, Conservation by the People: The History of the Conservation Movement in Ontario to 1970 (Toronto, Canada, 1974); and Dan Shrubsole, "The Grand River Conservation Commission: History, Activities, and Implications for Water Management," Canadian Geographer 36, no. 3 (1992): 221-236.
60. See, for example, Ontario, Department of Planning and Development, Don Valley Conservation Report (Toronto, Canada, 1950).
61. Rome, Bulldozer in the Countryside, 8-9, 189-219.
62. Ontario, Department of Planning and Development, Don Valley.
63. Betty Kennedy, Hurricane Hazel (Toronto, Canada, 1979).
64. Report no. 1 of the Planning and Parks Committee, March 2, 1954, Appendix A, Minutes of the Metropolitan Toronto Council, 1954, in City of Toronto Archives. On the history of parks in Toronto, see Wayne Reeves, "From Acquisition to Restoration: A History of Protecting Toronto's Natural Places," in B. I. Roots et al., eds., Special Places: The Changing Ecosystems of the Toronto Region (Vancouver, Canada, 1999), 229-241.
65. Metro Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, Conservation (Toronto, Canada, 1967).
66. Orsi, Hazardous Metropolis; and Kelman, River and Its City.
67. Metropolitan Toronto Planning Board, Official Plan, 189- 189.
68. Rome, Bulldozer in the Countryside, 9-10; on the relative significance of ecology and other scientific disciplines in environmental affairs, see Stephen Bocking, Ecologists and Environmental Politics: A History of Contemporary Ecology (New Haven, CT, 1997), 196 - 202.
69. On this phenomenon generally in American cities, see John D. Fairfield, "Private City, Public City: Power and Vision in American Cities," Journal of Urban History 29, no. 4 (2003): 437-462.
70. Kaplan, Urban Political Systems.
71. David and Nadine Nowlan, The Bad Trip: The Untold Story of the Spadina Expressway (Toronto, Canada, 1970); and Bureau of Municipal Research, "Citizen Participation in Metro Toronto: Climate for Cooperation?" Civic Affairs, January 1975.
72. Carver, Cities in the Suburbs, 56-58.
73. Rome, Bulldozer in the Countryside, 119-152.
74. Ibid., 173-81.
75. Ontario Department of Treasury and Economics, Design for Development: The Toronto-Centred Region (Toronto, Canada, 1970).
76. Leonard Gertler, Urban Issues (Toronto, Canada, 1976).
77. N. H. Richardson, "Insubstantial Pageant: The Rise and Fall of Provincial Planning in Ontario," Canadian Public Administration 24, no. 4 (1981): 563-585.
78. On some of the implications of conflicting professional perspectives for cities, see Cliff Ellis, "Professional Conflict over Urban Form: The Case of Urban Freeways, 1930 to 1970," in Mary Corbin Sies and Christopher Silver, eds., Planning the Twentieth-century American City (Baltimore, MD, 1996), 262-279.
79. See Larry Bourne, "Presidential Address Normative Urban Geographies: Recent Trends, Competing Visions, and New Cultures of Regulation," Canadian Geographer 40, no. 1 (1996): 2-16.