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rfmcdonaldOver at Acts of Minor Treason, Andrew Barton has a post up ("Signs of a Change") that takes a look--literally--at Toronto's street signs, old and new, and what they mean.
The upset with with obliteration of Metropolitan Toronto (Wikipedia, map) was audible on Prince Edward Island. Those city identities still remain strong--I've seen pieces of mail originating from North York, and Scarboroughers still seem to have a strong group identity. Identity, as Andrew points out, is also strong below the level of Toronto's component cities, vested in different neighbourhoods. Toronto, people around here like saying, is a city of neighbourhoods. Unless all of the world's other cities are all completely homogenized, this is probably a truism, but it is fair to say that loyalties to the old cities, neighbourhood identities and local patriotisms of various sizes remain strong. For now, at least
Some of you might be interested in what Patrick Cain at the Toronto Star has put together, at his blog Map of the Week: Version 1.0 of an ambitious map of all Toronto's neighbourhoods.
The painstakingly fine distinctions on these neighbourhood's frontiers and definitions made by contributing commenters are worth reading.
Toronto's municipal government has been laying the groundwork for a new generation of signs for a while now, and the first photographs of them in the wild which I know of started going up in January. They're slick, sleek, easy to read and suffused with all the space-age qualities of this twenty-first century in which we live - but they're also a departure from history.
[. . .]
The new models aren't bad signs, in and of themselves. In fact they're very striking. What concerns me is that they're part of the slow and steady homogenization of Toronto, a grinding-down of old identities into a new whole that bears few similarities to the former shapes of its components.
Until January 1, 1998, what's now the city of Toronto was the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto, a layer of government between municipal and provincial which consisted of the independent cities of Toronto, North York, Etobicoke, York, Scarborough, and the borough of East York. They all had their own mayors, councils, and local governments which dealt with their own issues while larger matters were dealt with through the Metro system. On that New Year's Day eleven years ago, those six cities (I'm not making another exception for East York) were effectively abolished by order of the provincial government, and Metropolitan Toronto became just the City of Toronto.
This was not a popular change; referendums in all cities before the amalgamation went against it, though then-Premier Mike Harris cared nothing for the will of the people in this respect. There's still a fair bit of resentment about the whole thing.
The upset with with obliteration of Metropolitan Toronto (Wikipedia, map) was audible on Prince Edward Island. Those city identities still remain strong--I've seen pieces of mail originating from North York, and Scarboroughers still seem to have a strong group identity. Identity, as Andrew points out, is also strong below the level of Toronto's component cities, vested in different neighbourhoods. Toronto, people around here like saying, is a city of neighbourhoods. Unless all of the world's other cities are all completely homogenized, this is probably a truism, but it is fair to say that loyalties to the old cities, neighbourhood identities and local patriotisms of various sizes remain strong. For now, at least
Some of you might be interested in what Patrick Cain at the Toronto Star has put together, at his blog Map of the Week: Version 1.0 of an ambitious map of all Toronto's neighbourhoods.
The painstakingly fine distinctions on these neighbourhood's frontiers and definitions made by contributing commenters are worth reading.
