[CT] "Toronto's Two Solitudes"

[rfmcdonald]

I've a pessimistic post, "Toronto's Two Solitudes", posted at the interesting-looking group blog Crasstalk about Toronto's sharp internal divisions. (Thanks for pointing me in their direction, Troy!)

Metropolitan Toronto worked well enough for a time, but as the 20th century progressed and the Toronto conurbation expanded beyond the confines of Metropolitan Toronto–the Greater Toronto Area referred to by planners has ten times the surface area that Metropolitan Toronto did–its perceived utility shrank. In the 1990s, as governments throughout Canada and across the world tried to economize on government expenditures, the right-wing Ontario provincial government decided to save money by getting red of Metropolitan Toronto’s component municipalities and making a single City of Toronto.

The problem with this? The inhabitants of the megacity didn’t want this unification, and the city remains sharply polarized on the old borders. Look at the results of the 2010 election.

This division also occurred in the 1997 and 2003 mayoral elections. It would be reasonable to say that sharp contrasts endure, between a downtown core that has been strongly in favour of greater government investment in building a dense city of Toronto strongly inclined towards New Urbanist philosophies with a suburban periphery that’s much more skeptical about these projects and skeptical of waste.

Numerous studies have highlighted economic and demographic divisions, too, with the relatively more white downtown being relatively richer than the relatively declining and heavily immigrant peripheral regions of Toronto. This division has defined city politics. In the most recent election, Rob Ford defeated his downtown opponent George Smitherman through his appeal to the suburbs, promising to make city government more efficient (despite more recent studies demonstrating that the city government was already efficient, that there was not in fact a “gravy train” as Ford had said) and to extend to the suburbs the subway service that would mark their inclusion in the city (although subway construction is considerably more extensive than the surface light rail plans he rejected, the suburbs arguably don’t have the density necessary to support subways, and the money would be better spent on light rail which would transport more people more efficiently anyway).

Go, tell me what you think of the post and of the place.