Journal of Urban History

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Constructing Urban Expertise: Professional and Political Authority in Toronto, 1940-1970 Stephen Bocking Journal of Urban History 2006; 33; 51 DOI: 10.1177/0096144206290265

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Downloaded from http://juh.sagepub.com by on February 7, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. CONSTRUCTING URBAN EXPERTISE Professional and Political Authority in Toronto, 1940-1970

STEPHEN BOCKING Trent University

Between 1940 and 1970, the population of the Toronto metropolitan region increased rapidly. This imposed new infrastructure demands, particularly for sewer, water supply, and transportation systems, and encouraged comprehensive approaches to planning and flood control. Several forms of expertise emerged to guide responses to these demands, of which three are considered here: engineering of urban services, planning of new communities, and watershed conservation. Each form of expertise had close ties to public- or private-sector institutions; collectively, they reinforced prevailing views concerning the public interest and the role of technocratic expertise. They also demonstrated how a city’s expert and political orders could be constitutive of each other, with the planning and building of infrastructure by government and the private sector creating the contexts for applying expertise, which, in turn, justified expansion of the city’s administrative functions.

Keywords: planning; technical expertise; urban environmental history; infrastructure; flood control

Technical expertise has played prominent roles in the history of cities. It has been not only viewed as essential to decisions regarding complex urban issues but also condemned as inimical to the diversity and vitality of cities and neighborhoods. According to some, planners and other experts tend too often to sketch utopian visions unrelated to the problems of city living, while others argue that they have served often simply to justify the wishes of powerful political and economic actors. Urban environmental historians, especially, have identified expertise as central to efforts to solve the challenges posed by concentrated humanity: supply of clean water, disposal of wastes, design of communities intended to combine the advantages of city and country, and protection of people and property from floods. Cities today can, indeed, be characterized as products, in part, of the exercise of experts’ knowledge and perspectives and of the political and economic authority that both derives from and reinforces their influence. It is thus of particular interest to understand how, historically, expertise has acted within the urban context, including its relation to other forms of authority. Expert ideas about urban environments have been generated within

Downloaded from http://juh.sagepub.com by on February 7, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 52 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / November 2006 a variety of professions and scientific disciplines, shaped by evolving political and economic priorities, within a natural environment that itself has influenced the range of possibilities. The purpose of this article is to examine urban expertise between 1940 and 1970: the period when its authority was perhaps most unchallenged. My focus is on a specific city: Toronto, Canada. During these decades, Toronto experienced rapid growth in population and in demand for housing and environmental services. There was also substantial expansion of both the private and the public capacity to meet these demands. Several forms of expertise emerged to guide this expansion, while supporting certain prevailing views concerning the public interest. Three forms of expertise will be considered: engineering of urban services (especially water supply, sewers, and highways), planning of new communities, and watershed conservation. Each had a distinct professional identity. I will also place these forms of technical expertise within their environmental, economic, and political context: the growth of the city, the changing nature of the development industry, and the evolving capacity of the city to govern itself. Thus, this article aims to con- tribute to our understanding of the evolving role of expertise within the political economy of urban development. A study of Toronto is of special interest to historians for other reasons. First, it can provide an opportunity for international comparison: forms of expertise important in Toronto were, to some extent, transnational in nature but were applied within a different national context than in American cities. And, second, with Toronto once being viewed as an example of successful urban governance, it is of interest to consider what roles experts, and the intended and unintended consequences of their advice, played in achieving this success and in constructing the image of success itself.1 It is appropriate, however, to begin this study of Toronto by outlining a broader perspective on the roles of experts within cities.

CONSIDERING CITIES AND EXPERTS

As I have noted, experts have captured the attention of many urban environmental historians. Experts played prominent and complex roles in the creation of the sanitary city, in which environmental services are provided effectively and efficiently. Historians have described this in terms of the work of individuals such as Edwin Chadwick, George Waring Jr., and Abel Wolman, as well as in the context of the emergence of professions of public health and sanitary engineering.2 Experts’ contributions are similarly evident in the identification and alleviation of other environmental hazards, such as smoke pollution in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries or, more recently, the environmental challenges posed by suburban development.3 In understanding these contributions, historians have often stressed the influence of

Downloaded from http://juh.sagepub.com by on February 7, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. Bocking / CONSTRUCTING URBAN EXPERTISE 53 evolving scientific ideas: from theories of disease causation by way of miasmas, to bacteriological theories, to ecological insights, with the political system exercising its influence by implementing (or failing to implement) the solutions proposed by experts.4 Study of the relation between scientific ideas and their implementation has also drawn attention to the divergent advice sometimes provided by distinct professional groups. In the late nineteenth century, for example, the contrasting counsel of public-health physicians and of sanitary engineers regarding protection of the public from waterborne diseases (to treat a city’s sewage or merely its drinking water supply) would have implications both for the appropriate roles of municipal governments and for the natural environment itself.5 Beyond identifying and overcoming specific challenges such as waste disposal or smoke produced by coal burning, experts have also pursued more comprehensive approaches, often motivated by their belief in a close relation between the urban environment and the physical and moral health of its inhabitants. By 1900, advocates of “moral environmentalism,” including landscape architects, sanitarians, and municipal engineers, were sketching plans for projects such as Boston’s Back Bay, able to fulfill several goals at once: providing areas of greenery for recreation, controlling floods, protecting water quality, and providing transportation routes.6 Even larger ambitions, of course, have been evident in the history of planning: the restoration of the relation between country and city, as interpreted by Ebenezer Howard through his Garden City concept; the design of great boulevards, parks, and public buildings, as expressed through the City Beautiful ideal; or the design of communities such as Radburn, that express in their carefully planned lay- out confidence in the capacity of rational planning to create better neighborhoods and perhaps better citizens.7 These comprehensive efforts exemplify the complex and diverse relations between expert authority and political power. During the Progressive Era, confidence in expertise fostered a demand for technological solutions to the environmental crises of industrial cities.8 The perceived need for expert administration similarly encouraged the growth of municipal governments, exemplifying, as Stanley Schultz has explained, how the emerging capacity of the city to regulate and provide for itself was both enabled and expressed through the formation of administrative agencies wielding both expert and political authority.9 More recently, the postwar era witnessed the apogee of confidence in rational problem solving as an alternative to politics, in which highway engineers and other experts promised efficient and “universal” solutions to local problems, thereby enrolling city decisions into national and international professional networks.10 The consequences are today evident across the landscapes of contemporary North American cities. Transportation networks built for speed and rivers con- verted into concrete flood conduits constitute expressions of confidence in

Downloaded from http://juh.sagepub.com by on February 7, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 54 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / November 2006 expert judgment, with responses to demands for mobility tending to be framed in terms of rational calculation of the most efficient design of urban highways and with disorderly nature—a flood-prone river, for example— redefined as an engineering challenge.11 Expert advice and ideology have also been important in the history of con- troversies over the urban environment, especially when these have been framed in terms of opposition to the edicts of experts, as expressed most famously by Jane Jacobs.12 This opposition has had several roots, from prag- matic awareness of the inadequacy of simple solutions to complex problems (evident in engineered responses to flood hazards); to objections to the political implications of expertise, including its capacity to render invisible those aspects of the urban environment that cannot be expressed in numbers (such as the idiosyncratic details of neighborhoods and the concerns of citizens unable or unwilling to speak the language of experts); to the capacity of expert discourse to impart an objective patina to decisions that disfavor mar- ginalized groups. That expert advice has political consequences is now a familiar notion, as is experts’ frequent use of political strategies, even while they assert their apolitical authority.13 The close ties between expertise and politics also remind us, however, that cities did not simply emerge from the drafting tables of planners and engineers. This lesson has been especially evident in the history of planning, in which expert advice has often been subordinate to political authority or private property interests.14 The lengthy history of the unintended consequences of this advice—from expanding suburbia and exurbia, to engineering projects that only increase a city’s vulnerability to floods, to the seemingly unending displacement of a city’s waste products in search of the ultimate sink—provides a similar lesson. The diversity of these consequences illustrates the importance of contingent circumstances: from the local impact of national institutions like the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, to the influence of community activists opposing expert advice, to the fortuitous combination of landscape and environmental resources that present both opportunities and constraints on growing cities.

PLANNING FOR POSTWAR TORONTO

By 1945, Toronto, then about 150 years old, had reached a population of 900,000, located within a fairly compact urbanized area of about 160 square kilometers on the northern shore of Lake Ontario. Approximately two-thirds of this population dwelled within the city of Toronto itself, with the rest in several surrounding municipalities. The metropolitan area faced several challenges. After a decade of economic depression and six years of war, there was a severe housing shortage, one expected to get worse with future population growth.15 Much of the existing housing stock was older, of poorer

Downloaded from http://juh.sagepub.com by on February 7, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. Bocking / CONSTRUCTING URBAN EXPERTISE 55 quality, and overcrowded. Shortages of clean water, inadequate sewers and sewage treatment facilities, a polluted lake, and polluted rivers reflected the lack of investment in environmental services. Flooding was a periodic concern along several rivers. Adjustment to a postwar economy was anticipated as a major challenge. In response to these challenges, and drawing on wartime experience in economic management, as well as political support for the concept, both from the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, a new democratic social- ist party, and from the city’s economic elite, there emerged in Toronto greater interest in creating a plan to guide its future growth.16 This interest in planning was not, in Canada, unique to Toronto but was widespread within the provincial and the federal governments. The Ontario provincial government, for example, created in 1944 a Department of Planning and Development and passed a Planning Act in 1946, which required cities to establish planning bodies responsible for producing official plans. For its part, the federal government, while restricted constitutionally from direct involvement in city matters (cities were, and remain, under provincial jurisdiction), sought to encourage housing construction, creating in 1946 the Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation.17 Within Toronto, this interest in planning led in 1942 to creation of the City of Toronto Planning Board. The board immediately set an ambitious agenda. Its chair, J. P. Maher, stated that earlier planning initiatives had failed because they were developed in isolation not as part of an overall plan “based on a sound planning policy formulated in keeping with fundamental Town Planning principles.”18 On the last day of 1943, the board released its proposed master plan for the city. The plan represented a striking departure. While there had been a few attempts earlier in the century to develop large-scale comprehensive plans, they had never been adopted. Instead, planning in Toronto prior to the 1940s had focused on incremental modifications, such as adjustments to roads to improve the efficiency of traffic flow. Planners were reluctant to develop comprehensive, citywide plans, both because they lacked the confidence to do so and because they saw their role in terms of accommodating rather than directing private property development.19 In contrast, the 1943 plan specified a new direction both for city planning in Toronto and for the city itself. Planning would take a much more comprehensive approach, including designation of specific areas for working and living, along with provision of transportation facilities and recreational areas. Planning would not simply facilitate but would “control and direct” development.20 In particular, this entailed redirecting the intent of land-use zoning, from protecting existing neighborhoods to controlling land uses across the entire city (see Figure 1).21 Thus, the plan exemplified how planners saw an opportunity, in the general interest in planning newly prevalent in Canadian economic and political circles, to assert larger, more sweeping professional

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Figure 1: Master Plan, Toronto Metropolitan Area, 1943 SOURCE: City of Toronto Archives, RG 32, box 76, file 2. Used with permission. ambitions: to apply planning ideas to the pressing needs for new housing and urban services in the Toronto area. In the future city, development would be at lower densities than was char- acteristic of existing areas and would take the form of distinct neighborhoods. Every neighborhood would have some open green space, while the Don and Humber river valleys, extending through the city, would become an inner greenbelt, protected from “encroachment and vandalism” and serving both for recreation and to separate neighborhoods from each other and residential from industrial areas. A network of “superhighways” would speed travel by private automobiles through the city. An “Agricultural Belt” would prevent unorganized residential development beyond the city limits.22 The plan was a reflection of its times and especially of the newfound ambitions of planners in several countries to set out new visions of cities, with new ideas, such as the neighborhood unit and the greenbelt. Its chief author, Eugene Faludi, a Toronto-based planning consultant, drew on con- cepts from both Britain and the United States. The influence of British ideas was evident, including plans for New Towns outside London as well as, from much earlier, Howard’s Garden City ideal. The influence of the example set by the new American community of Radburn and of American ideas about greenbelt communities generally was also evident.23 The extensive system of highways recalled those proposed for New York in its 1929 Regional Plan

Downloaded from http://juh.sagepub.com by on February 7, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. Bocking / CONSTRUCTING URBAN EXPERTISE 57 and for Los Angeles since 1939. But the plan did not simply reproduce inno- vations from elsewhere. For example, unlike in American plans, the new highways would be part of a balanced transportation system that would also include public transit. This reflected the long-standing political support for urban transit in Toronto. Overall, by war’s end, Toronto had in place a plan intended to ensure its orderly development in the postwar era. In the following sections, I will examine how Toronto actually developed, emphasizing the emergence of various forms of technical expertise and associated professional communities: engineering, neighborhood planning, and resource conservation. As I will explain, each form of expertise had particular links with and implications for the city, shaping the relationships between the plans and the realities of urban development.

BUILDING THE CITY

By the early 1950s, it was evident that any plans for the city would need to be revised to keep up with rapid and unexpected population growth. The 1943 plan had projected that the metropolitan population would grow from 900,000 in 1944 to between 1,250,000 and 1,500,000 in 1974. In fact, the higher projection was reached by 1960, on its way to a 1974 population approaching 3,000,000 (and a current population of about 5,300,000). As in virtually every North American urban area, this population surge was accompanied by even more rapid spatial growth, as most growth took place in the lower-density suburbs. While the city of Toronto itself declined slightly in population between 1953 and 1964 (from 665,502 to 649,462), the surrounding suburbs grew dramatically during that decade: the population of North York expanded from 110,311 to 341,437, Scarborough from 78,803 to 253,292, and Etobicoke from 70,209 to 195,700.24 This growth in both population and area had a variety of implications for governments and the private sector, for visions of the city, and for the roles of expertise in defining and implementing these visions. The most pressing challenge presented by this rapid growth was the provision of services. As I have noted, by the 1940s, municipal services were inadequate. Postwar urban expansion exacerbated the situation. During the first postwar decade, suburban residents experienced the discomforts of septic tanks (often in unsuitable clay soil), gross pollution of the rivers and the lake, shortages of water, unpaved streets, and inadequate transportation facilities.25 All observers agreed that municipal services needed improvement. There was also consensus among politicians and experts regarding how the necessary investments could be made: through coordination or amalgamation of area municipalities, so as to increase their capacity to finance and manage these expanded services.26

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Consulting engineers were among the first to propose this solution. In a 1949 report commissioned by the Toronto and York Planning Board, the engineering firm Gore & Storrie, after describing how water supply and sewage problems had reached a “critical stage” that demanded “early action,” argued that the need for new engineering infrastructure demanded a reengi- neering of local governance. Failure to act, the engineers suggested, would be irresponsible:

If no comprehensive and co-ordinated scheme is provided under a unified control the effect on the quality of the water supply and health of the citizens may be highly dangerous and perhaps disastrous. It is extremely doubtful if the desired results could be obtained by each municipality acting independently of the others....The sooner a unified control is established over the whole area, the more efficient and economical will be the results in the end.27

This unified control would be provided by a “single authority” able to design, finance, construct, and operate new works for the entire urban area. In effect, therefore, the form of urban government would follow its chief function, as understood by engineers: the provision of engineered works providing the services demanded by residents. Once the engineers had set the tone, the initiative passed to provincial and local officials. Beginning in 1950, the Ontario Municipal Board (a provincial body charged with reviewing the decisions and actions of municipalities) con- ducted an inquiry into the challenges facing the Toronto area. On January 20, 1953, the board recommended creation of a two-tier municipal federation, composed of a new metropolitan government responsible for major infrastructure and services and the thirteen existing local governments taking care of local roads, libraries, and other neighborhood concerns (in 1967, these thirteen were reduced by amalgamation to six). The province responded promptly, passing in April 1953 a bill creating the new municipality of Metropolitan Toronto: a new level of government that would take over many of the responsibilities for services, including trunk water mains, sewers, and major roads and highways.28 In its response to the massive suburban growth experienced in the 1950s, the Metro Toronto government adopted a substantially different strategy from that envisaged by the Toronto planning board the previous decade. It focused not on developing and implementing a comprehensive plan but on planning specific new developments and their necessary infrastructure. To support the new Don Mills development, for example, it approved, at one of its first council meetings in 1953, the Don Valley Parkway, a six-lane highway linking the development to the downtown. In the following decade, other highways followed as well as an expanded water supply system and replacement of numerous smaller sewage treatment plants located on rivers with a few much larger sewage plants on the lakeshore (see Figures 2 and 3). The new sewage plants were justified in terms of explicitly utilitarian values: transferring

Figure 2: Metro Toronto Sewerage Plan, 1954 SOURCE: Richard White, Urban Infrastructure and Urban Growth in the Toronto Region, 1950s to the 1990s (2003), Figure 2. Used with permission.

Figure 3: Metro Toronto Sewage System, 1965 SOURCE: Richard White, Urban Infrastructure and Urban Growth in the Toronto Region, 1950s to the 1990s (2003), Figure 6. Used with permission.

sewage treatment to the lakeshore would clean up the rivers, enhancing the recreational value of the valleys. This was consistent with the view (as expressed in the draft plan of 1959; see below) that natural features of the

Downloaded from http://juh.sagepub.com by on February 7, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 60 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / November 2006 region, including the valleys, should be “utilized to the maximum extent.” Thus, the metro government’s vision was not guided by a comprehensive plan but with simply the engineered infrastructure that could provide the necessary environmental services. The low priority accorded comprehensive planning was reflected in the failure, for almost three decades, of the metro government to adopt an official plan. (It should be noted that most municipalities within the metropolitan area had an official plan.) A draft plan was released in 1959; it emphasized ambitious plans to complete the region’s water, sewer, and transportation networks and the role of these networks in supporting urban expansion by the private sector, while also expressing mild preferences for certain planning principles such as diverse housing choices in every neighborhood, a strong central area, and the full use of the lakefront, valleys, and other natural features.29 This plan met with little favor from politicians. This reaction had, in part, political roots: many members of the planning board saw such a plan as potentially infringing on local plans or as simply another hurdle for development applications.30 Fred Gardiner, the powerful chairman of the metro government also tended to disparage planning. Although once a member of a provincial committee on urban planning and development, and a former chairman of the Toronto and York Planning Board, the focus, he believed, should be on providing order, stability, and support for development; hard services like sewers and highways would provide this support, not elaborate plans. Planning, he believed, tended too often to be simply an academic, impractical exercise an obstacle to the business of building a city, an imped- iment to bold ambitions. As he explained in 1959,

We have found that you can line your shelves with reports, plans, and models but eventually you must choose those projects which common sense tells you are most important, give them the necessary priorities and, as Robert Moses would say, put in the steam shovels and the bulldozers.31

The first official plan for Metropolitan Toronto was adopted only in 1980. In its absence, planning for the metropolitan area as a whole consisted of the plans for physical infrastructure: the water supply plan, the regional parks plan, the plan for conservation and flood control, the major roads plan, and the transit plan.32 These plans exemplified the concentration of decision- making capacity within the planning and engineering offices of the metropolitan government and the assumption by these experts of much of the initiative in setting the government’s policy agenda. From the point of view of both experts and politicians, this was justified by the definition of such matters as substantially, if not entirely, technical in nature.33 Gardiner’s inaugural address at the first meeting of the Metropolitan Toronto Council on January 12, 1954, had set the tone: he proudly announced that with the new level of government only a few weeks old, engineering experts had already been commissioned to develop plans for new water and sewer systems and

Downloaded from http://juh.sagepub.com by on February 7, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. Bocking / CONSTRUCTING URBAN EXPERTISE 61 for urban expressways.34 The new government, he made clear, had no higher priority. Both the projects and Gardiner’s own rhetoric established clearly that the role of the metropolitan government was to provide, in a business- like way, the conditions under which business could flourish:

The works which I have indicated are not only warranted but are essential. They are investments which must be made and from them will come dividends in the form of more convenient living conditions for our residents and will make possible the accomplishment of the great potential industrial and commercial development which is knocking at our door.35

By 1957, these plans were well advanced: that year, the commissioner of planning reported that plans for roads, expressways, and public transit were almost ready and that the sanitation and open-space plans were complete. Construction of all these facilities was also underway.36 The outcomes of these plans became, for many, the public face of the Metropolitan Toronto government: the success of the government was defined in terms of its provision of the physical infrastructure for expansion, including water supply facilities, sewer mains, sewage treatment plants, major roads and highways, and a subway system.37 Metro government, particularly by improving the financial capacities of local government (not least by providing the stability and credibility necessary to borrow in the New York money market) largely solved the problems of clean water supply and inadequate sewage disposal (particularly into Toronto’s rivers, which had become open sewers), and thousands of septic tanks were eliminated. As already noted, engineering experts had been among the advocates of municipal coordination or amalgamation; echoing this, the metro government’s emphasis on infrastructure gave priority of place to their form of expertise. Each form of this expertise—sanitary engineering, highway engineering, and so on—presented itself as apolitical, using quantitative methods to demonstrate the benefits of their proposals. It was, thus, the expression of a role for expertise commonly seen in North American cities, in which engineers proposed to city administrations technical solutions to the problems of a growing city, which, once adopted, would constrain future choices.38 But while their expertise shaped the future development of the city, it was a form of expertise focused tightly on its own priorities, divorced from other forms of expert knowledge of the city, that defined the “public interest” in often very narrow terms. One illustration of this is provided by decisions in the 1950s relating to the Don Valley, the most prominent river valley in the city and one of the chief relatively natural areas still remaining within the urban area. The valley had been envisaged since the 1940s as the location for a new highway linking the downtown to the northeast area of the city, and discussion of this project began as early as the first meeting of the new Metro Toronto Council in 1953. The engineering proposal for the Don Valley Parkway drew the highway

Downloaded from http://juh.sagepub.com by on February 7, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 62 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / November 2006 directly along the valley, justifying the route through this greenbelt in terms of the public interest, which it defined as simply the appropriate balance between utility, economy, and geometry.39 This balance, the sweeping curves and straight lines of the resulting highway, and its placement in a river valley (thereby encouraging minimal connection with the city’s existing road grid) together demonstrated the priority placed on speed and efficiency. It thus epitomized the modernist impulse guiding North American highway design during the 1950s and 1960s, while the ready adoption of these plans epitomized the influence and autonomy enjoyed by North American highway engineers during the 1950s.40 Through the methods of experts (such as the economic projections, origin- destination surveys, and volume-capacity studies used by provincial highway planners to establish the need for new highways), North American practices of justifying, designing, and building urban highways were brought to Toronto.41

HOUSING THE CITY

The expansion of the city and its infrastructure was accompanied by a transformation of its house-building industry. With a few exceptions (such as the Kingsway Park development, built in the late 1920s and 1930s), until the 1940s, most developers in Toronto built only a few homes at a time; a significant number of houses were also built by the homeowners themselves.42 In the postwar era, however, there emerged a small number of large corporate developers. While in 1955 no developer had built as many as a hundred homes in one year, by 1970, 79 percent of all homes were built by such firms.43 Several factors encouraged concentration of the industry. A handful of developers successfully gained control over large areas of rural land around the cities, years ahead of development. As a result, they enjoyed considerable control over the land market, making it possible to push smaller operators to marginal sites. These firms were vertically integrated: organized to handle the entire development package from land assembly, to servicing, to planning and design, construction, property management, and market- ing.44 Their position was further reinforced by the policies of the Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC). The CMHC supported suburban expansion by encouraging construction of individual owner-occupied family houses and by setting high construction standards, which favored builders able to put up many standardized units.45 In 1948, Humphrey Carver, an influential planner and architect, explained the implications of these development trends for community planning and, implicitly, for the prospects of the emerging professional identity of community planners. In Houses for Canadians (1948), he stressed that the produc- tion of housing should be a rational, planned process. The need, he argued,

Figure 4: Aerial Photo of Don Mills SOURCE: Eric Cole, Don Mills: The 45th Anniversary of Canada s First Planned Community, York University, Clara Thomas Archives, Neg. 1123, p. 4. Used with permission. was not for many small homebuilders but for a few large-scale developers, able to achieve efficiencies of scale.46 They would work within plans for whole new communities, large enough to support schools, stores, and other services but small enough to provide a sense of community.47 Carver drew for inspiration from the ideas then being discussed by planners: Howard’s Garden City, Clarence Perry’s concept of the Neighborhood Unit, and Clarence Stein and Henry Wright’s plan for Radburn in New Jersey. Other planners, especially Eugene Faludi, promoted and implemented these and other planning ideas, advocating their institutionalization through the creation of city planning departments.48 Reflecting the new demand for planning expertise, and the resulting growth in the planning profession, the Institute of Professional Town Planners was established in 1947. A key implication of this structural change in the housing industry was that it made it possible for a single developer to plan an entire community. The first community in which this actually occurred was Don Mills, a development housing about 35,000 people, northeast of Toronto. Constructed between 1953 and 1962, it has since been described as one of the most influential developments in Canada and has served as a model for numerous other large-scale suburban projects.49 The design of Don Mills, created in large

Downloaded from http://juh.sagepub.com by on February 7, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 64 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / November 2006 part by Macklin Hancock, a young architect and planner, was based on several principles that together represented a new approach to city development in Toronto: the neighborhood, centered on a school, as the basic unit of planning; a lower density than in the older city; a discontinuous road system (serving as an alternative to the grid pattern of the older city); abundant green space, both within parks and on individual housing lots (parks occupied nearly 20 percent of the area, while large lots were seen as encouraging a “closer contact with the land”); new house forms and lot configurations; and separation of uses and activities, including distinct areas for housing, retail, and industrial purposes (see Figure 4). Overall, Don Mills would include a balanced array of land uses: both residential and employment. Don Mills was inspired by a variety of sources, including Carver’s ideas regarding neighborhoods, as well as the example of the new towns of Great Britain.50 The continuing influence of the planning principles demonstrated at Radburn was also evident. Most significant, however, was the extent to which Don Mills reflected the shared influence of the planning profession and corporate interests. Professional ideas about neighborhoods, ample green spaces, and lower density had ample opportunity for expression: Don Mills was described by Architectural Forum as “a planner’s dream coming true.”51 This dream came true largely because it was consistent with private interests and with the capacity of a single large developer, E. P. Taylor, to assemble a large land area; to install water, sewer, and other services (the cost of these was then transferred to the buyers); and to manage and market the entire project. Carver had argued in Houses for Canadians that effective professional planning of neighborhoods required close contact between planners and developers: “If urban development is to take the form of planned neighbourhoods it will be necessary to achieve a much closer coordination between the technical staffs of planning boards and the actual developers of suburban property.”52 As Don Mills demonstrated, such coordination, and hence the practical expression of planning ideas, would be easier with fewer and larger developers that would have the resources to hire professional planners and that could impose a single vision on an entire community. Thus, the application of planning expertise to new communities was inseparable from the consolidation of the home-building industry. Both planners and developers benefited from their association: the former, through new professional opportunities; and the latter, through the opportunity to present their planned communities as distinct from the older areas of the city and as ideal sites for families pursuing the suburban ideal. After beginning Don Mills, Taylor bought 6,000 acres on the western outskirts of Toronto, where he eventually built during the 1970s and 1980s another huge development, Erin Mills, which would house about 170,000 people. As an integrated community with a variety of housing types and forms of employment, it also represented a combination of professional planning expertise and corporate agendas. Hancock went on to design other planned communities, including Flemingdon Park constructed near Don Mills in the 1960s.

These new communities, such as Flemingdon Park, which featured distinct neighborhoods, an identifiable center, a variety of housing types, large areas of open space (about 35 percent of Flemingdon Park was dedicated to parks and open space, imparting a “‘garden’ quality”),53 and a balance between housing and workplaces, were seen as antidotes to both the older city and the formless and shapeless suburban sprawl that tended to dominate housing development on the outskirts of Toronto. There was little precedent for these new communities in North America; rather, planners drew from the Roehampton development near London and from Vallingby, the new town of Stockholm that at that time, was attracting considerable attention from planners in other countries. Because of the lack of North American precedents, elected officials were said to be apprehensive; in the case of Flemingdon Park, some of their concerns were overcome with the help of a guided tour of these developments in Europe.54 Flemingdon Park and Don Mills were seen as the first two segments in what could be a chain of distinct, integrated model communities.55 Several other large planned communities were also built within the expanding Toronto suburbs. However, there were obstacles to creating these model communities, including the difficulty and expense of assembling large enough pieces of land and the pressure to conform to conventional standards and compromises. Thus, although it became a model for other planned communities, within the larger context of suburban expansion, Don Mills stood as an exception rather than a precedent. Instead, a considerable fraction of Toronto suburban development in the postwar era was the unplanned sprawl that has since been excoriated by planners, including Carver.56 The relation of these planned communities to their suburban context also remained unre- solved: being viewed as an effort to remove populations out of large, con- gested cities, design features commonly incorporated a spatial separation from the city (often reinforced by a greenbelt).57

PROTECTING THE CITY

During the 1940s, a third form of expertise, distinct from that represented by engineers and by community planners, began to emerge in the Toronto area. A diverse collection of scientists and other professionals, including ecologists and geographers at the University of Toronto, as well as agricultural scientists and engineers from other institutions, was expressing concerns regarding natural-resource conservation. They were influenced both by direct experience with local resource problems in southern Ontario, including soil erosion, deforestation, and floods, and by recent American experience with watershed management and conservation, as represented by such initiatives as the Tennessee Valley Authority and, more generally, the work of the U.S. Soil Conservation Service.58

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In response to these concerns and, at least in part, as a way of putting in place a strategy to provide work for returning war veterans, the Ontario government in 1946 passed the Conservation Authorities Act, creating a conservation branch and encouraging formation of a network of conservation authorities, each responsible for soil, water, and forest conservation as well as other tasks within a watershed.59 These authorities generally began their work with preparation of a river-valley conservation study: a compendium of information concerning natural resources and their proposed conservation strategies. Identifying and promoting the most efficient use of resources was especially emphasized.60 By 1950, three conservation authorities had been created in the Toronto area, for the Etobicoke-Mimico rivers, the Humber River, and the Don River. Scientists advocating conservation were, as a professional group, separate from the emerging urban planning profession—distinctive in terms of their ideas, individuals, and institutions. They emphasized not housing or highways or neighborhoods but a view of natural resources, such as soil and water, as limited and as requiring careful study and efficient management. In addition, conservation authorities were organized on the basis of watersheds, not city boundaries, and were an initiative of the province, not of municipalities. As will become evident, their professional identity was initially tied to rural concerns. However, the growing demand, as the Toronto area developed, to respond to the challenges of managing an urban environment would come to parallel the American experience with the urbanization of conservation.61 By 1950, the Toronto-area conservation authorities were ready to begin their work. However, they soon found that their tasks, and their perspective on the urban and rural environment, were forced to shift rapidly. This was partly because of the growth of the city and partly because of an unexpected natural event. That year, the Don Valley Conservation Authority completed its survey of its river valley, identifying a range of activities that could support efficient use of natural resources in the watershed. These included, for example, the dissemination of proper soil conservation practices to farmers and the refor- estation of selected areas.62 A significant feature of this survey was that it assumed that the mix of human activities in the watershed would remain relatively constant: predominantly urban in the lower region and primarily agricultural upstream. This assumption was reinforced by the view that limits to development were necessary. Thus, it was argued, certain areas should not be transformed to other uses: for example, forested areas should not be cleared for agriculture or open land developed into urban communities. Such trans- formations could generate damaging consequences for the watershed as a whole, including increased erosion and flooding. However, within a few years of this report, it became evident that with the growing population, the watershed was, in fact, in a process of transformation, from a rural to an urban character. Accordingly, the Conservation Authority concluded that it had to adjust to this new character and identify new rationales for its activities.

Figure 5: Metropolitan Toronto and Region Conservation Authority Proposed Reservoirs and Channel Improvements SOURCE: Metropolitan Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, Plan for Flood Control and Water Conservation (1959), xiii. Used with permission.

This need to adapt assumed more urgency in October 1954, when a severe tropical storm, Hurricane Hazel, dumped up to 200 mm of rain on the city. It caused severe flooding on Toronto’s rivers, millions of dollars in damage, and the loss of eighty-one lives.63 It was, in short, a traumatic imposition of disorderly nature on the orderly city, and it demanded a response. Toronto- area conservation authorities shifted much of their focus from managing natural resources, broadly defined, to the more specific tasks of identifying flood hazards, acquiring land and removing settlements on floodplains, and building structures for flood control, with a secondary emphasis on protecting recreational land. In 1957, the conservation authorities of the Toronto area combined to form a single Metropolitan Toronto and Region Conservation Authority—in effect, an amalgamated structure parallel to the Metropolitan Toronto government that had been created four years before. This amalgamation had been under discussion for several years and was justified in the same terms as the amalgamation of Toronto itself: a single, larger authority would be better able to make large investments, including acquisition of valley lands. (In practice, the metropolitan government reserved for itself

Downloaded from http://juh.sagepub.com by on February 7, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 68 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / November 2006 acquisition and control over these lands, viewing them as important not just in terms of minimizing flood damage but as part of its plan for developing recreational infrastructure.)64 With support from the province and the federal government, in 1961, the Conservation Authority began a large program of flood control, emphasizing the construction of dams, reservoirs, and chan- nels and the reservation of floodplains (see Figure 5).65 While this program was ambitious, it was much less so than responses to urban floods elsewhere, as epitomized by large works such as the concrete reconstruction of the Los Angeles River and the levees constricting the Mississippi through New Orleans.66 In contrast, most stretches of Toronto-area rivers were retained in a relatively natural state. This reflected, in part, local topography: the deep river valleys limited the potential extent of floods, elim- inating the need for massive engineering interventions. It also reflected the institutional context, especially the absence of a federal agency, such as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that could shape local perceptions of the avail- able options through the weight of its expertise and financial resources (there is no analogous federal flood-control agency in Canada). The metropolitan government’s view of flood-prone river valleys as opportunities to reserve additional areas for recreation was also significant. However, one flood-control approach described in earlier conservation studies—the preservation of large areas of the watershed as undeveloped land—was not pursued. This exemplified how the flood-control strategy, and the Conservation Authority itself, was now oriented toward protecting development. The draft 1959 plan had established clearly that flood control was intended to assist not restrict development:

The urbanized areas adjacent to the major watercourses . . . require protection from flood dangers. The increased storm water run-off, resulting from intensive urbanization, requires drainage facilities to ensure that local flooding conditions do not arise at times of heavy rainfall. The individual municipalities and the Metropolitan Corporation through direct action and through action of the Metropolitan Toronto Region and Conservation Authority . . . are under- taking various works to remedy the surface water drainage problems of the Metropolitan Area.67

THE IMPLICATIONS OF EXPERTISE

The initiatives described—provision of urban infrastructure, planning of new corporate communities, and watershed conservation—represented three distinct views of the Toronto environment. Several features of these initiatives, and the expertise underpinning each, can be noted. First, each represented a distinctive response to the largest environmental change occurring in the region: rapid urban development. Each was also underpinned by distinctive forms of expertise, either well established, such as sanitary engineers, or only emerging in the 1940s, such as community planning and

Downloaded from http://juh.sagepub.com by on February 7, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. Bocking / CONSTRUCTING URBAN EXPERTISE 69 resource conservation. These forms of expertise could also be distinguished in terms of scale: engineers focused on infrastructure across the metropolitan region; community planners, on new towns such as Don Mills; and resource conservation, on watersheds. Each also exemplified one of the contexts— political, economic, or environmental—of urban development. These were, respectively, the creation of a metropolitan government focused on providing the services required by a growing city, the emergence of large corporations as the dominant actors in urban development, and a conservation authority that became, to a large extent, a flood-management agency, whose most important task became that of protecting development from an unruly nature. And, finally, these diverse expert perspectives collectively illustrate how human impacts on the environment—including water-quality concerns in urban rivers, problems with septic tanks, or designation of natural areas within communities—were of professional concern before the emergence of environmentalism in the 1960s. These concerns also extended beyond ecology—the scientific discipline most often associated with environmental concerns but one that played at best a marginal role in the urban context.68 Together, these initiatives, and their related forms of expertise, adapted themselves to serving development and, in doing so, reinforced the notion that there was a single public interest: the support of private-sector development.69 Serving the needs of this development, then, became not a political but a technical problem. Questions that might have otherwise been defined as political, such as balancing protection of natural areas and provision of transportation options, were redefined as technical, amenable to solution through the appropriate calculus. Such a perspective was reinforced by the dominance of nonelected officials—in effect, technocrats—in decision making within the metropolitan government, corporate planning departments, consulting firms, and the Conservation Authority.70 Nevertheless, there were powerful political implications to this approach to city building, embedded in the form of development that resulted: a massive expansion of relatively low-density, automobile-dependent suburbs. These implications stemmed from the assumption that there was no necessary limit to city growth (an assumption expressed by the discarding of the agricultural belt envisaged in the 1943 plan and by the Conservation Authority’s reluctance to include preservation of large land areas among its flood-control strategies). A second assumption was that the task of defining a preferred urban environment was not a collective but an individual respon- sibility, with the function of government limited to providing the services (such as highways) that could facilitate the choices made by individuals. By the 1960s, some of the hoped-for outcomes of these engineering, planning, and conservation initiatives were evident. Toronto’s rivers were generally cleaner than they were decades ago (although far from pristine), river valleys were preserved as linear parks, and the urban highway network, including the Don Valley Parkway, was partly constructed.

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However, these initiatives were also generating a variety of unexpected consequences. Rationalization of the metropolitan sewer system sent treated sewage, including storm-sewer overflows, to the lakeshore, generating persistent concerns about the quality of Lake Ontario’s water. Plans for urban freeway construction eventually elicited widespread opposition, grounded in concerns about impacts on neighborhoods.71 As a consequence, only frag- ments of the highway network envisaged in the 1950s and 1960s were built. Most significantly, the expansion of water, sewer, and other services enabled urban expansion far beyond the boundary set by the 1943 plan. By the 1960s, a public debate had emerged regarding the costs of servicing these sprawling suburban areas and the accompanying loss of high-quality farmland. (It was predicted in 1961 that by 2000, there would be virtually no agriculture left within a 200-kilometer-long region centered on Toronto.) 72 As elsewhere in North America, in the 1960s, perspectives on Toronto’s suburban expansion were influenced by concerns about loss of open land and other environmental impacts.73 Overall, therefore, in several respects, the path of development followed in Toronto was consistent with a persistent theme in twentieth-century urban history: the prevalence of unintended consequences, including plans implemented only in part or not at all or, if implemented, that generated unexpected outcomes. These consequences reflected several factors. One was higher-than-expected population growth, the product of both the postwar baby boom and immigration. Inherent contradictions between these plans— such as that between the development limits set by the 1943 plan and the expansive infrastructure-development plans of the 1950s and 1960s—were also important. Another factor was nature itself: the 1954 flood, and the topography and geography of the rivers themselves, shaped plans for green- belts, recreational lands, and flood protection, exemplifying how the landscape itself was an actor in this history, both constraining and generating options for conservation and planning. In particular, the flood accelerated adoption of ideas regarding floodplain reservation and designation of river corridors for recreation that were only then emerging within the professional hydrologic and planning communities.74 The unintended consequences of urban expansion proved to have their own powerful momentum. This was illustrated by the fate of a series of provincial planning initiatives. In 1962, the province undertook a Metropolitan Toronto and Region Transportation Study. This was followed in 1966 by another study, titled “Design for Development,” that was intended to provide the basis for provincewide, comprehensive regional planning. In the Toronto region, the most thorough initiative was the Toronto-Centred Plan, developed in the mid-1960s and launched as a provincial policy in May 1970.75 Its chief objective was to obtain the benefits both of a single large metropolitan region and of distinct communities. It included a parkway belt, encircling the developed region, in which only limited uses would be permitted, as well as five

Downloaded from http://juh.sagepub.com by on February 7, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. Bocking / CONSTRUCTING URBAN EXPERTISE 71 to seven new communities, ranging in size from 25,000 to 200,000 people. Each would provide a wide choice in living areas and access to diverse work and leisure opportunities.76 Their compact form would also reduce service and transit costs. Overall, this plan was an attempt to get ahead of the development process by formulating desirable patterns of settlement for the entire region. It failed, though, because of a lack of support from developers, municipalities, and provincial agencies themselves.77 This outcome, in turn, reflected how the priorities guiding the plan, including concerns regarding loss of farmland and the desire to encourage more compact forms of development, were contrary to the assumptions prevalent among both experts and dominant economic and political interests within the Toronto region.

CONCLUSIONS

The Toronto region witnessed between 1940 and 1970 the establishment, in the context of unprecedented urban growth, of several forms of technical expertise, each relating in a distinctive way to an aspect of the urban environment. Each form of expertise enjoyed close ties to institutions, in the public or the private sectors, that enabled them to influence urban development. To a large extent, these expert perspectives gained in influence because they were consistent with powerful public and private interests and institutions, all sharing a common definition of the public interest: the need to support urban development by the private sector. Several aspects of these arrangements may be noted. One relates to how several distinct definitions of a preferred urban environment were constructed. These definitions paralleled the distinct forms of urban expertise that emerged and became institutionalized in the Toronto region. The definition of a preferred city in terms of the adequate provision of environmental services—the vision put into effect by the Metro Toronto government in the 1950s and 1960s—gave pride of place to engineering expertise. The definition of the preferred city in terms of neighborhoods, open space, and other characteristics of the planned suburban community drew on the perspectives of an urban planning profession that gained rapidly in status and institutional security during the 1950s and 1960s. And the view of the city that was grounded in watershed conservation emphasized, initially, forestry, soil conservation, and other disciplines related to the efficient use of natural resources, before being displaced in the 1950s by a tighter focus on floodplain management and hydraulic engineering for flood control. Each of these forms of expertise operated to a large extent in isolation, communicating, at best, intermittently with other forms of expertise. This reflected their distinct institutional contexts: the Metro Toronto government, corporate developers, or the Conservation Authority. Thus, they reinforced a compartmentalized understanding of this urban region, hindering consideration of its overall

Downloaded from http://juh.sagepub.com by on February 7, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 72 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / November 2006 environmental health and encouraging some of the unintended consequences I have noted.78 Nevertheless, the visions of the city implied by these forms of expertise were largely compatible, sharing, as I have noted, a common definition of the public interest. Thus, the impact of these forms of expertise extended beyond solving the problems of urban expansion, such as provision of sewers and protection against floods, to encompass the collective construction of an efficient, modern, postwar city. The shared perspective of these forms of expertise and of the metropolitan government, developers, and the Conservation Authority illustrates how, as Schultz described for an earlier era, a city’s expert and political orders could be constitutive of each other, with planning and building of infrastructure by government and the private sector creating the contexts for applying expertise, which, in turn, justified expansion of the city’s administrative functions. Experts helped constitute the political order, particularly by arguing for forms of organization (such as the metropolitan government and the Metro Toronto Conservation Authority) that were most compatible with their own forms of expertise. Their capacity to do this also reflected the authority during this period of science as objective and rational: the foundation of modernism. As a result, both expert and political orders readily defined the task of providing for development as a technical not a political challenge, even as the resulting actions would have political consequences. Senior levels of government also played large roles in the local exercise of expertise. The province of Ontario had defined planning as a municipal activ- ity and provided financial and technical support to implement plans for highways, sewers, and urban infrastructure. The federal government was also significant, particularly in providing a regulatory environment that encouraged consolidation of the home-building industry. However, comparison with American cities also illustrates the importance of federal agencies, by their absence in Toronto, in determining the local impact of expertise. Lacking a Bureau of Public Roads or an Army Corps of Engineers, Toronto was not transformed through the application of specialized expertise to the extent that many American cities were. In particular, few neighborhoods were removed to make way for highways. Finally, one can note the relation between technocratic visions and normative models of how, and by whom, decisions regarding urban development should be made.79 These visions tended to reinforce the assumption that such decisions are made, ultimately, by the consumer. The consumer’s demands are then met by developers, with governments or conservation authorities providing needed services or protecting investments from harm. At the same time, while the consumer was seen as sovereign, there was a shared preference for the technocratic ideal of making decisions without significant involvement by citizens. For a time, this preference helped ensure that these forms of expertise would play influential roles in urban development; eventually, however, it also ensured that when civic activists in Toronto began in

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NOTES

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), 323-51. 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), 159-78; 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), 225-37. 5. Joel Tarr, “The Metabolism of the Industrial City: The Case of Pittsburgh,” Journal of Urban History 28 (2002): 511-45. 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- 75; 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), 443-61. 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): 405-33; 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), 323-51. 17. Kent Gerecke, “The History of Canadian City Planning,” City Magazine 2, nos. 3, 4 (Summer 1976): 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.

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19. Walter Van Nus, “Towards the City Efficient: The Theory and Practice of Zoning, 1919-1939,” 226-46; Peter Moore, “Zoning and Planning: The Toronto Experience, 1904-1970,” 316-41; and Thomas Gunton, “The Ideas and Policies of the Canadian Planning Profession, 1909-1931,” 177-95, 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. 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. 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. 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. 31. Ibid. 32. Eli Comay, “How Metropolitan Toronto Government Works,” in Planning 1965 (Chicago, 1965), 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): 759-97; 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): 225-35. 43. Colton, Big Daddy, 163. 44. Leonard Gertler and R. W. Crowley, Changing Canadian Cities: The Next 25 Years (Toronto, Canada, 1977), 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): 252-74. 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. 51. Quoted in Sewell, “Don Mills,” 31. 52. Carver, Houses for Canadians, 43. 53. Hancock, “Flemingdon Park,” 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, 131-33; 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): 221-36. 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), 229-41. 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. 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): 437-62. 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, 119-52. 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): 563-85. 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), 262-79. 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.

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Stephen Bocking is a professor of environmental history and politics at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. His research interest is the roles of scientific expertise in environmental affairs, examined both historically and through contemporary case studies. Recent publications include Nature’s Experts: Science, Politics and the Environment (Rutgers University Press, 2004), Biodiversity in Canada, Ecology, Ideas, and Actions (Broadview, 2000); and Ecologists and Environmental Politics: A History of Contemporary Ecology (Yale University Press, 1997).