Journal of Urban History

Journal of Urban History http://juh.sagepub.com Constructing Urban Expertise: Professional and Political Authority in Toronto, 1940-1970 Stephen Bocking Journal of Urban History 2006; 33; 51 DOI: 10.1177/0096144206290265 The online version of this article can be found at: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/33/1/51 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com On behalf of: The Urban History Association Additional services and information for Journal of Urban History can be found at: Email Alerts: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://juh.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations (this article cites 11 articles hosted on the SAGE Journals Online and HighWire Press platforms): http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/33/1/51 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 liv- ing, 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 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY, Vol. 33 No. 1, November 2006 51-76 DOI: 10.1177/0096144206290265 © 2006 Sage Publications 51 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 influ- enced 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 high- ways), 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, protect- ing water quality, and providing transportation routes.6 Even larger ambi- tions, 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

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